It is rare to find a demo that leaves you satisfied at the end. Many end with cliffhangers, hoping you’ll buy the game. With Viva Piñata: Party Animals, the mini-games created a satisfying experience in just a short demo.

I wasn’t sure whether or not I would like Party Animals. I have never played Viva Piñata, but it was one of my sister’s obsessions. I have been hesitant to start the game because we have similar taste and I don’t want to get distracted from my schoolwork. When I heard that there was a party game using these characters, I thought it would be worth checking out the demo.

In the first few minutes, I was impressed by the amount of character packed into the game. Each piñata animal had its own personality, through exaggerated body language and careful character design. The mini-games were summarized and scored after each round with voice-overs imitating sports commentators. It was cute and clever.

After playing two other party games for quite some time (Rayman’s Raving Rabbids and Super Monkey Ball: Banana Blitz), I have to admit that this game won me over with its charm. While the games themselves hardly seem innovative (from a Mario Kart race clone to sailboats powered by burps), they are certainly fun covered in the Viva Piñata theme. The humor is not quite as gross as Rabbids, yet it still seems to have a good balance of humor to appeal to younger boys and girls.

However, I would not limit the audience of this game to children. My coworkers were playing through the demo one day and had a blast. While neither grown man would likely admit to enjoying a kids game that much, I saw first-hand how much they became immersed. The game became a way for them to compete and tease each other to a greater degree than they do in real life. Also, the stakes were quite low, keeping the fun level high.

I really enjoyed the limited demo experience I had with Viva Piñata: Party Animals. I plan to rent this game later. I was glad that I was able to gain an understanding of the strengths of the game from the demo. I would recommend this game for children and encourage curious older gamers to consider trying the demo.  

Since I have a Wii, I though it would be a good idea to rent a lot of different games to see what works and what doesn’t. I want to play the new Zelda, but FFXII and now FFVIII are going to fulfill my RPG quota for the next month or two. In the meantime, I decided to check out some more casual games like Rayman Raving Rabbids (discussed earlier) and, more recently, Super Monkey Ball.

I began playing this game with my sister’s boyfriend, who has more of a natural knack for games than I did. For this reason, I didn’t expect to win any of the short mini-games against him, but I really did value his feedback.

The first game we played was a shooter game where the monkeys were in space shuttles and had to shoot aliens. The arena was circular with a bunch of geyser-type structures scattered around that would spit out aliens. The game seemed simple enough, but I had an awful time trying to steer my ship with the Wii motes. Then I had a lot of trouble aiming. I thought maybe it was just me, but my sister’s boyfriend didn’t seem to be doing much better. His score was higher, but he was also complaining about the controls. I wondered if some types of games just don’t translate as well onto the Wii. However, I do not think shooters and the Wii are incompatible – the Raving Rabbids Western-style shooters are very well-designed. I just think this one was put together in a short amount of time and it shows.

One of the advantages to Super Monkey Ball is the fact that there are so many games. So, it was easy to move onto something else after that disappointment. Like Rabbids, each mini-game would provide very limited instructions. This is an effective way to get people into the game quickly, but, if you’ve never even seen the game before, sometimes it can leave players like me a little baffled. One of the games we then played was a game with the goal of collecting as many bugs on a stick as possible without the bugs falling over. The controls were okay, but any temporary lag in the Wii-mote sensor tracking could spell disaster.

We continued playing other mini-games, but were not impressed. There were a few games, such as shooting hoops or catching fruit, that just weren’t that fun. The goals were cute and the ideas all fit well into a theme, but the game felt sloppy. The tuning that comes with repeated playtesting was lacking. I would have appreciated a style more like Rabbids with multiple games of the same type and increasing difficulty to refine the mechanics of the game.

However, Super Monkey Ball is not altogether awful. I think it would be a fun game for a party, as long as no one was playing the game for too long. For casual players, such as my girl friends, I think this game could be fun. It’s very cute and happy. A game like Rabbids would also be fun at a party, but it requires a little more skill. Rabbids is also more crude – some games are based around drilling a rabbid’s teeth when you see a worm and shutting rabbids in outhouses. I would choose this game for a crowd of people who have played games more and come to expect more from them. While I have not personally taken a great interest in Rabbids, I often watched my sister play it with her boyfriend and I thought it was a lot more fun to watch, making it a good choice for parties.