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YouGamers.com Reviews Viva Piñata for Windows

Viva Piñata for Windows


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ESRB rating: Everyone ESRB: Cartoon Violence,Comic Mischief
Publisher: Microsoft Game Studios
Genre(s): Simulation
Home Page: http://www.microsoft.com/games/pc/...
 






Preview





 
 
By: Jarno Kokko Dec 18, 2007

Cute, innovative, but...

It's hard to resist the Cute Factor that is present here, and the amount of risky innovation piled to a single game is respectable. Fresh new ideas are not easy to implement in a way that will please everyone, and in this case while individual ideas are great, and the visual design is respectable, on the gameplay side the package fails to pull together as a playable game that would entice me to stay in the Piñata Garden. I wouldn't mind just visiting it though, especially if sharing the experience with a younger player, but the UI and technical issues hampers experience and sours the deal for me in the long term. It's really a shame, as there is obviously a lot of depth to the game. Here's hoping that Rare would make another attempt at a Sandbox-style Piñata game - overall the concept is good, it's just the execution that falters here.

Summary of YouGamers Hardware Testing

The publisher of this game state the following specifications for their minimum and recommended requirements:

Component Publisher's Minimum Publisher's Recommended
Processor Intel Pentium 4 1.8 GHz Not specified
Memory 1024 MB
Graphics Card DirectX 9.0c card with Shader Model 2.0 support
Graphics Card Example ATI Radeon 9600 series / NVIDIA GeForce 5900 series
Free Disk Space 10 GB
Net Link Not specified
 

To learn more about how YouGamers performs its hardware testing, click here. Through our extensive gameplay and hardware testing across the full spectrum of PC configurations, YouGamers suggests that one should use the following guidelines for an appropriate minimum and recommended setup:

Component YouGamers Minimum YouGamers Recommended
Processor Get it! AMD Athlon XP 1800+ / Get it! Intel Pentium 4 1800 MHz Get it! AMD Athlon 64 X2 3800+ / Get it! Intel Core 2 Duo E4300
Memory 1024 MB 1024 MB
Graphics Card ATI Radeon 9800 Pro 128MB / NVIDIA GeForce 6600GT 128MB Get it! ATI Radeon HD 2600 256MB / Get it! NVIDIA GeForce 8600 GT 256MB
Free Disk Space 10 GB 10 GB
Net Link none Broadband for Games for Windows Live features
 

Scores

To learn more about our scoring methodology, please click here.

Gameplay 69 Fun Sandbox-style gameplay hampered by playability issues, and a user interface tied to a control system originally designed for a gamepad. Supports a mouse without actually adjusting the game to work around it.
Graphics 83 Fairly pretty visuals with great and consistent overall art direction - shame about the aspect ratio issues. Widescreen monitor recommended for play.
Audio 86 High production values, lots of speech and cheerful music.
Technology 74 Pretty good for an Xbox 360 port, but the aspect ratio mess is inexcusable. Doesn't really scale for really low-end systems, but runs acceptably on anything you could call a gaming system these days.
OVERALL
75
Innovative and fun, yet has plenty of depth even for older gamers. The user interface issues, the problems with standard aspect ratio and overall lack of attention to detail are the big downers here. So it's "just a crude port of an OK game from Xbox 360 to the PC" - worth checking out if you have kids to play with.


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