Microsoft's Games for Windows dude Michael Wolf emailed me yesterday morning. He saw my post about Viva Pi ata. He wanted to win me over to this bright, beautiful world of animals and sunshine, and he did not want to leave uncorrected my impression that Viva Pi ata took place in a nightmarish world populated entirely by coulrophobia-inducing, chocolate-filled specters.

So Wolf shot me an invitation to come on by the Microsoft booth and get the producer, Chris Kimmel, to show me the game. I accepted. I wanted to ask some hard-hitting questions.

Unfortunately, I was double-booked. Parked in the waiting area was a three-man team of journalists from Actiontrip.com. These guys had a camera and a microphone ready, and spoke with suave British accents. Professionals. I eyed them nervously.

"Yeah, sorry, man, but these guys somehow got double-booked," Wolf very apologetically explained, "Do you mind going in with them?"

"You know," I replied. "I'd better not. If I go in with them, it's going to be the equivalent of kicking over their camera and jumping up and down on their mike. These guys are professionals. I'm a blogger."

"We're all professionals here!" Wolf soothed. But, of course, that was before I started hitting Chris Kimmel with my hard-hitting "professional" questions about the world of Viva Pi ata... questions which embarrassed and horrified all present.

Kimmel started off by showing how you start off Viva Pi ata by taking over a dilapidated garden from some sort of leafy wood sprite. An etched black line, indicating the size of your property, bound the garden. Anything within the boundary is something that you can influence. Throughout the game, this boundary will gradually expand... my understanding was that the boundary expanded as you brought more and more pi atas into your sphere of influence.

The wood sprite quickly handed over an extremely sorry looking shovel to the player, which Kimmel then used to profusely beat the cracked, charred earth into soil. After he had turned over most of the earth within his small patch of garden, Kimmel began spray-painting grass across the ground. And this attracted his first pi ata, a black and white 'Whirm'.

"We're hoping this game will appeal to children, casual gamers, and women," Kimmel said as the Whirm appeared. But I cut him off.

"Speaking of games aimed at children, I understand that pi atas can actually be broken open," I started, "At which point, other pi atas will try to devour the remains. Is that true?"

"Wellllllllll...." Kimmel demurred, "I think that's a bit of an extreme interpretation."

"So they're quislings?"

"... I mean, yes, pi atas can be broken open. And if you let the remains sit around, other pi atas can eat them. But the way they break open, they just sort of split, and all this chocolate spills out onto the ground."

"A chocolate offal, if you will," I clarified.

No one said anything. As sometimes happens when the person sitting across from you at a very serious business meeting screams, tears off his clothes, then spontaneously explodes, everyone in the room just sat around blinking for about thirty seconds. Eventually, Wolf chuckled nervously, and Kimmel changed the subject with graceful aplomb.

"ANYWAYS..." Kimmel said. "Once you get two Whirms in your garden, that fulfills the conditions to get the Sparrowmint."

"Is it coming to eat the Whirms?" I asked.

"NO."

My journalistic instincts kicked in. Would I get punched? I decided not to follow this line of questioning any further. Much as I knew my readers would want to know the gruesome detail of these cannibalistic feeding orgies — the papier m ch eviscerations, the slurping of warm, spurted paste — I felt that this was a subject Rare and Microsoft were not willing to consider in too much detail.

So I was surprised when Kimmel immediately volunteered the following information: "But the condition for getting two Sparrowmints to do the romance dance is actually to feed each one a Whirm." Ghastly.

Next, Kimmel demonstrated exactly how you get two Whirms to mate, or do "the romance dance." Not being carnal exhibitionists, Whirms (as well as all other types of pi atas) need a house in which to perform their shameful acts of moral depravity. Once the house is built, you have to perform a mating minigame.

"Are the minigames like Hot Coffee?" I asked.

But they weren't. Rather, in the Whirms' case, you had to guide one Whirm to meet another through a rather simple obstacle course that reminded me very much of a bisected fallopian tube. These courses become more and more difficult depending on how rare the pi atas you're trying to mate are. After you succeeded in mating the Whirms, they would then enter their house, where they indulged in an impromptu dance number before Viva Pi ata tastefully faded out, mere moments before the consummation of their lust.

Once any one of the gender undefined Whirms gets knocked up, a pi ata stork will swoop down from the heavens and deliver an egg. Because the pi atas do not appear to have gender, and because the delivery method is by adoption, I personally like to think the brightly-colored rainbow land of Viva Pi ata is actually a pansexual utopia where even the gayest of pi atas will not be denied a child by a morally-draconian state or an invisible old man who lives in the sky. Bravo to Microsoft and Rare for their progressive stand against intolerance!

My time with Kimmel was almost up. Under the barrage of my obnoxious, clueless, incompetent, repugnant and quite frankly retarded questions, he had held up like a champ. I decided to throw him a soft question.

"Okay, so I see a lot of pi atas here, and you say they get rarer and rarer? So how exotic do they get?"

"Well, we want to keep some of that for a surprise, but they can become pretty rare and exotic, even imaginary. The example we talk about is a unicorn pi ata." Kimmel replied.

A million follow-up questions entered my head. How exotic could they get? Cthulhu pi atas? Nyarlathotep pi atas? Amphisbaena pi atas (self-devouring!). The possibilities were endless. I was just about to ask about all of these, visions of Kotaku headlines like "GC06 EXCLUSIVE: CTHULHU COMING TO VIVA PINATA!" dancing in my head. But, with a start, I realized I had absolutely no idea how to pronounce the names of these creatures.

"Nyarrrrrr...." I started, but stopped as a rope of drool began to ponderously dangle from my bottom lip. Everyone in the room had already come to an unspoken understanding that I was probably mentally handicapped. This just sealed it.

"Thanks for coming by, man!" Kimmel said with a bright grin, a firm handshake and another hand firmly pushing me out the door. "Tell everyone about Viva Pi ata!"

So I will! Viva Pi ata is looking to be a charming and delightful game, sort of a hallucinogenic, brightly-colored cross between Harvest Moon and Pokemon. Those who want to play it as a cute little sandbox game in which you raise adorable pi atas and feed them chocolate can do so — this is the element of the game that is aimed at children, women, and casual gamers. And it seems to do that very well.

But, if you share my particular cerebral cocktail of various mental debilitations, Viva Pi ata is also a game in which papier m ch ghouls feverishly prance about, feeding off of the steaming chocolate entrails of their fallen friends off the ground. These prancing pi atas may or may not be gay. In his house at R'lyeh, the green, sticky papier m ch spawn of the skies — Cthulhu — may or may not wait dreaming. And that's got to be worth a cursory look. Florian Eckhardt