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

Nintendo’s popular Animal Crossing franchise will be making its way to the Wii at some point. We don’t have a time frame, but I would say we’re looking at 2008 at the earliest. Animal Crossing is a simple game in the AV department, but not only is there a lot of code there, there’s a lot of content, and localization of such a project is a huge task. Nate Bihldorff, of NOA Localization, has said that Animal Crossing was the largest task they’ve ever tackled, and the most challenging because of all the cultural barriers.

But when it does come, we’ve got expectations of certain features now, and wishes for more of them.

More comprehensive online play.

I’m very forgiving of Animal Crossing: Wild World’s simplicity where online play is concerned. It was Nintendo’s first game for their WiFi Connection service, and it’s understandable that they started small. The WiiConnect24 functionality on the Wii (that’s the tech that lets your Wii constantly maintain a limited Internet connection even when the system is in standby mode) could allow a lot of neat features. For one thing, I expect mail between AC towns on the Wii will deliver pretty quickly, like Wii-mail does. But beyond this, I would love for dormant towns to have the option of still having a presence on your system. Players on your buddy list could visit while you’re not even playing and interact with your town by shopping, talking to your neighbors, things like that. There’s a lot of potential here.

Better visuals.

If any franchise ever screamed out for a cell-shaded graphical style, it’s Animal Crossing. I’d love to see characters that look more like the style we’ve seen in Wind Waker. Yet, rather than going this route, Nintendo has made the characters in Animal Crossing look more like animated dolls. The Gamecube character models are dated because they’re based on the N64 models from the game it was ported from. The DS version’s graphics are more suited to its resolution and capabilities, so let’s see something with some pop on the Wii as well.

Custom town design.

I’d have loved to be able to design the map of my town in either of the earlier games. Right now they’re generated randomly in both games, while influenced slightly by your answers to some simple questions in the beginning of Wild World. Even a simple editor that asks, “ok, where do you want the source of your river? Where’s the tailor shop?” that kind of thing, would be great.

NPC variety and customization.

There’s a specific set of NPCs who work in the town that is mostly shared between the two games. There are two police dogs named Copper and Booker. Tom Nook runs the shop with his twin sons Timmy and Tommy. Mabel and Sable Able, the hedgehogs, run the tailor shop. Getting the idea? It’s pretty odd to walk out your town gate flanked by Copper and Booker, only to arrive in a town whose gate is flanked by Copper and Booker. If we could customize what the different agents in the towns looked like and change their names, it would be an improvement. Or, leave it all up to chance, and let the animals who actually live in the town have jobs in the town. It would be great to walk up to the police station and find that the bear who lives next door works as a cop at night.

Voice chat and maybe a keyboard.

Maybe I should call it VoIP instead. But whatever you want to call it, the single-line-at-a-time text chat in Wild World is pretty irritating, especially if you’re long-winded like me. Having to break normal sentences into three chunks to share them is a bit much. And Nintendo, stop blocking a common set of profanities in the text. We just get around it by using E X T R A S P A C I N G anyway. We’ve jumped through the friend code hoop, let us curse at each other if we want.

While voice wouldn’t work for composing letters, a keyboard would great. The game doesn’t need that, because text entry with the Wii Remote works fine, but I’d love to be able to use a wireless keyboard. I would definitely write more letters in-game if I had the option of typing them directly.

I could probably take this on a great distance. Anybody else have any good ideas, though?