I want one thing from Viva Pinata: Trouble in Paradise, the sequel to the garden sim from developer Rare. Just one thing. A snow garden swarming with penguins. Waddling, cavorting, swimming, honking penguins like the ones in the penguin tank at Sea World. Is that too much to ask?

Apparently so. Read the review after the jump.

I'm pretty far into Viva Pinata: Trouble in Paradise, having attainted level 17 of gardening. Actually, that's not really that far, considering I ducked into a random online garden only to find a mining installation, set up with defenses and automated miners digging for gold. It was bereft of anything green. There was a dragon stomping around. The host had been away from his Xbox for nearly an hour. I imagine he just left it running and open to online spectators, all of us locked out from interacting with his "garden", as a way of gloating: "Look at the automated money-making garden I've made". He was level 57. (I later found out he was one of the game's developers!)

But I've spent far more hours than I intended with this latest Viva Pinata. Like the original, it's wonderfully set up to keep you constantly busy and to always show you cute and interesting goings on. In other words, entertaining. Great for sitting back on the couch and almost literally sandboxing. I've made it to the brink of megafauna, which is where things start to get complicated and challenging. I've found gigantic arctic yaks. They will be mine once I figure out how to grow oranges (presumably something out of the desert I haven't yet found). But I've still got mysterious gaps at the lower end of my ecosystem, and these gaps are keeping me from living my dream of being a penguin mogul.

I can catch the penguins and turn the little guys loose in my garden. But you're only allowed two of any given creature from outside the garden. Any additional creatures of that type have to be bred locally. Breeding has very specific prerequisites. Among the prerequisites for my penguins are newts. Penguins won't have sex until they've eaten a newt. But newts need ants. And ants need watercress and honey. I have no idea how to get the watercress, but the honey comes from bees, which need tulips. And I have no idea how to get tulips. Somewhere along the way to these arctic yaks, I missed the watercress and tulips. My only recourse at this point is to take my shovel and pummel the living daylights out of Seedos the Weird Seed Dude until he drops what I need.

Trouble in Paradise doesn't seem to differ substantially from the original Viva Pinata, which I stopped playing once I got my industry up and running, cranking out honey automatically until I had more money than I knew what to do with. The main differences seem to be some nice interface improvements (ahhhh...), more stuff for your garden, and a few new creatures from the desert and arctic regions. Such as my penguins. Unfortunately, you can't actually garden in these regions. You can pave over your garden with snow or sand, but it'll always be in the same temperate green valley. Instead, the exotic regions are simply there for the visiting. Drop a trap and wait for a creature to meander onto it. Then go home with your booty.

Two new minigames help make your animals happy, but they're pretty insufferable. One is a contest where four different creature are evaluated by judges. It's a long stretch of non-interactivity hosted by the game's annoying characters, some of whom look vagely Aztec, or like a kiddie version of something from Silent Hill (the post office lady is clearly based on Pyramid Head!). These cartoon characters bang on the machine when you're trying to buy stuff from the store until you yell at the screen: "Would you stop banging that thing while I'm deciding what to buy?" They don't stop banging on it. And during the contest minigame, you get to watch them talk about your creatures. Then there's a slot racing game where you slide your animal from lane to lane as it runs laps on a track. There's got to be an easier way to make creatures happy. Oh, right, there is! By playing the actual game. Why bother with these minigames?

Also new is support for the Xbox camera, which can be used to read barcodes that unlock bonus content. It works this way because Microsoft doesn't sell any of those cameras when you unlock bonus content by typing in numbers. It's a reminder that Viva Pinata is, after all, in the business of foisting merchandise on kids.

Fortunately, it's also a compelling strategy game, as in-depth as, say, Harvest Moon. But unlike Harvest Moon's cleanly Japanese worldview, Viva Pinata is about sex and death, the two most salient facts of biology. Yeah, it's sanitized to be kid-friendly with its mewling prancing pinatas. But that makes it all the more of a bummer when a dead piñata is gobbled up as bits of candy, sometimes by its own species (cannibalism!). But there's only so much room in the garden, and some of them vomit confetti at each other because they don't get along. So eventually, some pinatas have to go. Your job is to turn these creatures around, like livestock, increasing their value and then selling them. A sold pinata vanishes forever. That's death, right? Although I have no idea what the deal is with dressing up your piñatas and sending them off to parties, presumably to be beaten to pieces by screaming children. You'd never know from they way the pinatas come back, no worse for the wear. This is where Rare's piñata model breaks down. That's what death should be.

Maybe I'm wrong. Rare lets you play piñatas as pets, giving them names and teaching them tricks (another new feature in this sequel). But then you're not min/maxing the game and you've just given in to its cutesiness, like someone who wants to build a penguin tank for no good reason.

The sex, however, is indisputable. The "romance dance" is presented as animated unskippable cutscene of a G-rated coupling, clearly sex-less and gender-less. At its climax, the little piñatas ejaculate fountains of hearts like some Valentine's Day bukkake. But to bring the romance dance to fruition (i.e. conception), a tiny organism has to work against all odds to make its way to another tiny organism, not unlike those old health class videos of sperms swimming valiantly to eggs. Clueless little kids must think this is all very cute. The rest of us know what's really going on. And we get creeped out by all the parent/child and sibling/sibling couplings. You can get away with a lot in cartoonland. Like spending hours trying to make a penguin tank for no good reason.

UPDATE: Between actually starting to write this review and then finishing it, I finally figured out that watercress was one of the unidentified seeds I already had. I just had to plant it near water. So the watercress and therefore the newts are on their way. Now to figure out the mystery of tulips. I'm going to take my shovel and beat it out of Seedos right now. I wonder if the watering can can be used to waterboard... Oh, and now I'm level 20. Penguinland, here I come!