Ahead of this evening’s Microsoft press event the interweb is wild with information spilling from development studio Rare on its Xbox 360 projects.

Today we’ve been collating all there is to know about “Viva Piñata: Trouble in Paradise” and “Banjo Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts”. VP will borrow ideas from the PlayStation 3 game Eye of Judgement, using real world playing cards to function in the videogame via the Xbox 360 Vision camera. This works by scanning a code written on the card, unleashing new piñatas or other gameplay components such as weather effects and construction bits and bobs. Players can also create their own virtual custom-piñata trading cards to share with friends online or post on forums.

Banjo Kazooie is, as we speculated yesterday, open to extensive customisation. This mostly relates to the vehicles that can be constructed from scratch using bits and pieces scattered around the world. These are mostly pre-determined blue printed designs, rather like LEGO Star Wars, and there will be some areas where a specific vehicle is needed to succeed. This should be fun, looking for the last vital component for the coolest vehicle in the game, and definitely beats collecting jigsaw pieces just for the hell of it. We’ve come a long way in just 10 years…

Both games feature physics based puzzles. Man, we’re sick of hearing about physics. We were sick of it at school. Enough already!

Viva Piñata: Trouble in Paradise is rumoured to be coming in September. Nothing speculated on Banjo Kazooie just yet.