Well folks, after harassing about 20 different game stores all day on the 2nd and coming up empty handed, I finally snagged a copy of Viva Piñata: Trouble in Paradise (hereafter referred to as "TiP") yesterday at lunch. "Encouraged" wifey to spend the evening with the littl'un at her cousins, rushed home after work and threw that bad boy in the console as soon as I filled my belly with some "life candy" (read: pizza).

Right off the bat, you can tell the load times have been greatly improved. The transition screens have also received a facelift and are a bit more "techy" looking instead of just flower petals or leaves encircling the screen. In the original game (hereafter referred to as "Classic"), the first garden was covered in cracked earth and littered with broken-down houses, ornaments and rock outcroppings. You had to beat down the earth into soil and smash this refuse before you could get down to business. In TiP, the initial garden already has a complete basic landscape, with short grass, a few planting areas surrounded by stone tiles with pre-grown flowers and even a small gated wooden enclosure with a (what I believe is a random) piñata inside. Mine was a fudgehog. I called him Fudgeo.



Leafos makes her triumphant return suggests you visit Langston (a new character who wasn't present in Classic, he is a lickatoad from the TV series) who offers to lead you through a few short tutorial-type challenges. They're pretty painless for experienced users and I gather they would help new users get up and running fairly well. The first challenge involves attracting one of the new species, a Bispotti (ladybug) by planting another poppy in the garden. After that, you're off to the Dessert Desert, one of the new "visitable" regions (you can't garden here) where you are taught how to trap one of the new desert pinata, a Sweetle. It's fairly simple: you lay down a trap that initially looks like a square wooden tile, and then you place bait on top of it. Then you wait for a pinata (hopefully the one you're after) to walk onto the trap, eat the bait and the trap to set at which point it expands into a box and locks the pinata up tight. Then it is whisked off to the post office, and you can accept it into your garden. You still have to meet a residence requirement (in this case, laying some sand) before the foreign pinata decides to stick around. The final challenge involves sending a certain pinata off to a party (this is part of the "storyline", by sending specific pinatas to various regions on a world map you are rebuilding the Piñata Central records) by increasing its candiosity to the maximum level which can be done in a number of different ways including changings its name and feeding it.

Once you've completed the challenges (or maybe part way through it, I can't quite remember) things start to get pretty hectic, (!) with new pinatas showing up left and right depending on what kinds of plants or pinatas you've put in your garden. Even as an experienced player, I felt a little overwhelmed. However, as usual you can typically just ignore whatever is going on in your garden and focus on the task at hand...which is...whatever you want! Staying true to it's sandbox nature, there's really no "wrong way" to play TiP. The good news is that with the influx of appearing, visiting, and residing species you tend to level through the initial levels quite quickly, receiving various upgrades to your tools along the way.

While the overall graphics have only received a slight improvement (apparently the shadows render more realistically now), I believe most of the classic pinatas have received subtle makeovers. For example, the "non-resident" lickatoad has a purple tongue which is a nice touch from its usual black-and-white self. The "appearance" of each pinata is also a little bit more exciting, with each pinata doing something expected of their species and interacting more with the beyond-the-garden-border environment (going with the lickatoid example again, it does some acrobatic jumping along water lillies in the pond). The music is still very soothing and calming with appropriate changes during interpiñata conflict (those newtgats and lickatoads just never get along!). All the original voice actors reprise their roles and have new lines interspersed with old favourites. Costalot is still greedy, Petula is still tired and apathetic and Seedos is still...well, he's still Seedos. I haven't given him a good whacking yet because he's been pretty loose with the seeds, if you know what I mean.

Anyhow, I still haven't really gotten into much of the "new" content - I'm still trying to gain a foothold in my garden, really, and get some of the basic stuff out of the way. I played from 6 PM until about 1:30 AM in the morning with only a brief break when the better half got home to help her get Ayden upstairs and tucked in bed. I got up to level 22, which means I have the max garden size (which hasn't increased from Classic, by the way). I did learn a few tricks (using the new trick stick) serendipidously just by feeding pinatas various seeds, flowers and fruits. Even though the load times to go to the store have been improved ten-fold, the new seed pouch is wicked convenient. It's accessed from the menu, or by invoking a real-time tool change by moving the D-pad left again from the water can. You then just use the bumpers to scroll to the seed of your choice and can place or plant it in your garden straight away. You can also access the fertilizers by hitting left one more time. I tested out the Piñata Vision to get my "Card Sharp" achievement - it did take me a while to get it going because it's tough to get the camera to read the card. Some tips for that: prop the card up against something in landscape (horizontally), barcode down, and point the camera at it. It should nearly fill the entire picture-in-picture box that pops up. I gather practice will make this process easier, though I don't think I'll be using vision cards it's basically cheating yourself out of achieving stuff on your own.

Other than the vision cam issue, the only other problem I've noticed so far is that sometimes Storkos will claim there's no house to deliver an egg to. I'm not sure if it's too crowded, or what, but she wouldn't deliver an egg or two. Oh, and the Cluckles romance requirements says they have to eat two "worms". Worms?! Don't you mean whirlms? =) Wildcards (at least in the early stages) are pretty easy to come by as well, which is a nice change of pace from my romancing of 500 buzzenges and coming up empty =). Pictured are my twin wildcard cluckles'es. Anyhow, it's still great piñata fun and a faithful sequel with the same stunning visuals and I'm looking forward to diving into some more of the new features in the coming days and week and will post again. Feel free to ask any questions in the comments and I'll answer them as best I can.