f13.net

Well, I'm beginning this write-up after two sessions of the game, around 3-4 hours in total so far. It's essentially a kind of cutesey farming/breeding sim, with kid, or family-friendly graphics and such. In the first hours, though, I've been struggling to find the game underneath all the extraneous bullshit and distractions so I can try to determine if it's fun or not. So far, it's mostly frustrating.

Not frustrating in the way a trickily-designed level or a tough boss fight are. No, this game is frustrating because of the constant interruptions.

Every 30 seconds-to-3 minutes whatever you're doing just stops, so that you can see the cutesey introduction to a new animal/Piñata, or one of the wacky-side characters such as the Nervous Doctor or Seed Guy, or because of some other random shit. These interruptions are always accompanied by your screen covering up with leaves or perhaps an Aztec-inspired pattern while it takes ten-ish seconds to load. Of course, by the 900th interruption the 10-second loads seem like 2-minute loads, so it doesn't become less painful.

So anyway, the point of the game. Well, it seems to be to breed your Piñata and make them do the "Romance Dance". The first time you get your Piñata to fuck dance, you get a little cinema showing them actually doing a cute little G-Rated dance inside their house. Speaking of which, Piñata Incest and inbreeding are just part of a normal day's routine as you basically just breed any two hermaphroditic members of a species together at any given time. The Piñata are cute though, so therefore it's not evil or twisted or fucked-up in any way, kids! You also hassle the Seed Guy when he visits around once per day for some new seeds, and also try to remember to water your plants, or they die.

That leads of course to the frustration at not having any ability to get Seed Guy to give you another seed of X type so you can attract another Piñata of Y type to make them a resident so you can breed the little fuckers so you can feed a spare one to the other Piñata that's hanging around so they become a resident. This can be alleviated, kinda, by paying a bunch of money to the Hunter Chick, who will then take a really really long time to hunt down a member of any Piñata species that's already been a resident.

All this while suffering an endless bombardment of "alerts" which contain important information such as "a snugglofagus has just looked sideways at your garden" and "a flower just grew". I mean, I've been gaming for more than 20 years, and I just wished the game would
1) Shut the fuck up.
2) Stop fucking interrupting me with annoying cinemas every 72 seconds.
3) For Fuck's Sake, just let me Play The Fucking Game!!

Oh yes, the point of the game. There's a Poke'Mon element to it in "trying to catch 'em all", or attracting the many different Piñata to your little plot of dirt and trying not to have them kill or eat one another. I'd say there's also that god sim element of having built something nice to look at, but I'm not sure if I can see that happening.

So, is it fun?

Well, no. Not really. It's more annoying and frustrating than anything else so far. It's teetering in between that "I want to play it again to see if it gets any better - maybe it'll stop fucking interrupting me trying to play it soon" and the abyss where Pack-In Games I Will Never Play Again go to rot.

I dunno. it might get better, it might become fun later, but on the strangth of the first couple of hours, it mostly just makes me want to punch my television.

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Rent It.

Sent in by Azazel.

Should be:

The first time you get your Piñata to fuck dance

I thought fuck dance was funny.

I wish it were more of a fuck dance. The entertainment value would really go up.

True. It would also make the game hella uncomfortable.

Sounds like a game that needs PvP. Coming back to your Pinata park only to find shreds of paper blowing in the wind and candy entrails littering the ground as I put another notch in my club.

This game is not a kids game. It's sold as one, but it is fucking not. I was playing it with my cousin (she's 4) and she was loving it up to the moment where our snake pinata ate our cutesy mouse pinata. We fucking loved the mouse pinata. It was named and all. I spent the next two hours trying to explain why the snake didn't really eat the mouse, even if it very obviously did.

The mouse was turned into delicious candy!  Although I can see how that's a fairly  :ye_gods: way to learn about death.

I guess kids' reactions could also depend on how much exposure kids have to Piñata before they see the game.

I got it (PC version) at Christmas.  My daughter (age 9) has played it two or three times.

She'd rather play the Sims2, Webkinz or Club Penguin.

:pedobear: That's unfortunate. But it reminded of this webcomic that I never quite understood till I read your statement.
(http://www.penny-arcade.com/images/2006/20060317.jpg)

Viva Pinata = Herding Cats

This. The amount of horribly banal micromanagement killed it for me. And the (PC) interface. Straight mouse-driven ports of a six/eight-button controller-driven game do not work well.

FWIW, the controller interface ain't that crash hot either...