Viva Pinata: Pocket Paradise review (DS)

There are some great things about living in London - the fact that you're close to everything; that you can get anything whenever you want it.

Fancy a beer at 5:30 in the morning? No problem, there's probably a 24-hour off-license at the end of the road.

Want to watch a B-movie marathon on a sleepy Sunday afternoon? Sure, there's probably a dodgy east end theatre showing just that.

Then there are some bad things. The transport gets crammed at rush hour; living costs about three times as much as anywhere else; no matter how many green spaces there are, you never feel very close to nature.

In a strange kind of way, Viva Pinata: Pocket Paradise addresses this last one. For the bargain price of £29.99, this DS 'companion' to the Xbox 360 series manages to provide a small window box of gardening magic for all us green-fingered wannabes.

Even when your DS is tucked comfortably in your back pocket on the Jubilee line, you'll know that the joys of digital horticulture are only seconds away.

For those unfamiliar with the franchise, Viva Pinata is essentially a gardening simulator that strips away all the horrible stuff associated with the pastime, such as the smells, neighbours and general misery of it all.

Developed by Rare (GoldenEye,Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts and Bolts), you are tasked with cultivating a garden using an array of tools and seeds with the goal of attracting pinatas to your backyard creation.

Yep, pinatas - those colourful paper animals filled with sweets that Mexican people bash up at birthday parties.

The interface with which you go about doing this is wonderful. Controlled solely with the touchscreen and stylus, you're able to select tools such as watering cans, trowels and spades so you can then tend to plants, remove rubble and break-up unwanted bits of debris from your plot.

First thing you'll want to do on your barren desert of lawn is to plant some grass and get some flowers down.

Again, the DS stylus make this a breeze, with even the most repetitive action of spreading seeds across your virtual allotment with careful brushstrokes giving the impression of painting a masterpiece.

Within no time, you'll find a menagerie of colourful papier mache creatures turning up looking for somewhere to call home on your little strip of land.

Take care though, as each of your visitors requires somewhere to live and has individual needs. Get the environment right with your pinatas (like giving them a house and vegetables to eat) and in no time your residents will have little pinata babies.

From here on in you have sandbox gaming at its most relaxing. You can make decisions as to whether to watch your garden grow by itself, let pinatas fight and reproduce among each other, or whether to take a hold of affairs, issue love candy to speed up the mating process or buy and sell your pinatas to a local trader.

Viva Pinata has certainly benefited from the switch to Nintendo's handheld system. The touchscreen controls fit the game's interface perfectly and the downgrade in graphics does no harm to its cute aesthetics.

The DS adaptation also holds the advantage over its Xbox 360 counterpart due to its early tuition levels that give a useful rundown of all the games features in an accessible manner.

While marketed purely as a children's franchise - with accompanying TV series - Viva Pinata is, curiously, more likely to alienate younger gamers.

While the presentation, which includes a number of supposedly humorous FMVs and friendly audio, is squarely aimed at the teen and pre-teen market, the gameplay requires a large amount of intuition and logical thought to move forward - something which could frustrate those more used to the likes of Shrek and Harry Potter tie-ins.

It looks likely that Pocket Paradise is to be the final entry in the Viva Pinata adventure, which is a shame because the series seems to have found its zenith with this last entry, with the Pinata concept and DS's innovation seemingly made for each other.

For us city dwellers, it looks like we'll have to find new ways of living the country lifestyle. What about Farmhands: The Game for the Wii? You could milk the cows using the Wiimote, or chase the farmer's daughter, or shear the sheep. Ok, maybe not...

8/10

Daniel Shane