Nintendo gave us all a first look at their eagerly-anticipated Wii episode of their smash Animal Crossing franchise, and it looks like… well, it looks like Animal Crossing. In a recent podcast I pointed out that the Gamecube Animal Crossing game was an N64 port, right down to the muddy textures, and worried aloud that Nintendo wouldn’t change the game to bring it up to scratch visually. We can see from the sharp textures and smooth polygons above that my worries were unfounded, and yet it seems as though Nintendo’s not done a whole lot to distinguish this run through town from the earlier ones.

Other footage shown by Nintendo includes some great stuff about the MMO portion of the game, which takes place once you leave town for the city. The game has support for a new mic peripheral called WiiSpeak, which is a kind of public mic for the room, rather than a headset. I was surprised at this approach, but it makes perfect sense with the console’s philosophy of inclusion: if a Wii player puts on a headset, everyone else in the room has just been excluded. Of course, there’s also the fact that some salacious pedophile can’t approach you and say terrible things if everyone else in your home can hear them as well, so we can see another consideration of Nintendo’s right there.

It was nice to see the familiar faces, particularly Brewster in the coffee shop. It’s also cute that you can pop your Mii’s head onto your player at the hair salon.

Source: GameTrailers