One of the strongest criticisms about the XBox 360 (and the XBox before it) has always been that if you don't give a damn about shooting, hacking or racing games, you have no reason to buy the console. Microsoft has apparently gotten tired of hearing that, because their newly-announced Viva Piñata has super cute animals and Sims/Harvest Moon/Animal Crossing-style open-ended character nurturing gameplay, i.e. things you expect from Nintendo and to a lesser extent, Sony. We got invited over to Microsoft's swanky booth for a Viva Piñata briefing this afternoon and got to yak with two developers for a bit. More on the storyline and gameplay after the jump.

So here's the story: You get a patch of land to garden with on Viva Piñata Island, which was once a paradise but is now an abandoned ruin. Your task is to restore the land to glory, or at least what you think glory is—there's no real set end goal, your garden can look however you want it to look, and you can change it all the time depending on how you want it to be. The tasks you perform are so you can make your garden attractive so that piñatas come into your garden and decide to stay.

There are 60 different species of piñatas, and each species has different requirements you need to meet before they come into your garden. For example, rabbits like grass and carrots, so you'll have to have a lot of grass and grow some carrots before one will come in; when one does come in, and you treat it right, it might decide to stay. When piñatas decide to stay and become residents of your garden, they change from black and white into color, plus you can name them and tag them. The tags are important because piñatas are tradeable in XBox Live and their tags travel with them, so recipients can always tell where each piñata originated and where it's been since.

Viva Piñata is a title Microsoft plans on making sweet sweet cash off of in XBox Live, allowing you to buy new items over the service that wouldn't otherwise be available in-game; XBox Live users will also be able to download new species for play as they become available, as part of Microsoft's strategy to frequently refresh the content of existing games, so players get more play time out of their initial purchase, and Microsoft can squeeze more money out of them over that increased play time. Apart from buying new items outright, there are a few ways to obtain items in-game: you can pick up coins in your garden, buy seeds from the shop with the game currency, grow vegetables and then sell them back to the shop for a profit. You can breed piñatas—yes, piñatas breed, by doing a funny little PG-rated dance with each other if the circumstances are right—and sell them to the shop for money. You can trade for items with other players too, if you want to, which is par for the course, but the developers told us that you can also outright steal items from each other. No idea how this works cause they wouldn't elaborate, but it would be interesting to see if players of such a cutesy game will develop a community that has space for users that steal.

Back to the Piñatas! They're more intelligent than Sims, sort of, in that while you can make suggestions on what they should do, they have minds of their own and might decide not to do what you say they should do. The better you treat them, the more likely they are to do what you ask. And you can ask a lot of a piñata: one of the ways to attract a piñata into becoming a resident of your garden is to feed it a piñata lower on the food chain. Viva Piñata Island is on an accelerated day and night cycle and species have their own cycles that they stick to, so for example if a nocturnal visitor needs to eat a day animal in order to become a resident, you'll have to find a way to keep that day animal awake into the evening so it can be eaten. If you have so many piñatas in your garden that you can't keep up with all the tasks, or there are just tasks that you hate doing or micromanaging, you can even outsource the tasks by hiring humanoid helpers to do certain things, like keep the grass healthy. Speaking of humanoid helpers: we'd really like to hire one RIGHT NOW to massage our aching feet, but instead we're going to go run around the floor some more to look at games you want to know about.