Tiny Diggers – An iPad Construction Truck Game for Kids Age 2-5

I was playing Animal Crossing: Wild World on my DS this past weekend while relaxing in bed when the game warned me that I ought to save because my battery was low. That’s always a bummer, because who wants to stop playing for a battery? Luckily it doesn’t happen too often.

As you probably know, I have a Wii now, so my Gamecube was tucked into the bedroom, but I never hooked it up. I began to wonder how my town in the original Animal Crossing would be doing if I hooked the Cube up in the bedroom and played there. I fully expected to be disappointed in the earlier version with its lack of touch control and online play.

Instead, I was surprised to find how much better the game looked on the Cube. You would think this would be unsurprising, but the DS version looks really, really good. Those of you who’ve seen the DS version and not the Gamecube version might not know that the Cube version’s graphics were pretty much bottom of the barrel. This was a Gamecube port of the Japanese N64 game, Doubutsu no Mori, or Animal Forest. Still, it runs at 60 FPS, in progressive scan if your TV will do that (this TV, it turns out, will not), and the analog stick control is something I really miss now, even with touch control as an alternative.

Coming back to Animal Crossing after more than a year is pretty scary. Most of the same animals are there, but the place is pretty overgrown with weeds. Nook’s store is really crowded and your house is really small compared to how big it gets in the DS version. But you can see all the way across the river in the Cube version, because of the difference in resolution. It’s a pretty dramatic change. Once you get past the anger of townsanimals who were horrified or hopeful that you had been murdered in your absence, you’ll wish the DS version looked as good.

My advice? Maybe you don’t want to go back. Animal Crossing was a great game, but Wild World is better, and all playing the old one will do is make you wonder what Wild World would be like if the DS had the graphical power of the PSP.