Animal Crossing

Date: 2008-11-02 11:52:02 Created: null

For Gamecube

This is 2005. I am the owner of a mighty Xbox. I play manly games such as Halo 2 and Ninja Gaiden. I back out of no boss fight. Being strangled with my own intestines just gets me going properly.

Maybe that's why I enjoy picking weeds and selling peaches to animals with four-pixel faces. Just for a change of pace.

From the viewpoint of technical merit in the graphics department, this really is a pretty ugly game. So much so that it makes me wonder if it was originally developed to be played on something else. Older, less capable. These are some of the lowest resolution and detail faces in a good while, and the game doesn't seem at all ashamed about it. Maybe my TV is too sharp or something. The style is plenty cute, and nothing really gets to me. But man, you've got some blocky, smoothed-out faces guys ...

(It should be noted that my current main reference for Gamecube graphical prowess is Mario Kart, itself not exactly a jaw-dropping sensory, polygonal and textural overload.)

What About the Game, Then?

Animal Crossing is about your little avatar moving into a town inhabited by little animals. You buy a house (with loaned money), run errands for the other villagers, pick a few fruits and sell them, buy and otherwise gain home decorations, useful items like fishing rods, plant some trees ...

Sounds peaceful and laid-back? It is. The game notes the passage of time (as set by your Gamecube) and has a whole lot of day, date and otherwise time-period-specific events. Fishing competitions in June, festivals, season changes, garbage collection, the Sunday visit of the turnip sales ... animal and so on.

While several players can live in the same city, and you can visit cities on different memory cards, only one person can actually play at a time. You can write letters to people, visit their homes and even use a code system to "send" items to another player, but never actually meet. This game is just crying out for a network or even online component, something which is apparantly coming in a DS version and something I think could be completely awesome if done on the coming Revolution. It would be completely natural to go visit cities on the same network, or go to the airport or something and use a world map to visit a city somewhere else. It would just fit so perfectly into the game.