Game Info Name: Animal Crossing review Category: Adventure Developer: Nintendo Publisher: Nintendo Players: 1-4 Score 9.6 Screenshots

Graphics
Animal Crossing is a perfect example of “graphics don’t make the game.” The game is very colorful and quaint, and just suits it perfectly. This harkens back to its previous N64 incarnation, which was released only in Japan. For instance, all small items you can pick up as well as all the tree trunks and vegetation in the game are 2D sprites. The game runs at a constant 60-fps (it better!) and never misses a beat. Each randomly-generated map in your town is made up of 30 “Acres” on a 5x6 grid. You run around through each acre with an overhead, isometric perspective, Zelda 3 style, such as when you reach the end of one acre, the camera automatically scrolls to the next. All of the villagers in the game are bipedal animals, which there are over 250 of them to meet and interact with. The animals as well as your own character are very low-poly and the textures can get very blurry sometimes. I wish they could have given you the option to design your own face, because your character resembles a very bland Raggedy-Anne and Andy, depending on if you’re a girl or a boy. In the end it really doesn’t matter, it’s what you can do that counts.

Sound
The sound category is also very lacking due to it being a port of an N64 game, but again, it really suits the game. There are well over 100 different MIDI tunes in the game, each of varying genres and tempos. There’s even a white dog named Totakeke (a.k.a. “KK Slider”) that plays acoustic guitar on Saturdays at the railroad station. He has 55 different songs to choose from, and you can request your favorite song for him to play. After he performs, you get to keep the track to play it in your own home stereo (in the game, not in real life!). So even though the tunes aren’t Square quality, they’re still fun to listen to, SUPER-catchy, and don’t take much away from the game. When you talk to the animals, they all speak in “Animalese” which sounds like a mixture of English and gibberish. Some words are spoken, while others are blurred together. There is probably so much dialogue in the game that no one could ever see it all, so this is a way of getting around it. And if it gets too annoying for you, you can turn it off.

Gameplay
The game starts out with you on a train, heading toward your new town. A cat named Rover comes up and asks you questions, and your answers to these questions tell how your game to be set up. (I named my town “HELL”, and this called for some really funny situations, such as when I got off the train, the monkey at the station said, “Hope you enjoy your stay in HELL!”) The main point of the game is to be a citizen of your town, and to interact with its villagers, any way that you choose. If you want to be a nice person, go ahead. If you want to be an asshole, you can be. Hence, the “Communication Game” moniker that the game has been dubbed. It also heavily uses the Gamecube’s internal clock to determine what day, time, and year it is. So whatever time and day it is in real life, it is also in the game. Special events can occur on certain days, and the game celebrates American holidays and your birthday too. You can do so much in this game that it makes my head spin.
You can do all of the following and much, MUCH more:
- order items from a catalog
- chop down trees