Viva Pinata is one of the bright shining jewels of the Xbox 360 library but it feels like nobody played it. If anyone had actually played it we wouldn't have heard "Herp derp, Microsoft ruined Rare and they suck now" for the last 10+ years. Viva Pinata is bright and colorful and funny and amazing and is peak Rareware. Keep reading for more on game 23 of Eric Vs. 365, Viva Pinata.
For whatever reasons, not enough people played Viva Pinata. They thought it was too bright and colorful, they thought it was a kids game, they thought it wasn't deep enough. Or, more likely, they were bitter about Microsoft buying Rare and wanted to continue the trope of Rare fading away into obscurity. The truth is that Viva Pinata was amazing and if it had been released on a Nintendo system would have gone down as one of the all time classics. Honestly, it IS one of the all time classics and I'd put it among the top 15 games ever released on Xbox 360. The sequel, Trouble in Paradise, is an even better game, but it re-treads a lot of the same stuff so it didn't have quite the same impact (we'll play it eventually too, don't worry).
For today's Viva Pinata video I started with a singular goal - to fill my garden with Kittyfloss cat pinatas. It only takes an hour or two of playing to unlock the ability to buy Kittyfloss, and I thought that would be that. Viva Pinata is such a damn fun game, though, that I just kept on playing and playing and playing for several hours more. I kept unlocking new stuff and new cute pinatas and bigger garden spaces so I just kept playing because it was freaking fun. If that isn't an indicator of how good Viva Pinata still is, I don't know what is.
I did eventually force myself to stop playing to make progress and got down to the business of filling my garden with derpy cat pinatas. The Kittyfloss act like real cats, for the most part, so they sleep all the time and just sort of derp around. They dislike water, so one way to make the experience more hilarious is to confine them to small islands of land so they're all crowded together looking silly together. I think it's funny, anyway, so that's what I did in the video. The result is pretty solid, I'd say.
I also want to say that the game still looks ridiculously great even though it is a 2006 game being played in 2019 on an Xbox One. It also has Xbox One X 4K enhancements if you have a XONEX, and I can only imagine how great it looks on there. The flora is lush, the water looks great, and the pinatas are fuzzy (papery?) and adorable. Life is good.
