Despite the fact the original wasn't the runaway commercial success that

Microsoft clearly craved, Rare's designers find themselves in an enviable position when making a sequel to Viva Pinata. They don't need to make any huge innovative leaps, as the original game was innovative enough. What they need to do is take a smart and critically-acclaimed game and improve it, deepening it and turning it into something that can find a wider audience.

What Rare is doing with Viva Pinata: Trouble in Paradise, an Xbox 360 game that Microsoft announced today, is both providing more structure to the game's open-ended gameplay and taking it away. The main game has been tightened up and made more difficult, including more problems for the players to solve and more concrete goals. For example, you'll have to get rid of Sour Pinatas who can ruin your garden. In the original, a single item could keep them all out, but that's been removed and replaced with multiple methods which only work temporarily.

But the game's other mode, called "Just For Fun," is a more relaxing, playful experience. There are no sour pinatas, lots more cash to spend, and all the shops are open right from the beginning instead of having to be unlocked. And you can have any Pinata you like in your garden with minimal prerequisites. The team has worked closely on the tutorial, trying a more integrated approach rather than simply overloading the player with text.

As requested by parents who want to play alongside their kids, Rare has added a cooperative mode where a second player can join in at any time just by picking up a controller. While the main player deals with the most important tasks, the second can help with the digging and watering and general activities in the world. And as an encouragement to get two people involved, they do so more effectively than the main player.

And while the Gamer in all of us realizes that a determined solo player could get those bonuses by switching between two joypads depending on what they were doing, wouldn't that be cheating? No, says Rare, that's a fair choice too. If you want to, knock yourself out. It's a game about cultivating a garden, after all. Relax.

As well as a conceptual re-tooling and new aspects to explore, there's the more expected expansion of content. Thirty new pinatas join the old favorites, and there are more interactions between them. And expect an array of new toys, I was particularly taken with the train tracks and the machine that made dinosaur toys that were promptly chewed up.

So on first impressions, this seems less a new unprecedented paradise than it does a careful pruning and measured growth of one of gaming's most leisurely destinations.

–Kieron Gillen

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