I got Animal Crossing New Leaf on the day it came out in the US: Sunday, June 9^th. Jon and I have been playing it since. I’ve really been enjoying it, and I think it’s my favorite Animal Crossing game yet. There are more shops and more places to go, plus I’m finally getting to travel to other towns easily. I never had any friends on my DS so I couldn’t travel with Wild World. I think I maybe visited someone else’s town like twice in City Folk. This time around, thanks to Reddit, I’ve exchanged Friend Codes with lots of other AC players. Most of the time when I go to my town gate and try to visit another town, one to two people have their gates open. And when I’ve opened my own town gate, I usually get visitors. That’s been great, because I can find cool items for sale in other towns, and people help grow my own Nook shop by buying stuff there.

Hope you folks aren’t sick of hearing about Animal Crossing, because I’ve been playing the Gamecube version recently after a year of playing City Folk for the Wii, and I wanted to grumble about some of the differences. It feels like they left a lot of detail out of City Folk and I don’t understand why. Perhaps it’s because they based City Folk off Wild World for the DS, and they had had to leave stuff out of Wild World due to memory/space limitations. If that’s the case, then it seems just sheer laziness not to have ported things from the Gamecube to the Wii game, since obviously the Wii can handle whatever the Gamecube (GC) can. Here are some of the things they left out of City Folk (CF):

Talk of the new Animal Crossing for the Nintendo 3DS has gotten me thinking recently about if another Animal Crossing were made for a non-handheld Nintendo console, either the Wii or its successor. Jon had an excellent idea the other day: an Animal Crossing MMO. Now, I’m not thinking World of Warcraft but with animals, because that wouldn’t keep with the theme of Animal Crossing. But I think there are a variety of improvements that could be made to Animal Crossing that would make it more a social experience, which I think would be a good thing. A problem I have with all the existing A.C. games is that, after a while, they feel too small. The animals repeat the same things (if I have to hear about the Mayor’s connections in City Folk one more time…), the days run together, and it becomes basically an item grab: get Gracie’s furniture sets, get all the Mush set items, get all the clothing, get all the Gyroids, get all the fossils, get all the town upgrades, etc. I get that that’s the heart of the game anyway, but when that becomes too transparent, the game loses its appeal.

So while reading about Animal Crossing: City Folk earlier, I tried to find a way to restore some of my grass, which has been wearing away to brown dirt everywhere. Turns out there’s quite a stink over the “feature” Animal Tracks that Nintendo built into the game. The idea was that grass would wear away where you walked most, but the problem is that it wears away pretty quickly and can take a month to nearly a year to grow back fully. If you’ve never played Animal Crossing, this might not seem like a big deal to you, but it’s actually a big part of the game. A lot of Animal Crossing is aesthetic value, and living in Mudville is not attractive. Also, you miss out on certain bugs that live in grass and, in the winter, snow only appears on grass so you can’t do snowmen.