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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Two pieces of good news for the price of one. Firstly, House of the Dead Overkill charted at number 10 in the UK All-Formats Top 40 (single SKU) chart, and secondly, developer Headstrong Games has claimed it is keen on making a sequel.

Wii’s finest lightgun title to date couldn’t quite topple the Xbox 360 version of FEAR 2 as the week’s biggest horror-shooter, but outsold both the PS3 and PC versions of the latter as it reached fifteenth spot on the multiformat 40 - not bad for a single-format title, albeit still not the numbers it deserved. Perhaps positive word-of-mouth will push it even higher? We’ll know next week, though a raft of new titles are released this Friday which could nudge it further down the chart. (Wii Fit was, rather boringly, number one this week. AGAIN.)

Meanwhile, SegaNerds.com has a video interview with the guys from Headstrong in which they talk all about Overkill and how they’d definitely be interested in developing a sequel. Which is obviously very good news indeed.

Well worth a watch, that vid. Check it out here.

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Bloody clever bit of marketing from the guys and gals at Sega - a House of the Dead Overkill poster creator, promoting the lightgun blaster which is released this Friday (or today, if you’re in the US).

Featuring a wealth of titles, graphics, character and background art, you can craft your own grindhouse-style movie poster, adding your own credits if you fancy, and muddying the print for added authenticity. There’s even a bunch of tacky filters you can apply to any part of the poster, along with a host of ‘warnings’ for adult content and such like.

You can see one of my efforts above, and I’ve produced a couple more here and here. Do have a go and feel free to link to your own posters in the comments thread below.

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Time Hollow has a central conceit that’s hugely alluring - Ethan Kairos is a sophomore at high school who has a magic pen (the Hollow of the game’s title) which can open portals to an earlier time, allowing him to change the past. All he has to do is draw a circle and he can reach through and pass important memos to people, move items out of harm’s way, and generally tinker about to prevent tragedies from occurring. It’s a concept with plenty of potential that deserves a more thorough exploration than it gets here - because Time Hollow is just about as linear as games get, being no more than a couple of baby steps away from a visual novel. It’s a shame in some ways, but its failings as a game aren’t detrimental to the story it tells, which is utterly compelling - enough to forgive its shortcomings and to keep you playing until the brain-screwing climax.

The opening scenes are baffling, as Ethan eats an evening meal with mum and dad, before waking up the following morning to discover that he now lives with his uncle - his parents having been missing for the past twelve years. Upon discovering the powers of this mysterious pen he’s been given, he starts to tackle various unrelated problems - like grabbing an important object from a dumpster before it’s moved in the present, or handing over an envelope of money to prevent an argument that leads to a classmate going missing. The structure for all these interventions is the same - Ethan has flashbacks which form pictures of events he was never party to, but which are significant to his current reality. He then has to piece together the mystery behind each - finding out the time, the place, and what the even relates to. Upon ‘confirming’ the flashback, he can then open a time hole and fix the problem. Of course, his problems start getting bigger and bigger, as someone starts to take notice of his meddling, and the realities start getting more bleak - friends are accusing of attempted murder, dogs are killed by falling refrigerators, and two young girls are beaten to death. Yes, really.

In truth, while there’s a strong sense of foreboding to many scenes (the superb score invoking a genuine sense of unease), it’s not nearly as heavy as that sounds, feeling more like a superior teen drama than anything more adult. The central idea is handled delicately and with maturity - of all the time-altering films and TV shows you’ve seen, the tone is perhaps closest to Gregory Hoblit’s wistful drama-thriller Frequency, with one or two scenes rather touching in a pleasantly understated way. Characters are likeable, it’s all beautifully presented (the time motif is used well throughout, apart from the rather incongruous numbers in everyone’s surname) and the ending will likely buzz around your head for a few hours while you get your brain around it.

It’s just a pity that the game doesn’t ever credit its players with any intelligence. On one occasion it forces you into visiting a number of areas before the right one just so Ethan can rule them out. You’ll often work out solutions before the characters do, but it won’t ever let you plough ahead with your theories until Ethan has exhausted every other eventuality. One character who has vaguely psychic powers will sometimes help you figure out where to look, but often you won’t be able to do anything there until you’ve spoken to others in different locations. It manages to be both patronisingly straightforward and yet (at two points) GameFAQs-visitingly obscure - not because of the puzzles themselves, but in the order in which you have to do things.

Viewed as a visual novel, Time Hollow is something of a triumph. As a game, it’s fundamentally lacking. Put those together and you’ve got a solid three-star experience - one few will regret playing, as long as they know exactly what they’re in for before they tap the touchscreen to start.

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LIT has just arrived on the Wii Shop Channel for US owners, who can download the spooky puzzler for 800 points assuming they have 232 blocks of fridge space. I’ve just spent an enjoyable hour or so with the game - while it’s very limited in some respects, it’s also quite ingenious, and worth a bash if you’re after a download that offers something a little different.

You play as Jake (think Xander out of Buffy but a little braver) who finds his school overrun by creatures that skitter about the floor, but only in darkness. Any steps into the inky blackness and Jake gets dragged away by said monsters, who emit a really quite disturbing asthmatic wheeze as they pull Jake into the aether. So it pays to stay in the light, of which there’s precious little as you step into each classroom. But you’ll soon discover lamps, which reveal ammo for your slingshot, with which you can smash windows to let in more light, and soon the room becomes crossable - make it to the exit and it’s straight into another puzzle, more difficult than the one before.

It gets pretty intricate surprisingly quickly - and the trial-and-error nature of the gameplay could be off-putting to some. But persevere and get your head around its tricks and you’ll soon figure out which windows need to be smashed in which order. As the game progresses, it adds plenty of neat new ideas - Jake’s girlfriend Rachael is the only other survivor, and she’ll find a way to call you on the various ‘phones in the classroom, with her worried voice audible when you hold the remote to your ear. Moving fans force you to think fast as you try to stay in their beams, while a bar at the top prevents you from switching on too many appliances - sometimes you’ll have worked out a plan of action only to realise it’s going to involve too much power, which forces a restart of the stage. Oh, and there are boss battles - the two guardians I’ve faced so far try to destroy the light sources which are harming them, forcing you to improvise strategies on the fly.

It’s not a good-looking game - the art style is quite ugly, and technically it’s at about PSone level. But with terrific use of sound, it retains its uniquely creepy atmosphere, and its intriguing gameplay makes it just about worth the 800 point outlay.

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Two new WiiWare additions for lucky Americans today - one balance board-enhanced bit of arcadey winter sports fun, and a puzzler which Game | Life described as “a pretty cheapo affair”. One is tempting me; the other isn’t. Can you guess which is which, WiiWii.tv readers?

That said, I’m still holding out for impressions of Hudson’s Snowboard Riot - there’s a global recession on, y’know, and 1000 US points is a lot more costly than it used to be. And perhaps LONPOS has been unfairly treated so far - after all, Nintendo is publishing the puzzler for its American debut, so maybe it’s got more to it than meets the eye. Or perhaps Nintendo is just trying to fill the schedule in an otherwise slow week. One of the two.

If anyone’s taken the plunge and downloaded LONPOS, I’d welcome your impressions in the comments thread. Otherwise I might just give Snowboard Riot a quick bash tomorrow.

Those who like their pixels large and their gaming old-school get a Master System-shaped treat this week in the form of Sonic Chaos, available on the Virtual Console service for a mere 500 Wii Points.

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Two more WiiWare games, and just the one Virtual Console release - it’s a schedule which has become fairly familiar to US Wii owners, but this week looks like the best in a little while.

High Voltage, arguably Wii’s hardest-working third-party developer, has yet another game for release, this time in the form of High Voltage Hot Rod Show, a multiplayer-focused racer which offers a nod towards top-down classic Micro Machines, but features stunts, boosts, power slides and more to keep things interesting. With four-player split-screen play and online leaderboards, it’s another feature-packed WiiWare release from the developer, and it costs 1000 points. It’s over 300 blocks, though - can I really bear to (temporarily) delete the Art Style games to make room? I’m not so sure. Get that storage solution sorted, Nintendo - and quickly.

Meanwhile, Aksys Games offers Family Glide Hockey for 500 points - glide hockey being air hockey to you and I. The same four cel-shaded characters which popped up in Aksys’ earlier table-tennis title on WiiWare make a reappearance here, and compete in one of four different environments, with a basic single and multiplayer mode bolstered by three minigames. And on the Virtual Console is Genesis/MegaDrive favourite MUSHA - 800 points’ worth of old-school blasting, which appears to be a popular choice with hardcore shmuppers.

Nothing hugely inspiring, then, but we’re still getting a fairly regular flow of downloadable content on the Wii, which will make that storage issue even more of an irritant before too long. SD card access isn’t the most elegant solution, but it’s certainly preferable to the current situation. Fingers crossed we’re offered some kind of alternative before too long.

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The latest must-have non-game if you’re a Japanese DS owner is Minna de Jibun no Setsumeisho: B-Kata, A-Kata, AB-Kata, O-Kata. Instead of training your brain or body, or teaching you how to cook, this latest life-enhancer apparently offers help in solving identity crises by analysing your personality through your blood type.

Based on million-selling Japanese self-help book Jibun no Setsumeisho: B-Kata, this software works on the belief that a person’s blood type affects their behaviour and thought processes. Upon inputting your blood type, you’ll be asked a series of probing questions, which in turn will theoretically give you a better inkling about the underlying forces which drive you.

There are around 800 questions featured on the cartridge, covering all major blood types. Additional writings and pictures will apparently “make your journey to self-discovery as enjoyable as possible.”

Chances of a western release are somewhere between “none” and “are you kidding?”, so it looks as if us westerners are likely to remain maladjusted for the forseeable future, while our Japanese cousins walk around with a new sense of purpose.

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While it’s found plenty of fans, Wii Music has undoubtedly divided audiences - more so than Nintendo expected, as evidenced by the latest Iwata Asks - a rare post-release round-table discussion about the game.

There’s an interesting introductory segment where Miyamoto talks about his press trips to Europe and the US to promote the game, and stating how his ‘ears had changed’ in that he was now listening to the individual parts of a song. While I can’t say I’ve never noticed individual instruments in a composition before, I can definitely see where he’s coming from - I’ve started listening to certain songs in a different way - almost re-styling them in my head and working out which would be good fits for Wii Music, and potential new interpretations.

The second part is perhaps the most interesting, as it deals with the mixed critical opinion of the game - indeed, the mixed reception in general.

“Viewing it as a player, I’d have to say this game is a time thief!” laughs Iwata, who’s clearly enamoured with Wii Music. However, Koji Kondo (who was heavily involved with Wii Music from the beginning) has this to say about his son’s reaction:

“My son has played electronic organ for years, so he can read music. When he started playing, one of the first things he did was to display music scores. He’d play through a song and then sigh as if to say “What’s the big deal?” And that was the end of it.”

While Iwata seems to suggest that it’s either a game you love or don’t get, he explains that Nintendo might not have done the best job in explaining Wii Music.

“The possibilities may be endless, but we should try to give players more examples of those possibilities. I’m afraid we haven’t done a very good job of that. For so long, games have been made with a “right” way to play them and players are expected to do whatever they can to approach that correct goal. We can say, “You can do whatever your creativity inspires you to do,” but there may be a lot of people out there who don’t know what they should do.”

To which end, there’s a third section which gives suggestions as to how to create quality music vids. 

If you’ve bought Wii Music - or received it as a Christmas present - and are unsure about it, or you don’t own it yet and are a little on the fence whether to buy or not, then this is well worth a read. It could even inspire you to give Wii Music another try. It’s certainly something which rewards perseverance.

(By the way, if you’re interested in swapping Wii Music videos, then contact me via the tab at the top of the page, and we can exchange Friend Codes. I’ll be happy to send some of my compositions to any fans of the game.)

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Sonic creator Yuji Naka has been a busy bunny of late - his new development team Prope, not satisfied with sweetly innocent throw-and-catch sim Let’s Catch, has crafted a game where you don’t have to pick up a controller at all. Because Let’s Tap is controlled by tapping on a cardboard box, with an upside-down remote positioned horizontally at the end of it.

Weird? Yep, very. But it works. The game comes with a box intended for this very purpose, though you can use pretty much any container of a similar size - the example shown when you’re learning the controls is a tissue box, so you’ve got an idea of the kind of proportions I’m talking about.

The first of five modes is named ‘running tap’ which sees you guiding a simplistic figure across a neon track against three other runners - tapping with your left and right hands helps you to run faster, and pressing down sharply executes a jump, allowing you to clear hurdles. Once I’d recalibrated the remote to a slightly more sensitive setting (I was really having to batter the box to action a leap) it worked just fine. There are plenty of levels, and it’s bound to be a hoot in multiplayer, assuming you’ve got a few small cardboard boxes lying around (a DS Lite box is just about perfect).

There’s a rhythm-action game which requires you to tap along with the beat - while the tunes are really quite catchy, it seemed quite hard to fail. It wasn’t entirely clear when I should have been tapping with my left hand and when with my right, but that’s the language barrier for you. With most of the menu options in English, it’s fairly import-friendly, but this was the one game where I wasn’t sure about what I was supposed to be doing.

The third mode tasks you with removing hexagonal tiles, which are stacked up with an item on top - the idea being that you remove them all without letting said object slip. You tap to select a block, tap again to stop a meter showing which direction you’ll be removing it in, and then gently tap to shake the tile free. It’s very tricky, but will undoubtedly be rewarding once you master it - I got down to two layers before losing out.

A strange Balloon Fight-esque game is the fourth option - instead of pressing buttons to keep your avatar afloat, you’re powering a strange creature by tapping, and destroying obstacles with missiles fired with a firmer whack on the box. I’ve not spent much time with this yet, but it looks like it could be addictive.

Finally, there are several visualisers - ranging from fireworks displays, with explosions triggered whenever you tap, to sumi-e paintings where your fingers daub splats of paint or longer brushstrokes for more vigorous taps. The fishtank one, where you’re presented with a series of koi carp, turtles and other fish as you create ripples in the water, is utterly gorgeous. One of these offers more of a game-like experience, rather akin to those bath toys where you press to squirt bubbles to manouevre balls into small containers - here you tap to guide spherical gems into jars of increasing height.

It’s all fairly slight, but it does offer a pretty unique experience (even if it could reasonably be replicated with the DK Bongos). Innovation for innovation’s sake? Perhaps, but then it’s nice to see someone trying something different on Wii, and it’s quite beautifully presented. It’s very Japanese, but let’s hope Let’s Tap makes it to Europe - though it would certainly benefit from a budget price. I’ll have a full review for you very soon.

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