Finally! Snow has fallen in Meltown, and it means those dig spots are much easier to locate - the grey-brown of the ground not showing those telltale cracks nearly as well as a layer of pure white. With precipitation comes gyroids, and so I’ve only dug up a few fossils over the last few days, but my cabin wardrobe is bulging with squat dingloids and mega lamentoids and such. I’m keeping them for when I’ve got a basement, but if I keep spending my money on daft hats from Mabel and Sable’s tailors - latest additions: a mandarin hat and a cat mask - then I’m not going to pay my second mortgage back any time soon.

I’ve also managed to venture to another village, as the picture above shows. This is my father-in-law and me wandering around his town, swapping fashion tips and fruit - his town’s standard is apples, while my pears will no doubt come in handy in his orchards. We didn’t experience any real lag or problems during my admittedly fairly short stay, and the text and Wii Speak chat seems fairly robust. It’s also nice to give Booker and Copper something to do - standing by those gates all day must get fairly boring if your villagers are otaku like me.

It’s not just new threads I’ve been picking up from Mabel and Sable, instead designing a t-shirt of my own. It’s quite a simple one, which just involved me pressing a load of different coloured stars onto a black background, but I’ve already spotted Moose sporting my design, so hopefully it’ll catch on. It might be just my imagination, but the animal interaction somehow seems slightly different from previous Crossings - I’ve noticed plenty of chats between other villagers, while gossip is often offered when I strike up a conversation. I am slightly concerned that Prince wants to talk to my wife about “fashion flair” though. And he’s very exacting about my telling her so - suggesting that he won’t listen unless she puts it just like that.

Wendell visited once more, offering another corner piece of a pattern which might yet look good on an umbrella or hat. And I encountered Pascal for the first time - an otter who swapped me a piece of pirate furniture for the scallop in my pocket. Sure, a keg might not go particularly well with my current room layout, but then I bet it’s worth a fair few Bells at Nook’s.

Three weeks into new Crossing, then, and I’m as hooked as I was on the GameCube game, despite it being very similar indeed - the new additions are enough to make it feel different, the additions are pretty much all welcome ones, and while I do miss my secret island hideaway (surely DLC could solve this problem) and the NES games, it seems like the most refined Crosso yet. I’ll give this diary another week or so, and then I think it’ll be review time.

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This entry was posted on Friday, December 12th, 2008 at 5:16 pm by Chris Schilling
Columns & Opinion, Features, Latest Games, Wii.