Welcome to the continuation of the 2024 Summer season of Video games! Every weekday main as much as Gamescom, we’ll highlight a Microsoft-published sport or franchise, previous or current. It is then your flip to publish your greatest reminiscences and highlights from these titles. We’ll protect these posts in the neighborhood wiki. Plus, you will get to choose from unique consumer flairs for every sport or franchise featured!
Viva Piñata was conceived as a cellular gardening sport earlier than Uncommon was acquired by Microsoft. It was launched on Xbox 360. It launched alongside an animated sequence produced by 4Kids. The sport acquired two console sequels: Viva Piñata: Get together Animals (2007) and Viva Piñata: Hassle in Paradise (2008), in addition to a handheld launch, Viva Piñata: Pocket Paradise (2008), for the Nintendo DS
Tim Stamper, the co-founder of Uncommon, conceptualized a gardening sport for the hand-held Pocket PC platform round 2002. A small (three-person) workforce started work on a easy prototype whereas Uncommon was nonetheless affiliated with Nintendo, previous to its Microsoft acquisition. The sport’s growth transferred to the unique Xbox and, finally, to the Xbox 360 for its graphics capabilities. Uncommon wished its animals to have a unified model, which was how the sport’s idea artist arrived on the piñata idea. The concept was thrilling to Uncommon, as piñatas weren’t commonplace in England. The connection between piñatas and candy-filled insides led to new gameplay instructions.
As Uncommon launched the unique Viva Piñata for the Xbox 360, its growth workforce noticed it as incomplete. The builders had reduce partial concepts from the discharge so as to meet their deadlines. Uncommon’s Gregg Mayles stated that the sport offered effectively and steadily on par with their expectations and Xbox’s Phil Spencer added that the sport was thought of a hit inside the corporate.
The workforce integrated participant suggestions and labored in the direction of a “extra definitive model” of the unique. Mayles left the workforce to work on Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts and Justin Cook dinner grew to become the workforce’s lead designer. The sequel was constructed atop the unique and the builders re-used lots of the instruments from the unique sport’s growth. In each the sequel and the unique, the event workforce volunteered to report the sounds used for the piñatas. One of many workforce’s new concepts was “Piñata Imaginative and prescient”, a characteristic that detects printed playing cards by way of the Xbox digital camera to vary the in-game surroundings (e.g., including piñatas or altering the climate). Close to the time of the sequel’s launch, Uncommon’s Mayles figured that the workforce would possible not have sufficient new gameplay concepts to warrant a sequel to Hassle in Paradise, although Cook dinner stated that he would work on the sport’s store interface had he extra time. The video games have been later re-released on the 2015 compilation of Uncommon video games, Uncommon Replay, however the server that dealt with their piñata sharing options had been shut down by that point.
