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Viva Piñata PC dated

Prepare your hearts.

Following on from yesterday's exciting news about Viva Piñata: Party Animals squaring up to roundly smash the hanging casket of our dreams over the fires of despair, Microsoft has announced that Viva Piñata will be released on PC on 16th November as well!

Available for both Windows XP and Vista, it's part of the "Games for Windows" motherbrand, which means that - like the Xbox 360 version from last year - it will have 1000 Gamerpoints to unlock by doing clever things like getting the animals to have it off and getting all the totem pole bits.

Viva Piñata is, if you want to be humourless about it, a garden management game where you have to try and attract lots of friendly piñata animals to come live with you by satisfying their fussy requirements. You can also famously get them to mate and create baby piñata, and if you smash one egg at the right time you can make one with two heads, and then three, and you should give money to the beggar too. It's also got the loveliest music and graphics of anything we can remember since the good old days before dropships and normal mapping and EA Trax.

Look out for our (barring any last-minute catastrophes) excitable review of the PC version, developed by Climax, since we should probably mention that, in the very near future! Or, read our Viva Piñata Xbox 360 review to find out why we found it so charming in the first place.