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> Results: Viva Pinata Party Animals
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The ESRB says:
Cartoon Violence: GamerDad found players attacking each other using cute weapons like honey-oil slick to cause the pinatas' candy stuffing to sometimes fall out. Comic Mischief: GamerDad found the standard blustering and pranking found between cartoon competition contestants. One of the first games appropriate for younger kids, Viva Pinata quickly became a best seller on the X-Box 360 game console. The popular pinata characters were even given their own Saturday morning television show and are now the focus of a new party game. As is typical for the party game genre, Viva Pinata Party Animals is not just a single game but more of a collections of very short mini-games suitable for pick up and play multiplayer fun. Party Animals isn't the best party game on the market, but as the only party game for the Xbox 360, it does reasonable job. Party games are all about multiplayer, and Party Animals is no exception. Gamers can play multiplayer games online or using a split screen on the same console. The game consists of a series of contests that each begin with a race and then conclude with a minigame. Based on both the race and the minigame performance, players' pinatas earn candy points. The character with the most points at the end of all the events wins the game. A party game lives and dies on the quality of its minigames. Unfortunately, Party Animals' games are OK but not great. Many of them are slightly difficult to control and player's pinatas are often represented onscreen with small graphics. This isn't a problem on large, widescreen TVs, but gamers using a more traditional sized television may become frustrated with the zoomed out action. To complicate matters, every minigame is preceded by a race. Similar to most console "Kart" games, players zoom around a colorful track, finding shortcuts and picking up various power-ups to use on each other. While the kart portion of the game is quite robust and is actually a pretty good game, forcing players to run a race before every minigame seems a bit counter-intuitive. Rather than have some of the minigames be based on racing, forcing players to race as every other event can get annoying for gamers who don't care for racing. In fact, the races often take much longer to finish than the minigames themselves. Taken as a mix of racing and minigames, Viva Pinata Party Animals is a pretty good game. However, as it contains so much racing, it should be thought of as a racing/party game mix rather than a pure party game title. Gamers comfortable with the racing aspects of the game should find a title well worth picking up. Those looking for a more pick up and play minigame title may want to give the game a rental first.  
As a game based on a very kid-friendly franchise, there is very little objectionable content in the game. Some friendly banter back and forth between contestants during the more antagonistic games is about all there is to be concerned about. The minigames are simple enough for any gamer able to handle a controller to play, but the racing segments require a bit more coordination making them a better fit for the 8+ year old crowd.
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