|
|
 |
Animal Crossing |
| Platform: GameCube • Developer: Nintendo • Genre: Simulation • ESRB Rating: T • Words: Man9child |
| Life sucks. And by and large, so do simulations. So when one actually tries to simulate life, I’ll take the game with the ninja any day. Enter Animal Crossing, Nintendo’s take on the inexplicably popular life sim genre and one that succeeds on a level similar titles can’t without ever actually simulating anything at all. |
 |
 |
| A typical day in Animal Crossing consists of some fishing, gardening, seashell collecting, and scouring the lost and found. Maybe you’ll write a letter to a squirrel or something. Regardless, there’s not that much to do. After the initial few days and after you kind of get settled into living in your new town you can run out of most of the days assorted busywork inside of twenty minutes. Time passes in accordance with the GCN’s internal clock and this slows the game’s pace considerably. Stores close down at night, your neighbors do things at certain times of the day, plants take ages to grow, etc. The intended effect is to create a kind of real world feel, but watching plants grow is uninteresting enough without having to make a videogame about it. |
 |
| During daylight hours when the town store is open there’s usually enough to do to keep yourself busy. There are a handful or so different ways to make money which is the only real tangible goal Animal Crossing presents you with aside from the slightly impossible promise of meaningful interaction with your neighbors. Interaction with these creatures is novel at first, but soon degenerates into something resembling, “Look, I don’t care about your hat. Do you want me to drop off your package or what?” After a few days of this, I found myself becoming a virtual recluse. There I was, sitting alone in my room on a Saturday night, playing a game in which I was avoiding people because they’re stupid and shallow, while I was avoiding real people for much the same reasons. That’s depressing. Thanks for rubbing it in, Nintendo. |
 |
 |
| The Sim’s is a game that focuses less on interaction within a community, but more on the mundane processes of life. You’ll have to get up and get dressed for work in the morning, and if you’re lucky, when you get home maybe, just maybe, you can wash the dishes. Regardless, the game does pretty well at capturing most of the qualities that made Life such an excellent board game. You’ll get to make decisions for your character and watch as they play out. Eventually your character might start a family. You’ll grow old soon enough, and you’ll die. Maybe you left some kind of mark while you were here. Harvest Moon, an early example of the life sim genre, also focused on the menial side of things. You’d wake up early and till fields and milk cows until your hands grew raw, but there was a point. You had your fathers farm, effectively a failing business, and you had three years in which to make a turn around and pull a profit. Maybe you’d meet a girl and get some along the way. That’s really all most of us can hope for, anyway. |
 |
| Though dubbed by Nintendo as a “communications game”, Animal Crossing is nothing if not a game about spending money on things you don’t really need. If the typical goal of a game of this nature is to live a virtual persona and try to make a go of it, Animal Crossing merely asks that you fill up your house with tons of useless shit. And even though that’s all it does, it does it well. Animal Crossing is shallow. But as a person whose gaming diet consists mostly of twitch action titles, sometimes it’s nice to just pop in AC and shake furniture out of a tree for a while. |
Rating |
||
5.0 |
 - Though stellar graphics aren’t necessary for what the game does, the fact that this is a port of an N64 game is very noticeable. - The worst aspect of the graphics isn’t the blockyness of the polygons, but rather the blurry textures on the character’s faces. |
|
7.0 |
 + A pretty large selection of songs for you to collect and make your own personal theme song of sorts. - The standard town theme is pretty grating after a while. |
|
6.0 |
 +/- None of the game’s assorted tasks are particularly involving. Even fishing, the most complicated, is merely a matter of pressing the A button with decent timing. Still for what it’s worth, the game is terribly addicting. |
|
7.0 |
 + Unique, though strange, character designs and concepts. Just what is the main character wearing on his head anyway? |
|
8.0 |
 +/- A game that you can play in short bursts for months, but can’t really play too long in a single sitting. |
|
7.0 |
 +/- Animal Crossing is the ultimate sandbox game, albeit a little more shallow than most. Your opinion of the game depends highly on how much that type of game design appeals to you. |
|