One of the games I like to play on the Xbox 360 is Viva Pinata. It’s a gentle game, kind of silly but still fun. The gist of it is that you have a garden and you can grow various plants to attract different kinds of pinatas. The fun lies in getting a new special species of pinata and/or in decorating your garden with outlandish stuff. It’s a good game.

So we picked up Viva Pinata 2: Trouble in Paradise when it came out, and I was kind of excited to see what they had added. Unfortunately, I think they’ve broken it. It’s not fun anymore.

You see, in the first game, there were bad guys who would come in and break your decorations or smash your pinatas. Once you got to high enough level, however, there were enough tools at your disposal to ban all these bad guys from your garden and let you play in peace. You could do all sorts of fun decorating and landscaping, and you could raise very valuable rare pinatas without worrying that one of these bad guys would smash it all.

However, in the second game, they’ve changed the behavior of the head bad guy, Professor Pester. He comes into your garden once a ‘day’ (about every 15-20 minutes of game play) and smashes one of your most valuable pinatas.

Yes, I realize that it sounds ridiculous that I would be concerned enough about smashed pinatas to write a blog post. But it takes time and effort to get the good pinatas, not to mention in-game resources (chocolate coins). And thus, it is very frustrating to lose them.

And there’s the problem. There is no way to block Professor Pester forever, no matter how high a level you’ve achieved. There are two ‘normal’ ways to keep him at bay: you can  keep one of two very large pinatas in your garden, but that means fewer other pinatas, and it won’t stop Pester from smashing your buildings and decorations. Or you can buy an expensive decoy pinata – but that only works once, so you have to buy one every ‘day,’ which is brutal in terms of cost. There’s apparently a way to use a fence to trap him in one part of your garden, but then you have to listen to his grunting the whole time you’re playing. Blech.

Sorry Rare, but you’ve you screwed this one up. I suspect you just wanted to make the game a bit more challenging, but this has crossed into outright frustrating. The new romancing games and mini-games, as well as all the new pinata, are plenty challenging. It used to be really fun to build outlandish gardens full of crazy pinatas. But now that I either have to grind for cash or lose my best pinatas every time I play, it’s not fun anymore. You broke it. Please fix it. Give us a tool to keep Professor Pester out for good.