Animal Crossing
After suffering an hour and a half discussing Animal Crossing with a creepy Nintendo employee for you, I bring you Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Animal Crossing, as well as some stuff you couldn't care less about.
The game starts with you on a boat talking to a person who's making idle conversation. You pick your name, the name of your island, and some other beginning game necessities. You get a house, one of four identical houses in a small center in the town. These are the four save slots on the memory card. You can do any number of things at that point. Meet your neighbors, change the landscape of the island, hit that dog guy with your axe - anything. You're the new guy in town, the ball's in your court. There's no real beginning nor end to the game. No real point. That doesn't stop it from being amazingly fun, though.
As the American text writer informed me, there's a lot of different things the animals will say. Your neighbors will respond in a way that won't get you easily bored with talking to them. Disappear for a month? They'll ask you where you've been. One of the most popular features is Mr. Resetti, the little critter who confronts you in rage when you return after resetting the game improperly on your last visit.
Some will be mad that you've gone so long without visiting them, while some will be pretty apathetic. All the characters have different personalities, and you won't likely run into the whole set of them for years. They've got a decent memory, and won't easily forget how you pissed them off yesterday. They have symbols above their heads denoting their current mood, whether they're worried or mad or extremely elated. Often, you'll see one of your neighbors stomping around angrily, after having had an argument with another animal on the island. They act pretty independantly of you, which is nifty.
One of my favorite features of this game is that it runs in real time. When it's night where you live, it's night in the game. When it's winter outside, it's winter in the game. This means you can come back to the game at any point and things are always different. In Japan, buying and selling used games is a big market, more common than the US. However, this game hasn't been sold back much at all. Once you play the game, you get addicted. You can always come back to something new.
Or, you could start something new! When you start a new game, a map is randomly generated. You're randomly given neighbors and land. It's always something new and different, especially when you go visit a friend's island.
If you've got a friend who brings over their memory card with THEIR island on it, you can go to their island and see their house and friends and stuff. Best part is, you can dig holes all around their house and cut down their trees and generally mess their house up. You can't do anything seriously devastating, just mildly amusing pranks.
As well as being able to visit friend's islands, you can visit randomly generated islands. You'll be able to keep one island at a time to return to whenever you want. This is where the GBA small task games come in - the animals that will request of you to complete a task will be on these islands.
The connectivity is a big part of the game. Using the GBA to GC link, you can do a number of things, such as design your own clothes, download minigames onto your GBA, or do small tasks. When you make your clothes, you'll soon start to see your neighbors in the town wear the "hip new style" that recently appeared in the town store - your very own creation. You, of course, can sport the design, too. The actual designing works pretty much the same as MSPaint, and you'll have to dedicate a bit of time to the project if you decide to make a design that actually looks like something. It's fun to toy around with anyway, though. You can also connect your GBA and download a small game onto it, which will remain playable until you shut your GBA off (it will stay if you put your GBA in Sleep mode, too). Nothing too exciting, but it is still amusing enough. There's also the small tasks. You use your GBA to find peaches for a cat or something, and when you return to the GameCube, the cat will have left you bags of money. I repeatedly asked the Nintendo guy how the hell that made sense, and he assured me, "It just does!" So just go with it.
The graphics aren't stunning, but they don't really need to be. They're very fitting - a simple feel that doens't distract from the point. The animals are able to properly convey their emotions and everything looks pretty.
I've been guaranteed this game is addictive as hell, and I whole heartedly believe that. A+ and a half.
Emily White (N-Sider Freelancer)