Viva Piñata: Pocket Paradise (DS)

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Rare doesn't do press events. The ever elusive game studio rarely allows anyone onto its impressive campus, yet we joined a lucky group of European game journalists on a recent visit to check out the studio's upcoming DS title Viva Piñata: Pocket Paradise. Ahead of an afternoon with the game we spoke to producer Paul Machacek and came away with a strong sense that Rare is a studio with a clear passion for video games and some extremely talented developers.

VideoGamer.com: The DS seems like the perfect console for Viva Piñata. How come it's taken so long to arrive on Nintendo's handheld?

Paul Machacek: The team that has written it actually wrote Diddy Kong Racing on the DS before that and so the timing was purely when we finished the previous project.

VideoGamer.com: With the Xbox 360 sequel arriving later this year, did you consider releasing the DS game ahead of it to get people going with the series before moving to the 360 game?

PM: You know, this game stands on its own. We've written it because we believe it's a really good way to help build a franchise. We love all of these games, as you say there's a third one coming out as well this year, and we love this franchise to bits. I particularly have a bee in my bonnet that as many people should see this as possible because I think it can appeal to a very wide group of people regardless of what machine it is on and all of the games stand up extremely well on their own.

VideoGamer.com: On the 360 the game had a great critical reception, but I think it's fair to say that people didn't expect it to be as in-depth as it was. Have you had to tone down anything when bringing the game to DS in order to make it more accessible to kids?

PM: I think it is a very easy game to get into. I think they all were. We have put the episodes in at the start of this one. You're all playing the episodes here today, and we're asking people to do that because you get more out of it if you have a basic understanding. They are very very simple at the start of the game to lead people in. We have changed one or two things so you didn't have to do quite as many things as you might have had to before. For example every piñata only has one variant, which reduces the amount of variations you can do on the Piñata. We have been very very careful to focus on our target audience, as have the other guys with their audiences. People don't just write games. They look at who they're targeting the games at and you have an awful lot of discussions about what will make it good and what is the right thing to do for each individual product.

VideoGamer.com: You mentioned the episodes. Is there going to be any tie-in to the TV series at all?

PM: We were very well aware that a lot of people that might buy our game may have seen the TV show. There's actually a bit of misnomer about which came first. We were developing the game and the TV show came after that. We were conscious that we wanted to give people direct access to some of those characters. So in the first four episodes you see, we have very popular TV characters in there - we've got Hudson, we've got Fergie. As soon as those first four episodes are out of the way and you've learnt that basic gameplay mechanic, you can go straight into the playground mode, and those characters are available for you to play with. Instant access rather than having to play through the main garden for some distance until you can naturally unlock them. We have a lot of FMVs in the game as well and whilst we've got the romance dances in there, there are a lot of scenes taken from the TV series which we have free access to.

VideoGamer.com: There was a story on the internet a few weeks back about how the DS game would link to the 360 game via the LIVE Vision Camera, but it didn't make the final game...

PM: How reliable is talk on the internet?

VideoGamer.com: I don't know. That's why I'm asking (laughs).

PM: You know what. If I spent time actually trying to fend off half of the rumours... we all sit on forums, we all look at Wikipedia. We all look at these sources of incredible journalism that are out there. There are a lot of people speculating a lot of things. I actually dropped a comedy comment deliberately at the end of an IGN interview recently, and sure enough that set off a debate - Oh my god, Rare is doing this. Whatever. We might be doing that, we might not be doing that. I can't confirm that. But it's very interesting what people discuss. I'm not getting into that. I don't want to talk about other people's speculation.

VideoGamer.com: You're a Microsoft owned company, yet this is a DS game. How were you allowed to do that? Is it that the DS isn't seen as a competitor?

PM: Harking back to my previous answer, there's a lot of speculation on the internet about what we can and can't do. You know, Microsoft is a company that develops hardware and software. We develop a lot of things on a lot of platforms and there is no clash.

VideoGamer.com: So in terms of developing for handhelds, could the PSP be a potential platform, if it was something you think could work?

PM: Rare has never developed for Sony, and I couldn't comment on any future plans that we would have right now.

VideoGamer.com: Is the DS something you're going to look to even more? The 360 had Party Animals. Is that something you've thought about for the DS?

PM: I can't discuss future projects.

VideoGamer.com: The DS game looks really good, with its mixture of 2D and 3D graphics. How have you managed to produce such a good looking game on a handheld?

PM: I was an engineer here for many years. I didn't do any engineering, but was involved in some of the design on this product. Basically I am the producer so I'm not blowing my own trumpet here. We have a huge amount of talent at Rare. We always have done. We've got a great bunch of people. You've seen some of them helping out here today. They really really spend a huge amount of time trying to get things absolutely right. You wouldn't believe the level of 'is this pixel right or not?'.

All the Piñata in there, we've actually taken the models that we already had and they are fully animated in the game. The only thing that we had to do was reduce the polygon counts so they would work on that level of hardware. A huge amount of time and effort was put in trying to get the plants to work, but we got there in the end. The one thing that was very important to us was that at no point did the game turn around and say 'sorry you can't do that' because of some technical reason. We want it to be a space that is a virtual world where we didn't have to explain any technicalities to the player. They just do whatever they want. They play with their pets.

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