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Mark your calendars for September 2 (for those in North America) or September 5 (Europe) if you’re a fan of Viva Pinata like me, because those dates have been confirmed as the release of Viva Pinata: Trouble in Paradise. Over 30 new pinatas, co-op and new gameplay modes are the headliner features for the game, which I already know will be embarassing to buy at the store just like its predecessor. It’s times like this I’m thankful to be an Amazon Prime member.

Unlike the original VP, you’ll now be able to explore outside the confines of your garden, which will be essential to nabbing exotic pinatas that won’t wander in on their own. You’ll also find some pinatas that prefer the cold (such as Pengums and Polollybears — are you embarrassed reading this? It’s difficult to write, let me tell ya.) or the heat (Camellos and Jameleons). To accommodate them, you’ll need to place snow or sand in your garden, just as you would with grass or water.

So, who else is not too ashamed to admit they’ll be buying the game, too? In all seriousness, I’m very excited for the game. I loved the first game on 360, so I’m very much looking forward to this refined version, even if it’s not a full-on sequel.

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Thanks to a link provided by VG247, we now have a list of developers confirmed for E3 2008 along with what titles they will be showing off at the event. While the list is still updated regularly, as of this post, this is what you can expect should you be attending.

Akella
Postal III (PC, X360)

Bethesda Softworks
Fallout 3 (PC, PS3, X360)

Capcom
Bionic Commando (PC, PS3, X360)
Bionic Commando Rearmed (PC, PS3, X360)
Capcom Project #1 [untitled] (other)
Capcom Project #2 [untitled] (other)
Dark Void (PC, PS3, X360)
MotoGP 08 (other)
Neopets Puzzle Adventure (PC, Wii)
Plunder (PC, PS3, X360)
Resident Evil 5 (PS3, X360)
Spyborgs (Wii)
Street Fighter IV (PC, PS3, X360)
Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix (PS3, X360)

For the full list, hit the jump.

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While I’m always interested in seeing each month’s NPD results, what I perhaps like even more is getting to see each hardware manufacturer’s spin on the numbers. Although, really, Nintendo doesn’t need any spin with numbers like these.

Microsoft’s spin on the May numbers hones in on the number of copies GTA IV sold on Xbox 360 versus “the other platform’s version” (Why can’t they just say PlayStation 3? It’s said a number of times throughout the rest of the release) and how much money the system is generating for third party publishers.

Higher Metacritic scores and the Nielsen report that 10-26 year olds play more on 360 than either the Wii or PS3 are also featured the Microsoft press release, so there’s actually quite a bit more variety than they had last month.

Oh, and they might mention that record-breaking attach rate. Again.

Hit the break for the full spin.

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Despite the drop out rate for the ESA and gaming companies that will be forgoing E3 2008, there will be plenty of upcoming games to get excited over. Microsoft will be featuring both Halo Wars and Gears of War 2. The company’s press conference is scheduled for July 14th.

Gamers can also look forward to learning more on Lionhead’s Fable 2. Rare is coming to the party and bringing Viva Piñata: Trouble in Paradise and Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts. There’ll be more on Silicon Knights’ Too Human as well.

Gaming Today will be covering the event live and will keep you posted on the details as they’re revealed. E3 2008 is returning to the Los Angeles Convention Center this year and runs from the 15th to 17th of July.

via Eurogamer

It’s strange enough seeing a Microsoft game in Viva Pinata appear on the Nintendo DS, but imagine if there was some connectivity between the two platforms’ versions of the game. It also happened, reports MTV Multiplayer, thanks to the Xbox Live Vision camera.

Viva Pinata: Trouble in Paradise features Vision cam support that I’d label as a major gimmick: hold up a collectible Viva Pinata trading card, and the camera can read a code from the card and grant you something in game. When Rare told Stephen Totilo that this technology could also read codes off an iPod or a Zune, the pieces were there.

Microsoft has had trouble getting the kids market that Nintendo so effectively courts to buy kid-friendly Xbox 360 games, such as Viva Pinata. The DS is popular with kids. Rare just announced this month that a version of Viva Pinata for the DS has just been completed. The VP game on the DS seems like the perfect agent to sell the series to those Nintendo kids. And now, with this camera feature in the 360 sequel, Microsoft has a way to connect DS Pinata gamers to Xbox 360s, for actual gameplay incentives.

It’s simple; you’d have an image displayed on the DS, which you would hold up to the Vision cam, and there you go: the DS and 360 working together.

Unfortunately, while it turns out that the developers had worked on this, it was simply too late to implement the feature. A Trouble in Paradise developer said, “It’s one of those things where you just kick yourself.”

Viva Pinata: Pocket Paradise is done, we know that, and while there might not be any official release date attached to the game yet, Rare has been happy to share more details on the game and explain exactly why and how it is they’re releasing a game originally published by Microsoft on the Nintendo DS.

“There is no real conflict here,” explained producer Paul Machacek. “Due to the game’s broad appeal, it makes sense for this game to be on the Nintendo DS. After all, Microsoft is not only focused on selling platforms but also building great IP. From the very beginning, we asked, ‘Why limit ourselves to the console?,’ hence the cartoon series by 4Kids. We have no conflict in the handheld market and have been quite happy to continue producing games for it.”

Machacek said that the game is very portable-friendly and allows for you to save at any time, which is crucial. There will also be some very limited multiplayer support, albeit local-only.

“You can send crates to your friends, full of whatever you want to pack into them. This is limited to the local wireless connection, and there is no online mode. However, you can also send crates to other gardens saved on your own game card, so you can run several gardens simultaneously.”

I’m certainly looking forward to the game as a big fan of the original Viva Pinata. It seems like such a natural fit on DS with the stylus, and it seems like a perfect portable game that you can play for a few minutes or get deeply invested in.

via DS Fanboy

As expected, Microsoft continued to tout the fact that the Xbox 360 has surpassed 10 million units sold in the United States. Since they first made the announcement a few days ago, they’ve bumped that figure up to 10.1 million sold.

Surprisingly little from the press release Microsoft sent out had to do with figures that would stem from the 360 having been on the market for a year longer than the competition. That could be because they dedicated an entire portion of it to talking about how wonderful Grand Theft Auto IV has been performing on the 360. They even say it’s “outselling the other platform’s version by nearly 2:1 in the U.S.” — “other platform”? What’s up with that?

Hit the break for the full spinjob.

image via CrunchGear.com

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There have been the highs (Conker’s Bad Fur Day) and the lows (Perfect Dark Zero) for developer Rare. Going from what was essentially a second-party position to a Microsoft-owned developer, the company has gone through some dramatic changes, and yet with the announcement of a Viva Pinata sequel and a third game in the Banjo series, we find ourselves in familiar but somehow new territory.

1UP recently spoke with Rare’s Gregg Mayles about how Rare has always set itself apart from the rest of the game development world, where the inspiration for Banjo’s new game mechanic came from, and how things have changed between being Microsoft owned and developing for a single system rather than dragging games through several generations. (See: Perfect Dark and Kameo)

So for Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts, did the idea of making your own vehicles, which is a central game mechanic, evolve from coming up with new things to do with Banjo? Or was that a separate idea that made you think, “Hey, this works for Banjo“?

It came from a separate idea. It came from a very simple idea of wanting to combine pieces with different abilities. The beauty of the concept was [that] the player could combine those pieces in any order they wanted to, and at the end of it, whatever they created, you’d put into the game. It would just work. The player wouldn’t need to calculate very complicated processes; the software would do that. And no matter what you built, the size, the weight, the shape, you’d be able to put it in the game, and it would just work. But until Xbox 360, we’d never had a piece of hardware that’s been capable of doing that. So that’s where the idea in its infancy came from. It’s been around for a while, and at the same time, we were considering doing a new Banjo game but didn’t want to just do what we’d done previously.

The platform-game genre…has probably not had a lot of games in it recently. Obviously, Super Mario Galaxy has come out and it’s very nice, but it’s quite traditional in its approach, and apart from that, there probably aren’t too many major releases in that genre. So we thought, ‘If we’re going to reenter that genre, we need to do something that’s going to make people look twice at it,’ rather than just dismissing it as, ‘It’s Rare, there’s going to be millions of things to collect, and everything’ll have googly eyes.’ We had to do something different, so we wanted to take a different approach to platform games.

We looked at how traditional games have approached that — the designers create the abilities, we give them to the player, and the player can only use the abilities as we’ve defined. So we thought, “Can we approach that from a different direction, where the players actually get to define their own abilities so they can choose how they want to complete whatever task they’ve been set?” And then, suddenly, we had this concept sitting here, this idea of approaching platform games from a different direction, and then we brought the two together. The result is the new Banjo game.

For the full interview, head over to 1UP.

Another short trailer from Gamer’s Day featuring footage from the upcoming Viva Piñata: Trouble in Paradise.
Not much is really shown in the video, other than the cool colors, loud piñatas, and a small clip of a moose getting wacked, but it still looks like it going to be just as zany and fun as the last installment.

For more information and other juicon Viva Piñata: Trouble in Paradise, check out our previous posts.

With all the news and leaks surrounding Viva Pinata: Trouble in Paradise, I had nearly forgotten that a DS version of Viva was in development. I say “was” because in a Scribes entry (Rare’s mailbag) from May 9, they wrote, “Viva Piñata DS is complete. We are just waiting for our army of university interns, illegal immigrants and small children from the local schools to assemble the hand-made cartridges that we’ll be selling at all good flea markets this Sunday.”

Okay, so it’s not coming out this Sunday, but at least we know that the game should be entering manufacturing soon. That should mean a release this summer, so keep an eye out for more details on that in the coming weeks.

via Game|Life / images via DS Fanboy

Want more lovely details for the new Viva Pinata game Trouble in Paradise that Chris was talking about yesterday? Look no further folks because here they are:

• There will be over 100 different Piñatas in the sequel, including a chicken called ‘Cluck Norriss’, a Yeti (hey, that’s my dog’s name!), gorillas and moose that during Christmas time changes into a reindeer
• You can quickly go from one landscape to the next such as snowy winter wonderlands to deserts to catch these animals and share them with the whole wide world
• There is a special in-game card that will give you infinite amounts of money and will unlock every item in the game
• The game starts in a green control area where you can jump straight into the action without a tutorial so that you do not have to do all the weeding and fertilizing if you do not want to
• All help missions are optional
• Jump straight into the sandbox and play with your garden as you see fit
• You will start with more upgrade tools and money than you did in the first game, that way all you have to do is start enticing Piñatas into your garden and send them off to special parties and birthdays
• Cooperative play will feature the game and you can tend your gardens with pals and while this is only for direct play with the Xbox 360 at this point, Rare is working around the clock to implement this feature on XBL.
• In co-op mode, only the main player will have full control over the game and will not be able to build new houses or other constructions, but can help with tending the garden thus gaining a form of magic for every uselful act than can be used to turn objects in the garden into different things

Sounds like loads of fun. More details, like with Fable 2 and Banjo-Kazooie 3 will be released later this afternoon so check back with us as more detail emerge.

Via: Videogaming247

In addition to all of the gorgeous screenshots from Rare’s two new games, Viva Pinata: Trouble in Paradise and Banjo-Kazooie 3, several other games have been discovered, although the details are shaky at best. The first and only simple one to wrap your head around is Scene It? 2. No real need for an explanation there, although I’d hope that if this is simply an expansion pack to the original that there will be some sort of DLC alternative where you can simply download this new content. But don’t count on it.

The other two games are called Ninja Blade and Lips. Your guess is as good as mine, but here goes my prediction: Ninja Blade will be something related to that rumored Xbox 360 Wiimote-rip off, which will work where you swing the 360mote like a sword. Lips will have something to do with the Xbox Live Vision cam where it tracks your lips.

Okay, that second guess is pretty stupid, but what the hell else could something called Lips be?

You didn’t think those first screens of Banjo-Kazooie 3 were the only thing uncovered by some intrepid NeoGAF members, did you? Good, because next up we’ve got a sequel to one of my personal favorite Xbox 360 games, Viva Pinata. Subtitled Trouble in Paradise, it looks like you’ll be tending to more gardens with a similar interface to the original game.

The one thing I pulled from these screenshots was that there is both a shovel and a watering can that seem to be working simultaneously. Could that mean we’ll be seeing some sort of co-op mode? We should be finding out the official word this week. In the meantime, we’ll keep our eyes peeled for more screenshots.

Never one to let a chance at innuendo go by, Rare has reportedly come up with a subtitle for their upcoming DS game, Viva Pinata — Pocket Paradise. (If you don’t get it.. then just enjoy it for what it is, I guess.) The BBFC revealed this on their website, so this isn’t an official announcement of any sort, but I also doubt that the BBFC just pulled this out of nowhere.

The other news that the BBFC revealed was that THQ will be publishing the game. So if you were hoping you’d see Microsoft’s name on the front of a DS box, I’m afraid that won’t be happening.

At least there’s always Photoshop.

via DS Fanboy

As a longtime fan of Rare’s and most everything they’ve developed (except Perfect Dark Zero, but that’s neither here nor there), so Banjo Kazooie 3 is near the top of my most anticipated Xbox 360 games. If Shane Kim’s comments to MTV Multiplayer are accurate, we’ll be seeing the game before the end of the year.

When asked about Rare’s status and where they stand in regards to making E-rated and M-rated games, Kim said, “I’m super-excited about what they’re doing with ‘Banjo.’ I think ‘Banjo’ is going to be a big hit for us this holiday.” That’s not quite the same as getting an email with the headline “Banjo This November” or anything, but hopefully Kim isn’t too far off in his estimation.

The interview also hit up several other subjects, such as the cancelation of Marvel Universe Online, whether Viva Pinata DS is still in the works (“There’s still a hint”), a future for Halo outside of Peter Jackson and Halo Wars, Ken Lobb’s enthusiasm for Crackdown, Alan Wake’s 2008 release (“not necessarily”), and a whole lot more.

You read the full interview over at Multiplayer.

Last week, on December 15th, Microsoft decided to remind Japanese gamers that the Xbox 360 can be family-friendly too by holding a Christmas event at Tokyo Bay. Basically, it was chance for kids to play some games and have their picture taken with characters form Viva Pinata and Beautiful Katamari characters, among others. Not pictured are the swarms of kids who showed up armed with baseball bats and proceeded to beat the candy out of the helpless Pinatas. When they turned their attention to the Prince, he defended himself by rolling them all up into a giant ball of screaming children and pushing them outside. Eventually he was taken down by sharpshooters after he collected a few dozen salary men along the city streets. Xbox 360 sales rose amid the controversy. Microsoft called it a “win.”

Via Siliconera

Rare, developer of such titles like Viva Pinata and Banjo Kazooie, recently sent out a Christmas card featuring characters from said games in a touching holiday moment. Even more interesting though is the stocking hanging over the fireplace, reading “KI3.” This is obviously a tongue-in-cheek reference to the company’s “Killer Instinct” fighting game series, the last installment of which came out way back on the N64. Meaningless little joke or a hint that a sequel is already in the works? You decide.

I’m still having trouble figuring out why Banjo looks so sad in this picture though. I mean, it’s not like he’s the one who got Viva Pinata: Party Animals.

Via CVG

My initial thoughts upon receiving Viva Piñata: Party Animals to review ran the gambit of curiosity to utter repulsion. However, being the type of gamer who insists on giving genres that I would not normally sully my Xbox 360 with the benefit of the doubt, I decided to give it a chance. Unfortunately, after the first ten minutes of playing my feelings of repulsion grew so intense that they quickly turned to rage and disdain for Ron our Site Editor. Considering the fact that he and I have been friends for many years, I was curious as to why he would do something so mean and spiteful to me. When I called to complain, all I heard on the other end of the phone was his twisted maniacal laugh before he told me to suck it up or lose my job. Okay, I am kidding about the losing my job part, but I am serious about the laugh. It was very unsettling.

If you are an adult gamer and you are thinking of playing Viva Piñata: Party Animals you may want to reconsider your decision and instead go for the wacky and macabre original title. This, the newest installment in the franchise, is nothing short of a game aimed at children. That being said, I think this is a fine game for the under 12 crowd but it lacks so much imagination, that even younger kids should become bored rather quickly.

Viva Piñata: Party Animals is chock full of minigames that repeat themselves over and over again. Once you have chosen your character, you start each level off with a race full of many twists and turns and jumps. The environments during these races are full of power ups and weapons you can use to gain the advantage over your opponents; however gaining these useful powers is a matter of sheer luck. I basically just ran as fast as I could and jumped here and there to beat the others never knowing when or where a power up really was. Like I heard another gamer complain – gaining these abilities is basically a crapshoot.

Once you have completed a race, you go on to challenge other piñatas in events where you collect as much candy as you can while staying in the light, aiming and firing, seeing who can smash the piñata first, squashing bugs, rhythm games, burping games, etc. After winning a level, you open up another one, and each one may be slightly different than the last of the same level, but it is still not that different. The repetition in this game gets old quickly and one would think that paying full price for a game would grant you access to a horde of minigames instead of the same ones over and over again – just with different environments.

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From the first time I heard about Viva Piñata, I was immediately interested. It was one of those situations where you just knew the game was going to be good, and you were set on playing it as soon as possible. Sure enough, once the game was released last year on Xbox 360, I picked it up and was rewarded with a really fun game, albeit one that led to an embarrassing exchange with an employee at the local Wal-Mart. I championed the game for months, trying to convince others to give it a try.

More than a year later, I’ve now got the PC version sitting on my desk, and I was convinced I was done with the game. But sure enough, after less than 20 minutes of starting a new garden, I was sucked right back in. There’s something really satisfying about luring in all sorts of new piñata to your garden, whether it’s intentionally or unintentionally. (For me, it’s usually the latter.) Sure, the game doesn’t control nearly as well and isn’t all that great of a port, but the game certainly deserves a second chance on a platform where it might have a better chance of selling.

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While it did quite poorly on the sales charts, Viva Piñata was a high quality game that deserved more attention that it got. Part of the blame can certainly be placed on poor marketing (although the commercial above is pretty sweet), but being on a platform in the Xbox 360 that doesn’t really cater to the demographic that would be most interested in VP didn’t help. Sure, it was a game that could certainly be enjoyed by a person of any age, but released next to Gears of War, it just didn’t catch on with the 360 crowd.

Luckily, it’s gotten another chance on PC recently and soon for the DS. (Check back for a review of the PC game soon.) There’s been some question as to if the DS version would be any different from the original 360 game. A recent interview answered these questions and more, with a Rare staffer stating that Viva Piñata DS is “a streamlined version of the 360 version, all of the features are present from the 360 version but we have utilised the dual screens to give the player instant information about requirements etc. Also we have implemented a full touch screen interface which really adds to the game experience. On top of that we have new Piñatas, tools etc. So basically quite a lot.”

When asked if there would be any further downloadable content for the 360 version of the game, Rare said that there wouldn’t be, but that they were at work on something that was better than Viva Piñata DLC. Sequel, anyone?

Read the full interview here.