Affectionate Diary

Viva Pinata Party Animals. I’m not doing it the honour of finding out how to do the proper fucking n with the accent. It’s hard to give the concise opinion of this game because I only played it once, but during that time I definitely didn’t enjoy even one moment of it on any level. Well, it’s quite competently coded, I suppose, but by people who have never played a party game in their lives, let alone a videogame

Here are some things that are proper fucking shit about the worst party game ever made, and that includes that one on the original Xbox that Bill Gates liked that managed to get a sequel on 360 -

• Choose your favourite pinata! Well, seeing as how I hated the original game for being a tediously slow, uncharismatic puking of colour onto my screen I was never going to love any of the characters I could choose from in this game.
• The commentary between rounds repeats itself IN THE FIRST GAME YOU PLAY.
• The races can be summed up as wishing they were Diddy Kong Racing, but with sub-Need For Speed handling, poorly designed and signposted tracks, three random power ups to collect and no indication of anything throughout other than you might be going forward. Also, WAY too many controls for a party game.
• The mini games basically consist of collecting sweets in various environments, with the ‘ability’ to push other pinatas out of the way, only the sweets appear in either the same place all the time or a stupidly random way, thus ensuring nobody knows what they’re supposed to be doing. There are other mini games, but they can also FUCK OFF.
• The commentary between rounds repeats itself IN THE FIRST GAME YOU PLAY.
• Every other minigame is a fucking RACE, with controls as complicated as PGR but with handling and track design a mentally handicapped child that has never played games could have shat out.
• It’s the fucking PINATAS FROM VIVA PINATA.
• At no point during the game are you really aware of what’s going on, who’s winning (unless you’ve managed to associate your portrait with your onscreen character), how many games are left to go or what you should be doing unless you’ve analysed each brief screen with the intensity and precision of a hardcore gamer.

Even the ‘non-gamer’ I was playing it with thought it was terrible.

Whatever you do, do not take the promo you have of this game out of the shrink wrapping. If you bought it, I can only offer commiserations.

Viva Pinata Party Animals - 0/10