Rare's Viva Piñata for the Xbox 360 looks like a kids' game. The graphics are bright and seemingly simple, the piñatas are cute and cartoony, and the game is based on a children's cartoon. It's one of those games, though, that if you take the controller to 'help out' for a minute, Junior will still be kicking you in the ankle trying to get it back three hours later.

Viva Piñata is a sort of collecting/resource management/strategy/god game. It's like a chocolately collision of The Sims and Neopets. While it starts out simply and has a nicely-managed learning curve, as you level up the game becomes progressively more complicated to manage, which may leave some children (and some not-so-children) frustrated. It uses all the usual devices to get you emotionally attached to your piñatas too, so failures could bring tears. Then again, there's a subtle but definite undercurrent of disturbing in the game too, which has definite adult appeal.

Your job in Viva Piñata is to tend your garden so that it will attract different piñatas to come live in it. That means providing the things they like, whether that's lots of water to play in, the right plants, or other little crunchy piñatas to eat. When you attract new species, or grow new plants, or make a piñata change color by feeding it something peculiar, you get experience points. These points will let you unlock new content, and attract higher-level piñatas. So the game gets more complicated solely in response to your progress, which should mean it doesn't rapidly get out of hand.

You start off with an abandoned garden, a helpful little friend, some seeds, a watering-can, and a shovel. This shovel is your main tool, letting you dig ponds, plant seeds, or smack your beloved pet piñatas in the head until they break open, candy comes out, and all your other piñatas rush over and eat it. Sometimes otherwise loveable piñatas will make this unnecessary by attacking your other pets and biting chunks out of them while they're still alive. While doing this, they'll still be fluffy, cute and smiley.

You have limited space in your garden and a limited number of piñatas and helpers you can have. Some piñatas fight each other, some eat other piñatas, some chase each other round the garden making cute squeaking noises. You'll need to keep what you've got happy and in balance, and keep out or tame the marauding wild 'sour' piñatas. If you discover a new kind of piñata you simply must have, you may end up having to make extensive changes to your garden, which in turn may upset some of your existing piñatas. Managing all this will become complicated as you progress.

The game's interface and controls are geared towards children. The 360's buttons are context-sensitive, and the control scheme appears on the petals of a little flower in the corner of the screen, so you'll always know what you can do. You can choose a less-restrictive scheme for manoeuvring round your garden, but there's no way to disable the check screens every time you try to do something. You won't sell something when you didn't intend to, but you will get frustrated with the number of times you have to say 'yes, I'm sure!'.

There are achievements to work towards through the game, some of which are secret until you unlock them. Some you'll get just doing the things you'd be doing anyway, others you'd have to put specific effort into. There are also optional 'piñata central' challenges where you need to supply specific piñatas for a children's party. Oddly, your piñatas actually come back from these events intact, worth more, and with special 'happy' candy.

Viva Piñata contains just about every trick for making a game addictive. The bright, surprisingly details graphics look fabulous even without HDTV, and combined with a slight subversive self-parody element, the game has a much broader appeal than you might expect.

It's an odd thing to say about a game whose chief appeal is hacking enemies apart with a chainsaw, but Gears of War is a pretty game. Epic's new third-person shooter lives up to its considerable hype, the first game to really show what the Xbox 360 can do. Without graunching to a halt to load up new scenes or getting choppy when the action gets a little intense, Gears of War looks and sounds superb. Lucky, because it's not really offering a hell of a lot else that's new.

Gears of War has a setting and a plot. You can tell it's a scifi combat game, because it's got every space marine cliché you'd expect. You can tell there's a plot, because you start off with your character Marcus Fenix being busted out of prison by his old friend Dom. Fighting your way out of that acts neatly as your tutorial, and then you and Dom join the rest of the squadron you'll be spending the rest of the game with, on a mission to rescue the missing Alpha Squad. While there's a bit more background than that if you do the reading, it's not integral to the game. There can't be plot because there are no characters, just very expertly-rendered grunts who don't wear helmets so you can see how great their skin texturing is.

Gears is a 'duck and cover' game. Charging in blindly will get you killed just like you'd expect, only faster. Written down like this, sneaking from bullet-riddled wall to abandoned car and popping up long enough to shoot sounds like it would quickly get repetitive and boring. If you're not sure about how absorbing it would be, try sneaking up one someone else while they're playing. This is what great graphics and sound give you: a real feeling of tension and menace that sucks you right into the game. You can hear the locust attacks coming, bullets pinging around you as you try to manouever to outflank your enemy.

While it's short on variations in weaponry, game play, scenarios, maps, and enemies, you just might not notice, especially on your first play through. The basics are done very, very well. The weapon you'll use for most of the game, the Lancer, comes equipped with a bayonet-mounted chainsaw. On the rare occasions you get close enough to a locust to use it, the experience is deeply satisfying. It fountains gorgeous sprays of blood and makes a noise like, well, a chainsaw tearing through meat. Your big kick-ass weapon is the Hammer of Dawn, which is as stunning as you'd expect satelite-mounted weaponry to be. It's nicely restricted, though, as it can only be used outside and with clear skies. Much like the chainsaw, if you could use it all the time, it just wouldn't be as much fun.

Gears comes with three difficulty levels: casual, hardcore, and insane, which unlocks after you finish the game once. All ramp up the difficulty towards the end of the game, but you can choose your level for each play session, so if you're struggling with a particular section, you can tone it down, then back up again once you're through. That's one of the little things this game does well.

Another is multiplayer. As well as the eight-player team mode available with Xbox Live, you can play two-player split-screen co-op as well. The other player, who takes over Dom, can drop in and out at any point. The game is a lot more interesting and tactical with two players, and some levels seem particularly designed for co-operative play.

The game is a bit on the short side, and can be finished in around ten to fifteen hours. Often when a game feels short like this, it's to push players to online multiplayer games. That makes it seem a little strange that there are only ten different maps available for that. There are three different gameplay modes, but they're all minor variations on team deathmatch. It's possible Microsoft will have more online content for Gears of War coming out in the future, but with all the hype, the launch content does seem a bit scant.

What it comes down to is this. If you like third-person shooters, you're going to love Gears of War. And if you don't, you aren't. There's nothing about it to suck in people who wouldn't normally play this kind of game.