I never completed the original Viva Piñata on the Xbox 360 properly, and it’s for a pretty silly reason. See, I had (and still have) the world’s most amazing Cinnamonkey called Lilly who wears a Fez and carries a rose around in her mouth, and I didn’t want to play long enough for her to naturally expire. I’d already been subject to her happy-go-lucky mate Benny being smashed to pieces by an evil git with a spade, and I wasn’t prepared for that to happen again, so the game went off and I never really went back.

Now this may very well sound like a completely stupid reason to not finish a game (and it is), but it goes to show that something in Viva Piñata really sparked my imagination. A cute and colourful collection of bizarre animals wandering happily around a user-cultivated garden didn’t exactly sound on paper like it was going to become digital crack, but by heck it did. Pocket Paradise carries this over to the DS and pretty much gives handheld players a like-for-like experience give-or-take a few things, and for the most part it is a roaring great success.

Of course, scaling down something as colourful and dense as Rare have here is no mean feat, but to give them their dues it is immediately apparent that they’ve managed to squish in a fantastic amount of detail and colour into Pocket Paradise. Little Whirlms squish their way around the muddy browns and emerald greens of your initial garden space, whilst at the same time bright blue Bunnycombs hop around madly and snaffling Fudgehogs tootle around going about their business. It’s bright, it’s a bit silly and it’s everything that made you fall in love with the first game.

Indeed, it’s fair to say that Pocket Paradise is, pretty much, the original Viva Piñata in every way, just downscaled to fit a DS screen. You start off with a small patch of rubble that requires breaking up with your spade so you can plant grass and attract your first type of piñata, and from there you can use your landscape, current local residents and a whole plethora of different fruit, vegetable and tree types to tempt more animals in and have them make their homes in your little paradise.

Hence, off you go satisfying various criteria in a rather Pokemon-esque attempt to lure every type of piñata into your garden so that you can feed them, home them and then – via a curious selection of dance scenes – mate them to produce offspring to sell. Got a few Whirlms knocking around? Cool stuff – that’ll attract in a some sparrow types that will stay if they munch a few, and having them in the garden will attract another few types of piñata while you’re at it. It’s a gradual process, sure, and to be honest the first few sections of the game are a little too slow at times, but the feeling of progression as you open up new animal types, tools and seeds really becomes heckishly addictive the further you delve in as new piñata types and all kinds of garden paraphernalia are unlocked for you to investigate.

The rate at which the game starts introducing new things to you improves quickly as well, and by the time you’ve completed about 20% of your gardening tasks you have a whole lot of different – and involving – considerations. Do you keep your little colony of Mousemallows going, or do you sacrifice some to get a population of Kittyfloss? Do you cram some ornaments into your limited garden space, or do you mate a new species? Send a piñata off to a piñata party to increase its level and bring you back romance sweets, or keep it there to entice a lurking visitor piñata in? Choices, choices.

It’s those choices and their various consequences that really act as the hook for Pocket Paradise, and make it a bloody difficult game to put down. Having started playing the thing in the office I ended up taking it home and continuing on my quest to grow my garden, raise new piñata types and protect the whole scene from the dastardly sour piñatas that waddle in and try to munch on your prized assets. As I said, it’s digital crack.

What makes this version of the game particularly enjoyable is the control afforded by the DS stylus, which gives much more precision when it comes to digging ponds and laying paths than the ol’ 360 controller could. The touch-screen controls work a treat and are laid out well enough so that whatever you’re trying to do, be it select a tool or visit a shop to buy something, is never more than a couple of taps away, and the ability to steer the overhead camera around the garden with the D-pad helps a great deal if you’re in the middle of doing something with your other hand.

There are problems of course, and most of these are either due to the restrictive nature of the hardware or a couple of the DS-specific changes that have been made. The main issue is that the camera angle – top-down – makes it very hard to see things in a crammed garden, and there was many a time when I completely lost a piñata simply because I couldn’t see him/her/it behind a tree or an ornament. It also makes picking single items, be they pieces of fruit, a piñata or money, a rather fidgety task when there’s so much clutter going on, even taking into account the added precision of the stylus.

Another couple of issues crop up due to the developer’s decision to do away with the ability to buy fertiliser or romance sweets, instead making you either use a Taffly on a fruit to produce aforementioned dung and send piñatas off to parties in order to gather your sweets. The former is somewhat of an unnecessary complication and doesn’t particularly add anything to the game, whilst the latter is an attempt to make the piñata party part of the game mandatory and useful rather than the optional task it was before. This is all well and good, but the resulting romance sweets can now be used on piñatas even if you haven’t mated them before by fulfilling certain criteria, hence it undercuts one of the game’s main challenges.

Then there’s the problem that the first game had, which is to do with how challenging it is and which audience they are targeting. Now, I’ve been playing games now for a good twenty years in some form or another, and having sat down with Viva Piñata during twice now on the 360 and the DS I can safely say that, when it kicks off and gets running, it requires a pretty intense level of thought and concentration to keep your little micro environment running There’s a chance that younger players or fans of the cartoon may struggle to keep up once the game reaches full flow, and as such it’s a bit tricky as to whether it will satisfy those who enjoy the whole Viva Piñata thing the most.

But, for folks like the most of us it’s quite the technical marvel despite the quibbles. Graphically it’s colourful and packed with detail and charm, with each piñata doing their own silly little dances and actions depending on what they’re up to. It’s pretty amazing just how much Rare have managed to cram into the pocket-sized version of their funky gardening game, and it also shows that the DS is most certainly a platform to be taken seriously not only for innovation and quirkiness, but for quality versions of games we already know and love. While you mull that one around the ol’ noggin, I’m off to mate a pair of red and green monkeys. Good times.