Viva Pinata's box should come stamped with the following Surgeon General's Warning:

WARNING: CONTENTS PRONE TO CAUSE EUPHORIA. MAY CAUSE USER TO BECOME INCAPABLE OF MEASURING THE PASSAGE OF TIME. EXTENDED EXPOSURE TO CONTENTS MAY CAUSE DAMAGE TO INTERPERSONAL AND/OR WORK RELATIONSHIPS. DO NOT USE WITHIN ONE HOUR OF USUAL BEDTIME.

I can't believe it's legal to sell something this addictive. See the horse on the cover? He's not smiling because he's friendly. He's laughing at you because he knows that you're mere moments away from signing your soul away to the residents of Pinata Island. Oh, yeah. It's that kind of game.

Fantastic Island
Viva Pinata is a sort of Technicolor hybrid of Animal Crossing, Harvest Moon, and Pokemon; it's a super-cute sandbox game with lots of stuff to collect, and even has an accompanying afternoon cartoon to go with it. The centerpiece of the game is your garden, which you'll tend and tweak and landscape to attract the island's inhabitants, the piñatas. Each piñata has certain requirements for visiting, and later for becoming an actual resident of your garden, so attracting new species requires lots of planning and replanting. When you start off, your garden is pretty tiny and you don't have access to much more than grass, but that's more than enough for the Whirlms to come a-calling. (Each piñata's name is a combination of an animal and a candy…'cause they're piñatas, get it?) Whirlms in turn attract Sparrowmints, and so on. You'll spend hours reworking your garden just trying to figure out what suits a particular pinata's fancy.

Garden of Love
You can only attract two of any particular species to your garden at a given time; if you want any more, you're going to have to dabble in some paper animal husbandry. Just as each piñata has requirements for visiting, they have requirements for love, too. Once they've been met, your lovebirds will engage in a little minigame that ends with dancing, and as Footloose taught us, dancing leads to babies. I was disappointed that you couldn't cross-breed your piñata. I was looking forward to seeing the offspring of a Buzzlegum and a Quackberry. Perhaps in the sequel.

For as much love as there is in your garden, however, there is just as much hate, because certain piñata just ain't never gonna get along. The Pretztails are always going to pick on the Bunnycombs, and the Raisants and Buzzlegums will never see eye to eye. If you want to keep the peace, you'll have to either thin your herd or keep 'em separated; the alternative is many calls to the doctor to come heal up your injured combatants. Sour piñata further complicate matters, as they slink through your garden, coughing up sour candy designed to make your happy piñata ill.

How does your garden grow?
Detailing the possibilities of Viva Pinata doesn't adequately explain just how or why it's so hard to stop playing it. Sure, the mechanics are all flawless, with charming graphics, an excellent camera and simple, yet deep controls. None of that is what makes VP so good, though. It's not even the sheer volume of possibilities that open up to you with your first turn of the shovel; rather, it's that each possibility actually means something. For example, adding a tiki torch not only makes your garden more valuable and more aesthetically pleasing, it attracts Mothdrops. There are all sorts of trees, flowers, vegetables, buildings, and objects you can add to your garden, and just about each and every one of them causes a reaction amongst your population.

Viva Pinata also manages to overcome two major downfalls of sandbox games: stagnation and micromanagement. Your garden eventually grows to a fairly substantial size, but its space is finite, so you'll have to pick and choose what you want to keep and what gets the heave-ho. You'll find yourself constantly overhauling your garden, adding new features, removing others, selling off items and buying others in order to attract or repel your target piñata of the moment. You'll also eventually be able to hire helpers to deal with the drudgery of managing your garden, like watering the plants or gathering the produce, thus leaving you plenty of time to obsess over your overall design. And obsess you shall.

Nice knowing you…
Viva Pinata is roughly as addictive as chocolate-covered crack with MSG sprinkles. There are so many tiny details to master that you'll never grow bored of the endless possibilities that your garden presents, but the mechanics are simple enough that even small kids will be able to whip up a piñata-pleasing space in no time. Be warned, however: there's no such thing as a "quick trip" to Pinata Island. Once you see its beautiful landscape and meet its colorful inhabitants, you'll never want to come home.

- Maj1013