Viva Pinata: Trouble In Paradise recently came out on September 2 and after having a chance to play it I'm enjoying it so far. There are a slew of control improvements, tons of new pinatas, 2 new locales (Arctic and Desert) to capture rare species only found within, and more difficult challenges to complete.



One feature of the new game is being able to scan in Pinata Cards with the XBox Live Vision Camera. Personally I have always felt this product was just to compete with the PS2's Eye Toy and was gimmicky at best. The only purpose I could ever see for it would be to see other Dtoider's flashing me during a game of Uno! This isn't the first time something like this has been tried...one might recall the [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-Reader]Gameboy Advance E-Reader[\url] that was hocked years ago as a method to integrate and promote new content with the following games:

-Classic NES
-3.2 Animal Crossing-e
-3.3 Pokémon Battle-e
-3.4 Pokémon Colosseum
-3.5 Super Mario Advance 4: Super Mario Bros. 3-e
-3.6 Pokémon Trading Card Game
-3.7 Rockman.EXE & Rockman Zero 3 cards



The reality is that it is a gimmick since all the data already exists on your disc and you have to "unlock" it by this method. I think Microsoft and Rare realize that selling card packs would be very unlikely and it's very unlikely most people will buy them. Fortunately the images themselves do not have to be purchased, and instead are primarily downloaded from the game's website. I came across one such site today which has been conglomerating the cards altogether: Viva Pinata Cards.

Now I just need to get a stupid camera...it might have been nice if they let you upload them on the website to live and then have the content sent to you that way as I can't see ever using the camera for much else.