Animal Crossing: City Folk looks very clean, but lateral
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
Tags: animal crossing, animal crossing: city folk, trailer
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Other concerns from a longtime AC fan:
I don’t see a lot of new items in the trailer… just the same furniture I’ve purchased twice now. Cowhide rug, classic bed, etc. This game needs THOUSANDS of new items, not just the same old ones.
The animations are identical to the previous games. The Brewster scene could be direct from Wild World, were if not for the sharper look.
The inventory screens still show category icons, not the actual item… so we’ll still be floating over the icon to see a text descriptor of what we’re holding! Come on!
I hope this is a case of Nintendo holding back the Big Enhancements until closer to launch.
Yeah it looks like the same game from the previous version. I mean, what’s new really?
I don’t mind if the look and gameplay are the same, I just hope they throw in more activities to liven things up as well as new items. They haven’t really shown either yet, but I would imagine those kinds of changes can be expected.
Looking forward to the game either way!
it’s like they’ve combined the ds and gamecube versions – and then removed a bunch of stuff. latest news is that you’re always by yourself in the city, even though you have to take a bus to get there, and you can’t see anyone else who is online. what is the point of that? all that so i can see some lame items i’ve bought twice put up for auction by someone that i can’t see?
i can see why they’re not bundling the wiispeak with this – because it’s of almost no use. unless you have tons of friends who have this game and you all add each other as friends – and then make real world appts to go online for a visit at the exact same time – you won’t be able to use it. and even then, it’s the same 3-visitor max in your town. and that’s the only time you’ll be able to use the mic presumably. plus they can’t charge 50 for the game and 30 for the microphone (which is probably $2 in parts) if they bundle it.
it’s pretty clear that they’ve decided to release the exact same game with the same items for the third time. they’ve decided to dissappoint all the old fans (who they figure will buy it anyway) in order to try and sell it to all these new “casual gamers” who are buying the wii. why waste new material when they haven’t played the first 2 games after all? i would be surprised if this wasn’t what they were thinking.
Actually, if you look at the article about the Nintendo Power story, you’ll see that you can see the other people on your friends list when you’re in the city. I’m wondering how much use WiiSpeak will really get if they don’t bundle it myself. Three visitors max in town is plenty. If you’ve had people visit your town in Wild World, you know how hard it can be to keep track of everyone. Even a large town will get surprisingly crowded with four humans and fifteen animals in it. I’m pleased that they’re letting us import our characters from Wild World, because I have a very established character there that I still play with today. I expect I’ll have a very long list of friends and some of them will be on line at any given time, which will work for me.