Interviews// Viva Pinata: Pocket Paradise

SPOnG: It wasn’t that the mini games were too racy for the DS then… Sorry, I’ve lost my train of thought, what with all that talk of piñatas mating…

Gary Richards: ‘Romancing’!

SPOnG: (Grinning) Sorry, ‘Romancing’! If they’re not mating, how are all the baby piñatas being made?

Gary Richards: I have absolutely no idea what goes on in the house, so…

Joe Humfrey: The Storkos brings an egg! What more is there to understand?


SPOnG: I’ve not finished Viva Piñata on the 360. Is there an end, or an end objective?

Joe Humfrey: There’s not an end objective as such. On the 360 you can reach the maximum level you possibly can, I can’t remember what happens when you get to that…

Gary Richards: It never ends, it’s an open game.

Joe Humfrey: On the DS version, anyway, when you get to the last level and you’ve achieved everything else, the credits roll.

Gary Richards: There’s an FMV sequence at the end saying, ‘Well done, you’ve got everything in the game’ but then it just goes back to the garden.

Joe Humfrey: Not that we want to spoil it!

Gary Richards: Then, you go back to the garden and you can just carry on tinkering, so there is no complete end.

Joe Humfrey: Even when you’ve done absolutely everything possible in the game, you can still go back in it and be creative and design the garden exactly how you like.


SPOnG: How long does it take to get to those credits?

Joe Humfrey: A pretty long time. It took our testers a long time, and they knew the exact most efficient way you could possibly play the game.

Gary Richards: I think, most recently the translators have been playing the game, and it takes them about two weeks to reach 100%. It is a long time. I think on the 360 it took about 50 hours, they were saying. I think we’re very comparable to that.

Joe Humfrey: That’s playing the most efficient possible route, as well.


SPOnG: For the 360 sequel they’re including co-operative online play. That’s not in Pocket Paradise. Was that ever a consideration?

Gary Richards: We did discuss it, then we thought ‘how the hell are we going to do it on the DS version?’ Obviously it was a big enough task getting the original game on there. To put co-operative in there as well – that was like, not happening.

We would have loved to have done it, but it was just time.

Joe Humfrey: I think we were mainly working off what we’d seen in Viva Piñata 1. We weren’t really aware of exactly what the Viva Piñata 2 team was planning to do in their version, so we were mainly just trying to keep the main features from the first game in.


SPOnG: OK, this is another one for Viva Piñata virgins. Does the area of your garden grow?

Gary Richards: Yes. It grows three times. At certain levels in the game it will expand.

Joe Humfrey: The perimeter basically just goes outwards, to give you more space.