I’m still playing Animal Crossing: City Folk (or Let’s Go To The City, if you prefer) but boy is it testing my patience. Admittedly, my enthusiasm for the game waned some time ago, but my three-year-old son loves it, and so I keep visiting my village more out of duty to entertain him than because I really want to. Yesterday, something happened which nearly made me snap the disc in half.

As those of you who play the game regularly will know, yesterday an event took place named Festivale. This new event brought with it a brand new visitor to my village - Pavé the peacock. Speaking in broken English, he was a feisty little chap, singing and dancing away to a samba-style beat and requesting candy of various different flavours. I’d read in my father-in-law’s strategy guide that it might have been wise to stockpile some from Hallowe’en, but seeing as the game wasn’t released until November and I’ve not been cheating by messing around with the dates, that was impossible. I was therefore heartened to find, when speaking to one of my animal neighbours, that I could win candy from them by playing a game, but that if I lost, I’d have to give them 500 Bells. Thus began a long, expensive and arduous few hours which I will never, ever get back.

My first test was a game of rock, paper, scissors - it’s the best of three rounds, and you have to shout out an answer rather than performing the gesture. I lost 500 bells on this game, and was then tested on my ESP by another villager. Soon after, I was another 500 Bells lighter. The third game had me guessing which hand my animal chum was holding some candy was in - I got this right, but it was the wrong colour candy. The fourth game was an entertaining and well-written exchange involving a penalty-shoot-out where I and my favourite villager Chrissy took it in turns to try to save a shot from the other. After several goals, Chrissy missed and I scored, and I got to choose a piece of candy. Upon returning to Pavé, I was told I’d need three pieces, not just the one.

Undeterred by this setback, I ploughed on with the games until I had three pieces of blue candy to pass on, at which point Pavé greedily munched down the lot and gave me a piece of Pavé furniture. I took it back to my house, and put it in the basement. It looked nice, and so I decided I’d try to get some more items. Big mistake.

My play session finished several hours later. I’d visited Pavé nineteen times for ten pieces of furniture (or eight plus a wallpaper and carpet). That’s nineteen lots of three pieces of candy, which means fifty-seven pieces of candy obtained from my villagers. If I’m being generous, my win percentage was approximately fifty percent, and I’m sure it was actually much lower. Which means I spoke to my villagers well over 114 times. God knows how many repeated lines of dialogue that involved, but it sucked absolutely every single bit of fun out of the Festivale, and made me swear that I’d never try and collect a set of furniture over one day again. Snowman or mushroom furniture, where it’s one piece a day and you’ve got plenty of time to get the lot? Fine. But with this and the Jingle debacle, Animal Crossing has made the simple collecting of items more of a rigmarole than level-grinding in an RPG. Of course, some people will claim that it’s not meant to be easy to get the lot. But there’s a difference between ‘difficult’ and ‘tiresomely random’. Had Pavé given me a different item each time, then that would have been something. The fact I had no idea whether or not he’d claim to give me a ‘new item’ and then pass me the table he’d provided not sixty seconds before was the final straw.

(I’m shy of a bed and a sofa, for the record.)

Tedious collectathons, eh - don’t you just love ‘em? Well, it’s a good job my son still loves Animal Crossing, because it’s firmly off my Christmas card list this year for that particular discretion.

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The hound that howled is set to get his own album - yep, the regular Saturday night visitor to your Animal Crossing village, the incomparable KK Slider, will be strumming his merry way through a selection of his greatest coffee shop hits, with a CD set for release in Japan this April.

You’ll get all of the background music from the game, along with that oh-so-hummable title tune, but the most important addition is the selection of tunes that KK bashes out on a weekly basis at his favourite haunt, The Roost. With such a vast repertoire to his name, it seems that the CD won’t feature all his songs - the music-loving mutt needs help to pick the best of his renditions for inclusion on the disc.

Aniplex.co.jp is where all Japanese Crosso fans will be going to lodge their votes - with a closing date of Monday March 2nd to get your choices in. The CD itself is launched on April 22nd, and retails for a price of 2310 yen (roughly £17.20).

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On the day it was revealed that Japanese players are getting more exclusive downloadable items (life really isn’t fair sometimes), I finally managed to get to see the aurora borealis in my village, only to accidentally delete my snap of them when my finger brushed against the 1 button whilst changing the batteries in my remote. Grr.

Hence the snap above of me in my favourite haunt, The Roost. I’ve struck up quite the friendship with Brewster now, to the degree where he’s regularly offering me a splash of pigeon milk in my coffee. He’s carrying about thirty of my gyroids now, though I don’t have any full sets just yet. Talking of full sets, I’m amassing quite the collection of modern furniture, while my old-school Nintendo collection is also coming along nicely, my father-in-law sending me a ?-block through the post.

Speaking of my father-in-law, I was most perturbed to find that he received ten cards on New Year’s Day, to my pathetic one (from Moose the mouse). Proving that Animal Crossing really is a game where you get out what you put in, it’s clearly his regular visits to his villagers’ houses - once a day, every day, apparently - that made him so popular. In AC, pleasantries are always rewarded.

Having recently become slightly disillusioned with the game, City Folk is definitely sucking me back in, with its routine feeling almost soothingly repetitive rather than irritatingly so. Its numerous tiny graphical and aural tweaks start becoming more noticeable when you’re actively looking for differences as much as similarities, while being able to send letters online is a definite bonus. And the more friends you have, the more you’re going to enjoy it - visiting other villages to sell turnips on for the highest possible price is easy and allows you to make some serious bells in next to no time. And I wouldn’t have almost every type of fruit in my village - apart from cherries, if any WiiWii.tv readers can oblige - if it wasn’t for adding a few friend codes to my roster.

That, and the familiar old pleasures of giving your villagers silly greetings and changing your town tune (mine is now a fair approximation of Kings of Leon’s Use Somebody) remain. If Nintendo can get us westerners some DLC soon, then I might just stick with City Folk for a little while longer, even if I sometimes feel guilty for playing a game I’ve all but played before when I’ve so many other titles unfinished.

Ah well, The Capital Wasteland will just have to wait - I’ve got a styraco torso to find. 

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After suggesting Animal Crossing could be the laziest first-party release Nintendo has ever produced, I was surprised to discover that the three associated websites (Japanese, US and European) have had a lot of effort poured into their creation.

The Japanese site is the most comprehensive, going into detail about every aspect of the game, and providing a few demonstrational videos to watch - some to give players ideas, others to show elements less careful or regular players could potentially miss. It also shows off the special downloadable items which have been made available to lucky Japanese players (a spinning top today joining the Pikmin hat released a week ago). Let’s hope this idea is added to the European and US sites soon, hint hint.  

The official City Folk site gives US gamers the chance to download a calendar widget, allowing you to quickly access information about important village events from your PC desktop. Again, it’s pretty comprehensive, but leans more towards new players, detailing how to get connected, how to set up your Wii Speak mic, and detailing ’new’ features, which are only new if you’ve never played the GameCube version. Several videos show actors players extolling the virtues of the game and talking about their own personal experiences which they’ve not had because they’re actors. A nice touch, but they take a little while to load.

The European site is a little lighter on detail, but it could be argued that it’s just a little more succinct and streamlined. But everything loads very quickly, the instructions provide enough info while still allowing you to discover the game’s idiosyncrasies for yourself, and it also arguably has the best feature of all three - a little game which allows you to ‘explore’ an infinitely scrolling village, catching bugs and fish, shaking trees and digging up fossils to earn bells (the game’s currency, for the uninitiated). You can then use your bells to purchase themed wallpapers and desktop icons.

All are worth visiting, and it’s a pity the same amount of thought didn’t go into the game itself. But those new to the series will likely find these sites of invaluable assistance given the open-ended nature of the game, and will hopefully encourage previously reluctant Wii gamers to take their console online - which can only be good news for future online options in major releases, as well as potentially increasing sales of WiiWare games. It’s important that Nintendo promotes its online services a little better than it has done so far, and this is definitely a step (or three) in the right direction.

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Five weeks on, and I’m already getting a little bored of Animal Crossing: City Folk. Sure, it’s a relaxing way to wile away half an hour every day, but the more I play, the stronger the sense of deja vu gets. And the stronger that gets, the more irritating the omissions from the GameCube original get. It’s in danger of turning my general apathy into a sense of total injustice.

I’ve spoken already about one of the most obvious omissions. In the GameCube version, you could download a tool to your GameBoy Advance, allowing you to design t-shirts on the move, bring them home and upload them to your console. Despite the DS being perfect for this sort of thing, this feature is not available in the Wii game. Moreover, tailor Mabel always used to recommend the must-have fashions when you ventured in. Now you’re not given the option to find out what the must-have threads of the season are. The latter might only be a small issue, but it’s symptomatic of the often bizarre tweaks to the template that make it probably the weakest Crossing yet for fans.

Take the house expansion, for example. In the DS game, you can have a back room, and rooms to the left and right as well as an upstairs room. Granted, if other players were sharing your copy of the game they’d have to live in the same house too, but how few people will that have affected? The Wii game offers a larger first room, a second floor and a basement and that’s your lot.

Then there’s the city - it offers a change of scenery but little else, and makes certain tasks more of a chore. Getting your hair done now requires you to leave your village (you could always just pop into the salon in Nookington’s in the DS game) while expressions require you to sit through a hopelessly unfunny thirty seconds of dialogue. With Lyle now fronting the Happy Room Academy, there’s none of that amusing insurance banter, and no reward for getting yourself stung by bees. That had always been a nice little earner in Wild World, but it’s also gone.

As for the decision to allow the ground to wear away where you’ve been walking - well, how silly. A lot of people spend significant amounts of time beautifying their village, and yet they’re more likely than anyone to suffer the problem of grass and snow being eroded into dirt pathways, with every step potentially leaving their town looking less attractive than before. A barren area where a villager’s house used to be is supposed to evoke sadness at their departure, but in reality you’re more annoyed that there’s a big messy-looking patch in its place.

Couple that with the load times as you enter and exit each building - astonishing in this day and age where consoles can stream huge open-world landscapes - and the laggy menus, the occasionally clunky and inconsistent mechanics (I can sell several items at once, but only order one item at a time from my catalogue?) and you’ve arguably got one of Nintendo’s laziest releases ever. What makes it worse is Reggie Fils-Aime’s insistence that this was Nintendo’s big ‘hardcore’ release this winter. The true hardcore will be the ones most ill at-ease with City Folk - it’s only those newcomers that are enjoying the Animal Crossing experience from the first time who won’t feel let down or cheapened by Nintendo’s penny-pinching approach to one of its most novel creations of the past ten years.

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There’s every chance this is going to be outdated by the time it’s posted, but what the hey.

Japanese owners have received the first piece of downloadable Animal Crossing content - in the form of a Pikmin hat (or helmet, depending on how you look at it). It’s a red juvenile Pikmin  - evidenced by the fact that there’s a leaf at the top rather than a flower. Perhaps it’ll grow if you bob into The Roost for a cup of java - assuming Brewster adds a bit of nectar extract, that is.

Anyway, the reason this might be outdated is that the DLC may well be available to Europeans and Americans very soon - if not already. After all, it’d make a very nice Christmas present. Hint hint, Nintendo…

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Let’s Go To The City? Let’s Not Bother, more like. I’m starting to tire of the same dialogue from the animals gathered around the fountain in the town square - even if Chow Down Meltown does sound like a good name for a bistro. And it’s a bit odd that they all change every time I exit a building - like they were all waiting for me to venture inside and then legged it so they didn’t have to speak to me on the way back. And the auction house is possibly the most pointless thing in a Nintendo game since the controls in DK Barrel Blast. Or the tracks in DK Barrel Blast. Or DK Barrel Blast in general. So far, in my four weeks of playing the game, I’ve seen one - one - item in there, which I bid on, and the stupid gyroid that runs the place still can’t tell me if I’ve won or not. And Redd’s run out of stuff until Christmas Eve, and I wanted to go in and give him a piece of my mind after he flogged me a dodgy painting. Again. Not happy.

Thankfully, things are going pretty well in Meltown - Nook has upgraded his store to the two-storey Nookington’s, and I’ve now earned enough points to get my hands on a Yoshi egg (which wriggles and yelps ‘Yoshiii!’ when you prod it). The HRA is officially in love with my house, and my new asymmetrical stripe top seems to be going down well with the locals. I’ve made two perfect snowmen so far and received two special pieces of furniture for my troubles. Oh, and I got a hat that makes me look a bit like Kapp’n. Gar!

Best of all, I’m now bezzie mates with Brewster in the museum’s coffee shop - ’pon the advice of WiiWii.tv reader Richard Schroeder (thanks, fella) I ventured in there for his finest pigeon blend for seven days in a row, and he expressed an interest in storing my gyroids for me. Rather than taking up valuable cupboard space, I can now pass them to Brewster, and can look at my collection any time. He’ll also tell me if I have any duplicates so I can sell them on to Nook. Well worth the 200 bells a day for a cup of java, methinks.

It’s little touches like this - and seeing Prince having a cuppa in the Roost the other day was another pleasant surprise - that makes your village feel more alive than ever before. But it’s disappointing to see Nintendo has left out as much as it’s put in. The GBA holiday island from the GameCube game? Nowhere to be seen. Surely it couldn’t be too much effort to allow DS owners this additional bonus. Of course, the more glaring omission is the lack of portable t-shirt creation tools - which the DS would be perfect for. Designing a top on your bus ride home and then importing it to your Wii? Makes perfect sense to me - especially given that the DS is more suitable for such a task than the GBA was. Nintendo might have had its hands bitten with the whole connectivity malarkey, but given that it allows the DS to be used as a suitcase to travel between villages, surely this isn’t too much of a stretch for the hardware?

(Incidentally, it doesn’t allow travel between villages from different regions - I transferred my items from my US copy of City Folk to travel to my father-in-law’s PAL village, and couldn’t transfer the info over. Bah.)

With DLC still yet to be announced by Nintendo - will it happen at all, or was that always just going to be a possibility rather than a reality? - it’s still arguably too early to effectively review Animal Crossing. It’s certainly got the most potential for expansion of any Wii game. Let’s just hope that Nintendo makes good on its early promises - even if it’s just a few pieces of Ikea-branded furniture or a Coke machine in the museum. The caffeine might help Blathers stay awake, after all…

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