Rare spills seeds of info on Viva Piñata: Pocket Paradise

Rare has been talking to IGN about Viva Piñata: Pocket Paradise and, in the process, the developer has revealed some of the first details about how the Xbox 360 game has been converted to DS.

The DS game was announced - somewhat surprisingly, seeing as Rare is Microsoft owned - some time back, but it hasn't been completely clear whether it would be the original garden-growing, piñata enticing and collecting game slightly tweaked, or a different type of experience using characters from the series.

But the game's producer, Paul Machacek, confirms Pocket Paradise is "really a full-fledged Viva Piñata game". Among the changes that had to be made for the hardware are hybrid 2D/3D visuals instead of full 3D (the garden is viewed from above in 2D but the piñatas are fully animated in 3D) and the simplification of some tasks, such as fertilising your garden and romancing your piñatas.

But the freedom to design your own garden, planting trees, flowers and piñata homes according to the type of piñata animals you want to attract to your garden, remains. As do the cute FMV videos for romance dances and various other events.

On the subject of the touch interface, Machacek says everything is controlled using the stylus. There are shortcuts assigned to buttons but you can direct piñatas, sow seeds, select tools and so on just using the DS touchscreen. You can even tickle a piñata with the stylus to make it happy.

The game isn't playable online, but - as with the Xbox 360 version - you can send a crate containing a surprise gift to a friend using local wireless. Hopefully you'll be able to send bad garden-trashing piñatas as well as well as good ones, as in the 360 version. There's nothing quite like wrecking someone else's carefully crafted masterpiece after all.

You'll also be able to transfer piñatas from one of your own saved gardens to another one using the crates - and there are three save slots so you can be playing three different gardens at any one time. Seeing as various piñatas don't get along in the same garden, this will mean you can experiment with different combinations without being too upset when your Syrupent eats your Mousemallow.

Some final snippets of information from the interview include the fact there will definitely be new piñatas in the game (but Rare doesn't want to spoil the surprise and say what they are yet) and that there's a new Sandbox mode too for players who simply want to experiment with creating a garden.

Which, added to all the other details revealed in the interview, makes Viva Piñata: Pocket Paradise sound very promising indeed. If it's anywhere near as addictive as it was on Xbox 360, it's going to be the only game we need to take on our summer holidays...