Viva Pinata more like Muerte Pinata [update 1]
Stopping by the Viva Piñata booth at the Leipzig convention, a couple of the boys from 1Up noticed that the game maybe wasn't ready for public viewing. Besides not really knowing what to do, the guys also experienced some deadly frame rate issues -- sometimes having their screen freeze on them.
From the video, the game kind of looks like a Tim Burton rendition of Animal Crossing. But, putting a less-than playable version of such a much-hyped game on the show floor probably wasn't the smartest move for Microsoft.
[Thanks, Andrew Yoon]
[Update: Microsoft has responded to 1Up's video via the Gamerscore blog. Check after the break for the explanation.]
Gamerscore blog's explanation:
I just saw the video of Viva Piñata gameplay that 1Up posted. I'm a big fan of Viva Piñata (can't you tell?), and I'm a bit miffed that 1Up is positioning the game the way they are-they're usually much more responsible than that. Instead of asking for a demo, they decided to jump in the middle of a level without any instruction, then complain about not understanding what they're supposed to do. Okay for them to do, of course, but I'm surprised they posted the video (including profanity forcing them to age-gate the video on their site) as representative of the game.
As for the game-play issues, there's actually a good explanation. From what I've been told, the issue is with a piece of hardware on the kiosks that we are using. Normally, we don't use retail kiosks at trade shows, but for GC, we did. I'm told the retail kiosks include a special piece of hardware that prevents someone from messing with the settings, or accessing the hard drive. For Viva Piñata, nobody can get to the tutorial because they can't leave the game (which asks for a save destination). Also, Viva Piñata has an auto save feature, and with these kiosks, it's not "aware" of where to save, so it pauses every few seconds while it tries to access the locked hard drive. I hear the team has removed the extra device from the show floor hardware, and the games should be performing more normally.
At the same time, we should have made sure that we had knowledgeable staff on hand to provide instruction, and we should have double-checked the game play before putting it on the show floor. So our bad.
