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Animal Crossing: Wide World |
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Written by Ben Heron
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Monday, 26 February 2007 |
Are you tired of your life? Do you want to take control? Have you a desire to make money digging up fossils and picking shells?
Life just not simple enough!
Your short journey starts in a taxi where you’ll chat to the taxi driver about who you are and where you are going. Before you know it, you’re there in your new touch-screen based cyber home.
Guided into the town hall, the staff will introduce themselves and point you where to go next; that’s it, you’ve all but set up home.
Move it!
To control your cyber-self you can either use the D-pad and buttons or simply (and my preference) the touch screen. Just a drag or tap of your stylus and you are walking or running around your town, picking things up, talking to people and so on. This ease of use makes this a very relaxing and therapeutic game.
Town folk:
As the title suggests, all the characters you come across in this game are an animal of some kind (some more obvious than others) and the most familiar face will be Tom Nook the Racoon – the owner of the town shop and your very own mortgage lender.
Tom will guide you during the beginning, helping you get used to the controls, get an idea of the town and its other amenities and is your source of anything from paper to shovels. You will also be able to sell your stash to Tom, however unfortunately if you don’t like what money he’s offering you, you’ll have to lump it as Tom has a definite monopoly in your town!
After about 30 minutes to an hour of game-play Tom will set you free and leave you to your own devices. This is where it starts to feel strange. Like SimCity, there’s no real purpose or aim. It’s whatever you want it to be…
Idle thumbs?
Animal Crossing: Wide World as seen on the Gamecube is a slow, chilled out game where you live your cyber life as you see fit in real time; be it raising money to pay off your mortgage, donate money to those less fortunate, furnish your house, fill the town museum with your prize paintings or fish or insects or fossils…
The list goes on, and the beauty is that you learn it as you play. It’s possible to spend many hours at a time playing this and especially if you are donating things such as fossils or fish to the town museum, you’ll have something to show for it. You can even design your own clothes or the town flag, compose the town theme tune or create new star constellations to fill the night sky!
That saying, you can also just call in for a little while every day – and I imagine Animal Crossing: Wide World would be a great game to have if you’re fed up of twiddling your thumbs on the train commute to work.
Times and dates:
This game is set in real time so as long as you’ve correctly set up the time and date, things like Christmas, New Years and even your birthday will occur in the game as in real life. You’ll see a change in the weather and depending on the season, the game even goes as far as change what type of fish and bugs you’ll be able to catch.
The bizarre truth:
Have you ever wasted a morning popping bubbles on some bubble rapping? You get to the point where you just cannot stop; you’re enjoying it, it feels right yet you really don’t know why such an act should be fun? For the first hour, a voice in my head whispered; “what are you doing? Why aren’t you shooting people? Why aren’t you doing hero rolls everywhere? Why are you enjoying this?!”
Thankfully, the voices passed, yet my enjoyment of this game stuck and this game has been a big hit in my house with at least one person playing every day.
A word of warning though; in Animal Crossing you can only save one town on a game card, and anyone can create a player and have access to that one town… Therefore - after you spend hours meticulously planting flowers, buying the most expensive furniture and stashing the rest of your hard earned cash in a cupboard - a major rethink is in order when your 5 year old asks to play. If you don’t, you will find holes all over the garden, all your furniture sold and that secret stash of money spent on two years supply of medicine and pears!
All in the detail:
It’s easy to control, relaxing to play and jam packed with features – but what about visually? It’s no Super Mario Bros, but the graphics of the wide environments are more than acceptable for the pocket sized record breaking DS and the game has no visual or audio glitches. One minor issue is that you cannot alter the camera angle apart from when you are in your own house. This is only an issue if you’re trying to find something where there are lots of trees as you can’t see around them and I’d be surprised if it affects you at all.
The sounds in Animal Crossing don’t stand out, but then they aren’t supposed to either. All character speech is subtitled, so you’ll just hear “blah blah blah” rather than actual words and the background music is forgettable yet noticeable if absent.
Cross with Animal Crossing?
I felt that there could have been a little more opportunity to customise the actual map and maybe another shop or feature. Also, I do get the feeling that sometimes different features have been spread a little too thinly so to further increase the life-span however apart from that, this game has been made with great skill and creativity and is a refreshing change from the now stereotypical genres appearing in games.
Fancy a holiday?
Another feature in Animal Crossing: Wide World is the Wi-fi feature, whereby you can visit a friend’s town or invite them into your own. It’s a nice way to show off the fruits of your labour and also allows you to receive any updates or notices from Nintendo, however you can’t just go and find a random town on the big wide web; you have to acquire the specific friend code to locate them. Understandably this means you feel safe that someone won’t hijack your town, cut down all your trees and sell all your furniture, however it is a limitation if you don’t have any friends…
That’s where the multiplayer ends though – there are no tasks or additional features, you simply just visit and can chat. This makes it feel like just an afterthought from Nintendo, albeit a neat one.
What just happened?
This is a fantastic game that will keep a wide variety of gamers more than amused for a long time. If you get bored and put it down, curiosity will soon prevail as there are so many new things to find. However, if you aren’t one for the more relaxed game and hate not having a set objective then you might be disappointed…
The Scores:
Game-play 9 / 10 – Even if you don’t like this genre, you can’t find many faults on the way this plays
Graphics 8 / 10 – There’s better, but that’s no discredit to the large environment and pretty animation.
Sound 8 / 10 – Forgettable yet fit for purpose. Listen to your own music if it’s not enough.
Lifespan 9 / 10 – For those who enjoy this type of game; you’ll always go back to Animal Crossing.
Because of the real nature of Animal Crossing: Wide World, I’ve not included a score for the multiplayer. I think that it would unfairly bring down the scores to a game that is essentially your own little world.
  
Reviewed by: BenCubed |
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