Carved a bloody swathe through Ancient Greece, turning every creature that crossed my path into mythological mincemeat. Then I played Gears of War, where I got to gun hordes of alien filth to the ground and then kick its skull in with my massive armoured boot.

This week I’ve been playing Viva Piñata. That technicolour sugar rush of a game involving the farming of animate papier-mâché constructs, on Xbox 360.

Let’s not muck about; it’s totally a kids’ game. The bright colours and happy noises, the characters and indeed the premise itself, all of the presentation seems aimed at preschoolers. But I have a hard time believing a kid of an age to enjoy the aesthetics could cope with the gameplay, cuz it gets pretty complex as you progress. Sure it’s straightforward enough at the start. One carrot will nab you a Bunnycomb. A turnip begets a Mousemallow.

But having to evolve Sparrowmints into Candaries, breeding them on a diet of Yellow Flutterscotches (which need to be evolved from White Flutterscotches by feeding them buttercups) to raise a prey stock of sufficient size to feed an entire flock of Buzzenges (which require Pudgeons and even more Sparrowmints to breed), all to convince one Buzzenge-eating Eaglair to take up residence in your garden …And then do it all again to get a breeding pair… seems a little out of the league of kids in the demographic of the tie-in Saturday morning cartoon.

So, sorta deep, in its way. And damned if it ain’t compelling. Even when talked by my brother into taking a break to play some Gears, while eviscerating an enemy in a shower of gore with a chainsaw bayonet, I found myself thinking how many Bunnycombs I need to breed to aquire a couple of Pretztails… I don’t often play such open-ended sandbox games. I generally prefer more goal oriented games. But each new species that appears in the wilds is intensely desirable, a thing that must be aquired at all costs, as though the Piñatas’ colourful shells were stuffed with crack cocaine instead of sweets.

Holy shit it’s a Fizzlybear! I need some fuckin honey! WHERE THE HELL ARE MY BUZZLEGUMS?!

…I have to go