Fishing with your friends
If you’ve been even remotely familiar with Nintendo over the years, you are familiar with Animal Crossing. Some call it a kids’ game, some find it a fun and casual way to while away a few idle hours, and at least one calls it a vessel for memories from his departed mother.
The original was on Nintendo 64 in Japan, but was released as a Gamecube game in the US, and broke some ground with the passage of time mechanic; the game world time reflects real world time. If a day passes on Earth, a day passes in Animal Crossing. Time and seasons are 1:1.
It allows for some interesting longevity. You can fire up your old Gamecube today and find that years have passed in your Animal Crossing town. Residents may have come and gone, things may look different, but the world persists.
Animal Crossing City Folk is an update to the venerable franchise that keeps this mechanic. There’s not much “game” to be played; instead you move to town, buy a house, get a job, and help the townsfolk with various errands and odd jobs. You can also collect things such as fossils and seashells. You can help stock the local natural history museum. You can get a Saturday night jam band going in the coffee shop. It is, in essence, a life simulator.
To many people, this sounds exceptionally boring. To some, it sounds like a brilliantly conceived chunk of fun.
I played this game with my eleven year old son. It was a delight to get mail from him in-game, and to be able to help him out with paying off his house. Since I had been playing so much for my review, I was able to accrue a good amount of savings, and sent him enough money to pay off his house. He was extremely excited. These kinds of interactions aren’t possible with most games.
If you’re familiar with the original Animal Crossing, this game will be immediately familiar to you; it basically offers more content. You can hop on the bus and visit the City now, a bustling metropolis with lots of new people to talk to, new shops, and many many ways to customize your house and alter ego.
That’s all I’m going to say about the game itself; you either like Animal Crossing, and know it, or you think it’s dumb.
I want to talk about the place that experiences like Animal Crossing have in our game collections. The beautiful thing about Animal Crossing is that it demands nothing from you, or everything. The experience is delightful whether you put minimal effort or spend hours a day customizing everything.
Is there a bigger place for experiences that are designed to do nothing more than bring joy and delight into our day? There is nothing competitive about games like Animal Crossing, Flower, or Eyezmaze’s “Grow” series of games; there is nothing violent or tense about them, they are simply delightful.
Let’s look at Auditorium for a moment; you have an experience with definite goals (the further you get, the more music is unlocked) and difficult challenges (things start getting crazy around level 3), yet there is nothing more than circles and an ever-flowing stream of colored dots on the screen. Your soul can’t help but sing as you strive to beat the levels; the reward is nothing more than amazingly tranquil and beautiful music. This is delightful.
These are the types of rewards that you get with Animal Crossing: Some may say that nice carpet or new furniture in your virtual home is boring and inane, but many think it is simply delightful. If you’re that type of person, you may very well love this experience.
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