Thursday 9 February 2006

Pic of the day: Careful where you put those big sausage fingers!

Dear Mr Resetti

The next time you show up and force ME to apologize for YOUR corporate masters putting the "off" key right next to the movement keys, you may make someone very happy. I happen to know a nice girl not far from here who doesn't have Animal Crossing yet. And since the game is still not officially for sale in Norway (I got mine through a friend in the USA), that means one less sale for your corporate masters. Actually it may be more than that, because I consider getting rid of the whole DS while I'm at it. It's not like there are dozens and dozens of great games for the Nintendo DS, after all. Nintendogs was kinda cute, but not enough for me to go back to it after the vacation.

Yes, we are talking about the Nintendo DS, the handheld game console. It is inexpensive and fairly good, and there's a wide selection of games available for it, both those made for the Gameboy Advance and the new ones made specifically for the dual-screen, touch-sensitive console. Unfortunately my demands are pretty high. I don't spend a lot of time away from my PC (except at work), and on the PC I have games such as The Sims 2, Civilization IV, and City of Heroes (although the latter is of little help until my Internet connection comes back, planned for February 27th). In comparison with these games, both concerning gameplay and graphics, sound and user interface, the handheld games just don't cut it. The single contender that stands out is Animal Crossing, a game that has been available on the Gamecube for a while but is now out for the DS in a mostly enhanced version.

The game is vaguely similar to The Sims, except your neighbors are stuffed toy animals. They are predefined, but there are quite a number of them, and they have their own personalities. They interact with each other and with you, the only human (or human rag doll) among them. As such you have quite an impact on the community. Everyone wants to be your friend, more or less. If you create new patterns for clothes (which is fairly easy to do with the touch screen and stylus) your furry friends are likely to wear them. If you write them letters, they are likely to collect them. And if you like some of them, you better pay them lots of attention, or they may move out (but someone else moves in instead).

Half the game is the social life. The other half is upgrading your house. The local shopkeeper, Tom Nook, will help you expand your house, but this means a hefty mortgage. To pay it back, you can gather various resources on the island, such as fruit and seashells. You may also try your hand at fishing or hunting butterflies with a net, and perhaps you find a small crack in the ground where you can dig up fossils or mecha toys. (The local museum would like you to donate the fossils until you start getting duplicates, and the same for fish. Probably bugs too. I am not sure what happens if you just sell them instead, perhaps you'll not find as many new. Certainly I have had bad fishing luck ever since I sold my first two, but that could be just me.)

This is all good and well, and the control system is great. For the casual player, such as me, it is simple to stroll around the island and pick fruit. (If you get your hands on a coconut or a fruit that is not native to your island, be sure to plant them rather than sell them. You will later harvest much more of them, and they sell for a lot more than the one fruit type that grows there from the start. Which fruit that is varies from one game cartridge to another. The best shot is to cut down an existing tree of some sort to plant a new, except the coconuts which grow best just behind the seashore.) Players with more time on their hands can go fishing or in the summer hunt bugs, or they can plant flowers and water them. It is possible to crossbreed flowers for new variants that also sell for a nifty price. All of this can easily be done by moving around using your arrow keys and clicking on things you want to handle. It is also possible to move using the stylus, but I prefer the movement keys. Except on days like this.

I was nearing the end of the bus ride to work when I accidentally pressed the on/off switch instead of the upper movement key. It is right there. The last thing I wanted was turn off the machine without saving my game, in which I had already collected fruit for about 20 minutes. But that is not the worst of it. The worst is that when I turned the machine back on, on my way home, this mole come up of the ground. Mr Resetti, as he is fittingly called, makes a very angry and very long speech about the evils of turning off the machine without saving. Each time you do it he gets worse. This time he demanded a written apology before I got to play the game again. I can do that using the on-screen keyboard. But I didn't much like it, since all but the first time I turned off the machine, I did so by accident due to the small and cluttered keyboard.

I assume he will come up with something even worse the next time it happens. But I am not sure I will find it worth it. There may be someone with smaller fingers who will be happy to get the game. And I think that would send the right message to the Japanese makers of the game. It's not like we have forgotten what the Japanese did in the 1940es. We've put it behind us since they have stopped torturing people and started making anime instead. But if they revert back to torture again, well, we'll show them who's boss: The customer!