I’ve been getting a lot of enjoyment out of the Xbox 360 Elite with Xbox Live and yesterday finally put the first game in the disc tray. Until then it’s been strictly Live Arcade games. The chosen game? Viva Piñata by Rare, the company who made one of my favorite games of all time: Donkey Kong Country.

You start with a garden full of junk and the goal is to turn it into a thriving garden filled with different candy-filled creatures called Piñatas. What I thought would be 15-30 minutes of playing around turned into a couple hours tweaking and retweaking my garden, this is almost as involved as an MMORPG. I went through emotions thinking the game was silly and stupid to interesting to fun. At the end of my gaming session yesterday I’d been deeded additional land space for a bigger garden and garnered six achievements.

This morning I checked out the Viva Piñata website and downloaded the emoticons. Anybody else been bitten by Viva Piñatas?

Happy Mother’s Day to mothers everywhere. Time for me to take the mother in our family out for awhile. See you on the other side.