When I first bought my Xbox 360, Viva Piñata was on the short-list of games I desperately wanted to play. When I actually bought it, I enjoyed the box more than the game, because the load times were so horrendous at that point that I had real trouble getting past all of the load times between menus. Luckily for me, I stumbled across a super cheap copy of it for PC, so I grabbed a copy, hoping I’d get more enjoyment out of it, and apart from the wonky install process, I’ve been loving it. The PC version was very early on in the Games for Windows Live program, so the installer is pretty crummy, and the game doesn’t even support 1080p out of the box. Luckily, there are some modifications you can make to one of the ini files to get that resolution working, and if you dig into the nVidia Control Panel, you can do some really cool stuff like crank up the anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering to make the game look really good. The art style of Viva Piñata still looks fantastic, so it helps make the game look a little more modern if you crank up the graphical filtering outside of the game, since the options within the game are pretty limited. The really nice thing is that the PC version in general has much better load times now than the Xbox 360 version, and on an SSD the game is blazingly quick, which makes the process of buying seeds SO much better. Even in the couple of hours I’ve played, I’ve gotten a lot further than I had previously, managing to finally wrangle a Fudgehog into my garden. I also had the amazing moment of clarity where I could finally buy accessories:
LOOK! THE SPARROWMINT HAS A HAT!
I know, it’s all superficial and pointless, but for some reason, playing Viva Piñata just does my heart and my soul good. There’s nothing quite like it, and as stressful as it gets, the excitement of seeing a brand new Piñata wandering around the outskirts of the garden is too good to stop me playing.
BADGESICLE!
Noise In The Crowd 