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Viva Piñata for Windows

The Widescreen Issue

The Xbox 360 version of Viva Piñata was primarily designed for widescreen displays. On the PC, the 4:3 aspect ratio displays are still far more common than widescreen ones, but when converting the game to PC, it hasn't changed one bit in this regard. When played on a normal aspect ratio display, just like the Xbox 360 game, the the PC version doesn't seem to know if it's 4:3 or letterboxed 16:9. Most of the game is presented in 4:3 aspect ratio, with some of the UI elements redone for it aspect ratio. Yet some parts are just stretched from 16:9, and for some bits the game suddenly switches to letterboxed 16:9 (with black bars on a standard ratio display).

The end result is a mess - Climax should have done something about the problem; either redone everything for 4:3 aspect ratio (retaining 16:9 assets for those who play with widescreen monitors), or just made the whole game to a widescreen aspect ratio, using letterbox (black bars) on 4:3 displays, as PC monitors have good enough resolution to do that without problems. As it stands now, the mixture of elements made for different aspect ratios and random switches to letterboxed mode for some bits are jarring and give unpolished feel to the whole game. If you are playing with a widescreen monitor, then the problem obviously goes away as everything is 16:9.

Looks and Performance

If your system is reasonably modern, Viva Piñata is a quite pretty game - individual models and terrain features are nothing too special, but overall the consistent style and high production values are impressive. There is an active day/night cycle, everything casts shadows and all the piñatas are exceptionally well animated and move about quite convincingly. Character design, especially on the different Piñata species is also top notch, and I'm not surprised that Rare has continued to develop the concept with minigame-themed Viva Piñata Party Animals on the Xbox 360.

The Garden at day looks picturesque with furry piñatas hopping around the grass.

At night, piñatas with homes will go in to sleep, but some species actually show up only at night.

The listed minimum requirements for Viva Piñata are fairly low - 1.8 GHz processor and an ATI Radeon 9600 or NVIDIA GeForce 5900. While the game theoretically runs on a setup like this, you are limited to 800x600 resolution and minimum settings, making the game fairly ugly. To properly play at a more common 1024x768 without resorting to the lowest settings, a slightly faster system is needed. The game is video card-limited at the low end, but if you want to push the maximum settings, you also need a fairly modern CPU.

Low settings - the grass and fur are all gone, but it does run on the system printed on the box, at a low resolution.	You can bump up the settings to this level on the YouGamers minimum system.
Medium settings, looks already recognizable, but requires a fairly modern system.	The High settings look very nice, but you need a system comparable to the YouGamers recommended to run the game like this.

But staying at the minimum system, while you can play, you do need to reduce the visuals quite a bit - you can still recognize the game, but lot of the cute fluffiness is gone. For Xbox 360-level visuals, a fairly modern graphics card is required: in our testing an  ATI Radeon HD 2600 or an  NVIDIA GeForce 8600 GT is recommended to run things at higher settings. However, regardless of the hardware used, there are some small glitches with the performance, especially when the garden gets bigger and more complex. Due to the type of the game, small jumps in frame rate are not that important, but it reinforces the feeling that the game is just a bit unpolished.

Page 1: IntroductionPage 2: GameplayPage 3: Gameplay (cont.), User InterfacePage 4: Graphics and PerformancePage 5: Final Thoughts and Scoring

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