I couldn’t believe it!
Not only was Viva Piñata so damned addicting, but also, addicting is a word! (haha, no really!)

But let’s not discuss what Oxford would and wouldn’t put into their English Dictionary…

Viva Piñata (how do you type that squiggle on the n anyway? I had to copy and paste…) is a seriously, *seriously* big time sink. Remember when the first SimCity was released and you received on a freshly copied 360k floppy disk back in the 90’s? And then proceeded to play it, for hours on end, only to end up with a city that’s running itself into the ground, and then you start again, but *this* time it will be better? Remember that? Viva Piñata is 10 times worse, which makes it 50 times better.

On the surface, the game would never attract me, or most adult gamers, unless they’ve read something about the game, and know what they’re getting themselves into. The game is colorful, and, dare I say it, cutesy-cutesy. The game features over 60 animal species, all (almost all) with a possibility to be changed in color throughout the game through experimentation. Some species can be fed certain things to actually evolve into other species. Helpers help out, bad guys spoil the fun, and you get to breed (and, in one specific case, cross-breed) species of piñata. Fun fun fun.

So what’s the aim of the game? Create a thriving, living garden, and manage the fauna and flora in it. Sounds simple? It’s not. Far from it. Different species fight with eachother, ruffians and sour piñata come and spoil your day. There’s a storyline in there somewhere, that gets unlocked as time goes by, but I haven’t read it. I don’t think many people do. Oh, and there are many, many achievements to be unlocked, and lots of blocks that need ticks next to them. Do you have a Squirrel visiting outside your garden? Tick. Have you enticed the squirrel to come visit in your garden? Tick. Did you entice said squirrel sufficiently to actually stay in your garden? Tick. Have you romanced two squirrels? Tick. Are you a master romancer for the squirrels? Tick. Tick. Have you managed to find what to feed a squirrel to changed it into the three possible color variants? Tick. Tick. Tick. Now do that for every species that happens to come along to the garden, all the while making sure they don’t get eaten by other piñatas, or become unhappy and run away, or get beaten into little bits of sweets (Hey, they *are* Piñatas after all…) by one of the bad guys…

Scratching under the colorful surface of the game, you’ll find an enthralling, interesting and massive management sim. Each Piñata needs micromanagement to be able to get them to do anything. This is not a bad thing. It helps the game along quite nicely. You need to plant seeds, water them, and fertilize them if you want them to become really huge and bare more seeds, or flowers, or fruit in the case of fruit trees. Soon you’ll find yourself playing the game for hours on end just to breed that last Quackberry (duck for you uninitiated), or trying to entice that Doenut (a member of Bambi’s family) into your garden with sufficient amounts of long grass, wondering why it’s taking so long for the day to end, then realising that it’s been night and now it’s morning again, and you’ve played right through the night. As I said. Addicting.

And big. The game is big. There will always be something to do, something to try, and something to grow. “I wonder what happens when the duck eats a water-lilly flower. OH MY GOD! IT TURNS PINK!!!” is something that will happen every now and again. What’s the use of a pink duck? Nothing really other than to entertain whoever is playing the game. And in our house’s case, it’d be the woman of the house that’s claimed the Xbox 360 and the TV forever more. Or, at least, until she becomes a master romancer for every single one of the species in the game. Argh, I’ve lost the TV!

Seriously though, Viva Piñata is an extremely enjoyable game, and the subject matter of breeding, or romancing, is totally safe for kids. Xbox.com has an article by XboxDad on the suitability of Viva Piñata for kids. Good read. The game itself also has a short video on it. There is even a Viva Piñata TV series, which has several episodes for download, free of charge, via the XBox Live Marketplace portal.

Fun for the whole family, to play and watch, Viva Piñata is a must addition to any Xbox 360 game collection. And by looking at the online screenshots of the game, definitely appreciated better on an HDTV, which sadly, I don’t have.

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Tags: addicting, Viva Piñata, Xbox 360

WOW!
This is awesome!
I’m so looking forward to seeing this!
I signed up immediately! Go on, add your name to the list to get mail when it finally launches!

The guys over at Re-Inventech wanted to run a press release on the

Gaming console that is capable of reading and playing games from three of the world’s most popular gaming consoles has finally been developed

called the Phantom HP.

The site says the console will be able to play Xbox, Playstation and Nintendo (?) games. That would be so cool, except, it’s not true.
I call bullshit!

Here’s why. (Thanks to the guys on the take2.co.za forums that helped with the investigations…)

The domain reinventech.co.za was registered only 10 days ago, by a company calling themselves MLS IGroup (Pty) Ltd, on behalf of a Gerald Yepp (in turn from a place called In Detail Advertising. The domain is still to be paid.
In-Detail Advertising’s site says their philosophy is to “to create RESPONSE DRIVEN ADVERTISING that wins you business”. Added to that, the reinventech site has a single form to add your name and e-mail address to be notified when the console will launch. Double bullshit.

Other reasons that may spark the neurons to think “Hold it!”, could be:

• Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo will never let the reverse engineering of their consoles slide, legally.
• The Phantom console on the reinventech site looks suspiciously *exactly* the same as the Phantom Console from Infinium Labs, that never saw the light of day.
• Two of the members of Re-Inventech’s surnames are Hott and Price, which is suspiciously similar to a site of In Detail Advertising called hotprice.co.za
• It’s too damned close to April Fool’s Day.

Starting a bit early hey guys?
Honestly, I wonder if Gerald Yepp *really* thought it was going to work?
Or, maybe it did work. Something like this has the capability to become rather viral.
And, to those of you reading this far, don’t, really, don’t fill in that stupid little form on their website, ‘cos chances are they’re using it to harvest email addresses…

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Tags: Phantom, reinventech

I recently wrote a review for the PC game El Matador, and it was published on the fine, fine tech site IOLTechnology. I don’t think I can republish the review here on the blog, so just click through to the site if you want to read it. Even though I gave it the score I did, it’s still an enjoyable game to play, but has limited lifetime though. Thanks to the guys at Megarom for supplying the game.

Tags: review, El Matador, IOLTechnology

Well, someone has managed to kludge Half Life 2 onto their MacBook. Comments seem to suggest that it works, but the built in graphics cards on the MacBooks make for a slow game, so hopefully someone else with a MacBook Pro can give this a try and leave some comments here or at the like above.

Technorati Tags: apple, games, half life 2

Opening the Cape Argus today, I found an Incredible Connection pamphlet.  On the front page of this pamphlet, there’s a bloody good deal to get an Xbox 360…

Here’s the deal.

You pay a once-off sim and connection fee of R202, and they give you a Nokia 1600, and an Xbox 360 Pro System, for free.  You will also then be paying R211.60 per month for 24 months, which gives you a “Business contract” with Vodacom.

So lets do the math.  R211.60 x 24 + R202 = R5280.40

The XBox 360 Pro System sells for R3699 at Incredible.

I suppose it’s not bad if you already have a kickass phone (let’s face it, the Nokia 1600 is not exactly the most feature-rich of phones), and you want an XBox 360, but still.  I suppose this just adds onto the console-phone deals that have made it into the light of day over the past few years…

Technorati Tags: vodacom, contract, cellphone, xbox

Ooooooer.  I just found (Thanks Stu!) this link to a video of several of the Nintendo Wii games that will be released with or soon after the release of the Wii itself.

It looks gooooood…

Technorati Tags: nintendo, wii

Maxim lists top game toilets [via Joystiq]

Sometimes it seems like anything video-game related that can be listed has been listed. Games, weapons, underused franchises, bad dialog… there are so many that we’ve even done a list of lists.

But just when you think there are no more listable things out there, Maxim comes along and puts together a list of the top ten in-game toilets.

Yes, toilets. Haha, this is newsworthy!
And I must say, those are some good-looking toilets…
Why don’t my toilets ever look that good? I need a new video card. Or an XBox360.

Minimum Requirements:

• CPU: Athlon 64 3000+/Intel 2.8ghz
• Graphics: Nvidia 6600/X800GTO (SM 2.0)
• RAM: 768Mb/1Gb on Windows Vista
• HDD: 6GB
• Internet: 256k+
• Optical Drive: DVD
• Software: DX9.0c with Windows XP

Holy crap!!! The above is from the Joystiq entry on Is your PC rig ready for Crysis, who in turn got it from the Crysis Online forums… This is insane!!! This is why I’ve given up upgrading my PC, rather favouring playing games on a console, or playing games on my PC that fit into my lowly specs. I don’t have a crap PC, an AMD64 3000+ and a Geforce 6600GT PCI-Express card with 1GB ram is nothing to sneeze at, but it’s now become the minimum requirements for a game? That’s just sad.

If you haven’t heard of Crysis, then you need to crawl from under the rock you’ve been living under, and go check out the several gameplay footage videos of Crysis over at Google Video or Youtube.

Tags: Crysis

Oh. My. God.

This game looks *awesome*!!!!!

Valve (Halflife and Halflife 2 gods), are using the HL2 engine to create this game called Portal.

OK, I tried to embed the video from gamevideos.com, but it seemed to screw a bit with the layout of the site in Firefox. Not sure why, so you’ll have to click on the link.
They have two versions of the video, a normal quality and a High-Def one.

It also turns out that Portal will not be a standalone game (well, it seems like that anyway), but will in fact be a free addon to the soon-to-be-released Half-Life 2 : Episode 2. I haven’t even played Episode 1 yet. *sigh* There were some mentions of Episode 2 and Portal over at steampowered.com the other day.

Even joystiq.com mentions the game footage trailer. heh.

Tags: Valve, Portal

Hehehe, great game this.
Haha, thanks to Matthew, I have a new friday-afternoon timewaster!

Check out Tetris 1D.
What’s *your* highscore?