The Viva Pinata Hype Thread (that's right, ANOTHER)

[Manny Calavera]

Probably The Boxart

Couple of new screens from Liepzig

The first shot really shows off the paper-mache effect, looks really awesome, like the "fur shading" they used in Star Fox Adventures/Conker Live and Reloaded. The 'bad' pinata's are about to eat the sheep/cow thing I guess. I wonder, since I can mail a box back and forth with people on my friends list to trade pinatas and items and stuff, if I can box up all of my bad pinata's and launch an invasion of my friend's garden

 

[Addendum]

That pic which may be the boxart looks like the black-lit street fight from Batman Forever.

 

[Manny Calavera]

Yeah, it does look weird, the colors are wrong and stuff. I just found it in the IGN "new stuff from liepzig" thing and it clearly wasn't the game itself, so I mean, box art is the only thing it could be I guess

 

[Drakon]

Jesus, that box art is horrendously ugly.

--Edit: Maybe if someone were to invert the colours?

 

[Manny Calavera]

Yeah, it is. It wasn't labelled "box art" or anything, but it's obviously not concept art, and it's not a picture from the game, so it pretty much has to be. I don't know what they were thinking, I liked the box art here better

 

[Manny Calavera]

Still looks a little off (the 'bad' pinata in the back isn't the right shade, everything's too bright, etc), but at least resembles the actual game. I wonder if someone accidently inverted the colors or something before posting the image

 

[Drakon]

I'm not sure. But it seems to work as far as I can tell.

 

[WhatsHisFace]

That pic which may be the boxart looks like the black-lit street fight from Batman Forever.

Hahahaha, just when I forgot that movie!

Yeah, that movie sucked the fat one.

 

[Manny Calavera]

So WHF, are you buying this, or are you Topdawg: The sequel?

 

[WhatsHisFace]

Aren't those a bit drastic for a binary future? I mean, can't I just be the Viva Pinataless WHF?

 

[Manny Calavera]

Viva Pinata. Topdawg: The Next Generation. Those are the options

 

[WhatsHisFace]

Okay I'll get the damn game.

Eventually... *sinister laughter.*

 

[Manny Calavera]

It comes out "eventually", get it then. I'm going to mail you a box of crossbred doomsday pinatas to turn your garden into a pot hole filled waste land.

 

[WhatsHisFace]

Muahahahah, it's really too bad there aren't guns in this game to kill the evil Pinatas. Don't you have to talk them out of being evil, or something.

 

[Manny Calavera]

No, you can launch them out of the cannons (I forget what they're called), hopefully at another player's garden but I don't know, just off your island, you can beat them to death with your shovel, build a fence around them and another pinata and then just use your shovel to take away the part of the fence keeping them seperated and have pinata cock fighting, you can build stuff until they're sort of boxed in and have to walk off the island into the water, cross bread some bigger, meaner pinata to just kill them (not the best idea since they can eat the bad candy and become bad themselves), etc. Various options have been talked about/speculated about in various things about the game. I don't think you talk to them though

 

[WhatsHisFace]

Oh my gosh, I can't believe this is happening to me.

 

[Manny Calavera]

Buy the game

 

[WhatsHisFace]

I'm going to bank on the demo, if there is one. There's just so many places where this game can go horribly, horribly wrong.

I trust the team, oh how I do, but this is just not looking sure-fire.

 

[Manny Calavera]

1UP still sucks, but it does have some uses. Read this WHF, this should make you a little more excited about this game and a little less angry about Banjo Threeie.

 

[WhatsHisFace]

It's a decent read, but I have absolutely no faith in this game.

Peter Moore said two Rare games would be annouced this year. Hopefully at X06 we'll see something that actually has a genre.

 

[Manny Calavera]

Hopeless, change your avatar

 

[WhatsHisFace]

I forgot about my avatar.

I'd just change it to my other Lionhead one. The Christian Bale ones aren't big enough.

 

[Manny Calavera]

GC06: Viva Pinata presentation

"The Game Convention is now almost over on Xboxyde, so it's time for me to put online this big and long presentation video of Viva Pinata. I've been able to record this footage explaining how the game works, and especially how we are able to get some type of Pinata in our garden. Even if this game is definitely aimed at a younger audience, I was surprised by how complex the interactions between the different types Pinatas could be.
The video can get a bit dark at times, it's completely my fault as I forgot to lock the exposure on my camcorder. It's still very watchable."


HD Cartoon Episode One

HD Cartoon Episode Two
(both are also available on Xbox Live Marketplace)

I'll be the first to say "hey, this cartoon sucks and I will not watch it", but it's nice to watch simply because it and the game use the same art assets, and so it's a good example of how visually pleasing the game really is. It also has a few gameplay hints scattered between them, like how to lure in rarer things like a Chewnicorn.

And lastly...
I'm an idiot and heard that the demo was very laggy at that Leipzig thing, is this game going to be delayed/laggy?
No. As BlimBlim (the guy who runs Xboxyde) explains here, these huge framerate stutters (which were attacked by people running sites like 1up, because their "gaming journalism" is mostly bull**** and bias) were in fact not because of Viva Pinata, but rather because of the faulty set up of the display units. They had cache writes disabled, while at the same time the nearly finished and smoothly running Viva Pinata kept attempting cache writes, causing the game to occasionally time out, giving way to the stutter you see in some of the liepzig videos.

 

[Jerry]

Isn't there another game similar to this coming to the 360 as well. I think its called Spore. Except you basically start off by creating a an entire civilization from scratch and build it up into an entire world or something like that. Looks cool, but too bad since Peter Molyneux is making it, it won't be out until the next generation of consoles.

 

[Fenrir]

Isn't there another game similar to this coming to the 360 as well. I think its called Spore. Except you basically start off by creating a an entire civilization from scratch and build it up into an entire world or something like that. Looks cool, but too bad since Peter Molyneux is making it, it won't be out until the next generation of consoles.

Dude, Spore is being made by Will Wright.