Video Game Review: Viva Pinata (XBox & PC) for a few days of addictive, adorable, uplifting fun

I know I promised a review of Final Fantasy XII, but I'm still putting off beating it. Instead, I've been playing a different game, and I come bearing a recommendation of it. (Quite ironically, I'm watching Boondock Saints as I write a review about adorable piñata.)

I highly recommend Viva Piñata (XBox 360 and PC, 2006) as an addictive and adorable game that offers a few days of obsessive and uplifting fun. Having made it 55 levels and breed most of the piñata, I'm about "done" with the game despite the fact that it has no ending point. I'll be sad to see it go when we return it tomorrow, but my joy in it is winding down. I did, however, have a great time playing it, and I want to introduce it to those that haven't heard of it.

The premise of the game is that you are a newbie gardener, given a plot of dried, cracked land with which to start your own garden. As you begin to prepare the land, your first visitor appears: a tiny Whirlm (worm) piñata who frolics in the rich soil. As you prepare the ground, plant and tend increasingly varied flora, sell produce and pinata, dig ponds, build breeding houses, and hire helpers, you attract more and more piñata, make them residents, breed them via special diets and minigames, evolve them, discover variants, protect your garden from Sour (evil) piñata intruders, and level up to new abilities, better piñata, and a more valuable garden.

( The good and the bad: an in depth review. )

On the whole, I greatly enjoyed Viva Piñata, and I highly recommend it for a few days of compulsive, immersive, unapologetic fun. It's adorable, it's addicting, and it's hard to indulge in the dances, candies, colors, and animals without feeling good. The game's challenges require just enough work to be satisfying but not too frustrating, and the amount of variety and change that you can achieve makes it an ever-evolving, personal environment. What more is there to say? It's a great game, and you should check it out.

To thine own self be true: contemplating the value or possible harm of defining myself & my problems

I recently came back into contact with an old friend—Lizzie, from England. She was one of the closest friends I've ever had, and on of the greatest forces in perhaps one of the most formative of my life, although she may not know it. We've been out of touch for some years now, but at the urging of aep (after he heard me talk about England), I sent an email to the last address I had for her—and, luckily, heard back. We've been trading emails back and forth since then, reintroducing ourselves, catching up on lost time. It's been wonderful, of course, though there always seems to be more that I want to tell her—but I'm wordy and overly-analytical and intense by default, and so I feel like I'm cramming my letters with heady information and heavy honesty. With is fine, but, well, I don't want to overdo it.

The amount of catching up that there is to do has made me wonder, once again, about writing up a brief summary of myself and of my life. A single space with all the important background information, easily accessible, cleanly written, useful and organized. I've written introductions of me before, which is one thing—but there's still a lot that doesn't get included in there. Things I'm curious about in other people, but seem almost inappropriate to communicate about myself.

I watch a few journals of people with lupus/fibro/seizures, histories rape trauma/drug use/abuse, mental health issues, and the various combinations of such. Why these people interest me so much is probably a discussion issue in and of itself (although, in part, I find it puts my own history in context, and moreso, I admire them and appreciate what they have in-depth background info, chronicling their lives, ailments, who they are and how they got there. It puts their daily posts into a greater context, but it's interesting in its own right as well. These hidden diseases, mental and physical both, as well as past traumas, they all a particular impact on the sufferer, they are personally and socially trying, and I identify and I want to understand. I appreciate the open, clear communication.

But do I have the right to write such things about myself? Would it be healthy for me to do so—would it be educational and cathartic, or would it keep me constrained to a limited identity, defined largely by all the things that are wrong with me?

( This above all: to thine own self be true )

No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be
—The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock 111, T.S. Eliot
But the truth is that I often am—I am so caught up in knowing myself that I am limited by myself.

For the record, the issues I'm talking about writing about are my mental health issues, my back problems, and the merry little downward spiral that I've traveled as I've gone from school to school to no school.

I mentioned this, almost just as obtusely, in my last letter to Lizzie: the labels I have gained and use are hugely important to me because they make me definable and categorizable to myself, because they validate what I feel, how I act, who I am; however, I am so attached to these labels that I am limited by them, constrained by what they say about me, reluctant to deviate from them. On one hand, yes, I do not want to be and am not ashamed of who I am and how I (dis)function; on the other hand, I know that this desperate self-definition is a form of enabling, allowing me to remain motionless because I am consumed in contemplation, allowing me to remain unchanged because I am limited by the labels that I've been assigned and have adopted.

All that, coupled with that is the very real consideration that, as a self-concerned twenty-two year old with almost no life experience, my life just ain't worth writing about. In many ways, nor are my problems. I'm depressed, sure. I have problems with anxiety, or better, agoraphobia. I'm largely housebound, and largely by choice. I have chronic back pain. But no matter how greatly these issues, these labels, define me—and they do—they are not that interesting, not that big, not that bad. I have no past trauma beyond rocky moments in my relationship with my mother, no physical diseases greater than a moderately fucked spine, no mental issues greater than your run of the mill stuff. There are a few stories, the progression of my depression into anxiety, of my agoraphobia into being housebound, of how the back pain started and why it continues, of why I've transfered away from and dropped out of some wonderful schools, but yanno, there's no biography to write here, not one that would matter. I don't think so, anyhow.

I'm having the distinct impression that I've had these same thoughts, wrote this same sort of post, sometime before.

So for a change of pace, why not open up the issue a bit. Would you, flist, friends, readers, be interested in that sort of selfish, self-important backstory? Would it interest you, or be useful to you? Have you wondered what that backstory would be like, condensed and coalesced? I can deal with these doubts and these self-referential episodes of circular reasoning (and literary illusions). But if the information might benefit another, well then it means more than if it's just me, considering, defining, contemplating me. And if you want to tell me that you think this sort of contemplation of my own backstory is or isn't healthy, hell, do have at. But I certainly don't expect anyone to resolve my concerns for me.