When I went to visit Rare’s Studio and check out Viva Piñata: Pocket Paradise for the DS, one couldn’t help but consider the future of the franchise. VP is an incredibly original and inventive IP, one that most definitely deserves a long future, but I realized there was a crucial flaw in the game — Rare can only continue the series for as long as they can think of animal/candy wordplay.
Or can they?
As this musing reached its climactic peak, I imagined the bleakest future possible, a future where Rare had run out of candy portmanteaus and had to move onto chemical substances. In order to help my pals at Rare, I have taken it upon myself to draw up their concept art … concept art from Hell … and design creatures for the latest installment in the franchise — Viva Piñarcotics!
[Drawing by Jim Sterling, coloring by the awesome Topher Cantler]
Appear Requirements: Have a set of weights in your garden
Visit Requirements: Have an intense pressure to perform at physical peak
Resident Requirements: Have a “best of Chris Benoit” DVD in your garden
Romance Requirements: Under cook dinner and cause a hyper violent ‘roid rage fit
Appear Requirements: Have strobe lighting in your garden
Visit Requirements: Garden is 90% water (bottled)
Resident Requirements: Free glowsticks
Romance Requirements: Vomit onto the back of the person you’re screwing in a dehydrated stupor
Appear Requirements: Grow some perfectly legal, unprepared mushrooms
Visit Requirements: Pick some perfectly legal, unprepared mushrooms
Resident Requirements: Maaaaybe do something with a perfectly legal pot of boiling water
Romance Requirements: Put your head in the boiling water after tripping out and thinking that Spidorpions are coming to stab your face off
Appear Requirements: Lose your girlfriend
Visit Requirements: Lose your job
Resident Requirements: Lose your house
Romance Requirements: Lose your razorblades
Appear Requirements: Build a Starbucks
Visit Requirements: Build another Starbucks
Resident Requirements: Build another Starbucks
Romance Requirements: Build two Starbuckses
Appear Requirements: Chemical set in your garden
Visit Requirements: Magic eye charts on all the walls
Resident Requirements: Some Hendrix on the radio
Romance Requirements: Stop having horrific hallucinations about the killer brainroaches
Appear Requirements: Jack Daniels
Visit Requirements: Southern Comfort
Resident Requirements: Smirnoff
Romance Requirements: Aftershave chased up with floor polish
Appear Requirements: Build a porn-and-booze-filled squat in your garden
Visit Requirements: The first hit is free
Resident Requirements: Have a wallet that keeps having cash “disappear” from it in your garden
Romance Requirements: Go on the game to support the skag habit
Appear Requirements: One radiator
Visit Requirements: One set of handcuffs
Resident Requirements: One bloodstained mattress
Romance Requirements: One television playing Trainspotting all day, every day
