Read-a-long with Nintendo Power #235 (December 2008)

By Joe Fourhman | October 18, 2008

My copy of #235 came wrapped in an ad for the game Ultimate Band, Disney Interactive’s take on the Rock Band formula. It looks like it has all the soul of a Bratz movie. The true cover feature is Animal Crossing: City Folk… but the AC article offers almost nothing interesting. Do we worry or do we trust? Read-a-long!

Issue #235, December 2008
featuring Animal Crossing: City Folk, Chrono Trigger, Suikoden: Tierkreis, Pokemon Ranger: Shadows of Almia

Boy, you can’t go to much further extremes in your cover art than the road from last issue’s Grand Theft Auto to this issue’s Animal Crossing. The Animal Crossing: City Folk feature article is a detail-free six-pager presented as a diary of the first four days in City Folk. And it sounds exactly like the first four days in any Animal Crossing game. There’s no mention of the Wii Speak microphone, the character transfer from the DS Animal Crossing game, potential DLC, how the online/Friend play works, how the game interacts with the Wii Message Board, or what kinds of items we can look forward to collecting. Even more frustrating, there’s no promise of a follow-up article that would talk about this critical info.

But’s here the few items we are told (some of which we already knew), and my personal list of the Colossal Mistakes it seems we can expect from Animal Crossing: City Folk.

The Good

• - USB keyboard support for letter writing. Other in-game actions can be controlled by Remote+Nunchuk or just the Remote.
• - New town visitors and holidays. Zipper T. Bunny arrives for the Easter analogue, and Pave the Peacock will headline an as-yet-undated Festivale event. Hopefully this indicates a much more aggressive holiday schedule than the anemic and disappointing Wild World. The cover art includes Jingle and Franklin, two holiday visitors we haven’t seen since the first Animal Crossing!
• - Finally, the ability to choose shoe colors. Just ask Kicks (a skunk who hangs in the City).
• - A third Able Sister, who apparently gave up the simple life of her tailoring sisters for a retail gig in the City. I wonder how she fits in to the Able Sisters’ backstory of the girls being on their own after the death of their parents. True story.
• - Different world regions get different holiday events, but if you know players in those regions, you can travel to their towns on their holidays and participate! I need some Japanese, Korean and European Wii Friends straightaway.

The Bad

• - Same old character interactions. Not only will City Folk recycle the same catchphrases from previous games (a chicken says “Buh-kay”) but it sounds like those awful guessing games are sticking around. Remember those? Where a character would ask you to pick a winning card or whatever, and it was all done purely in boring dialogue text? You’d think Nintendo would have provided visual animations for those by now…
• - Inventory menu still doesn’t show the actual item, only the item category icon. COME ON. Why show a generic striped t-shirt icon and then expect us to mouseover to see what the item is? Why can’t the inventory show a miniaturized version of the item?

• - Dr. Shrunk returns with the ability to learn pantomime emotion animations, but no word on how this works with Miis. I’d expect this is no problem, but it’d be nice to see this sort of thing addressed. The bigger question is, will we be limited to four emotions (STUPID!) as we were in Wild World?
• - Same exact setup: Kapp’n and Rover bring you into town, penniless, and Tom Nook signs you up for his intense-debt plan. There’s no way to change this up?

Overall, the article is sorely devoid of the kind of details that professional-level Animal Crossing players crave. How many insects to collect? How many new furniture sets? Any chance of hidden NES games, or at least in-game access to your purchased Virtual Console downloads? Any forward-thinking interactivity on the docket… like how the GameCube original worked with the eReader, and Wild World’s exclusive downloads at Toys R Us? I just can’t shake the feeling that Nintendo’s Big Wii Game of Holiday 2008 seems a lot like Holiday 2002.

Here’s why Star Wars: Lightsaber Duels will suck, in three sentences.

“You assume the role of one of 10 characters… Your motions don’t match up one-to-one with the onscreen action… You’ll definitely have to pay attention [when] minigames pop up mid-duel.”

Adding to the trouble, Nintendo Power describes the game as “youth-oriented.” In all candor, these days the entire Star Wars franchise could be described that way, but it seems especially damning when applied to a video game.

And only ten characters? What garbage. Sounds like this could be a WiiWare download.

Another Pokemon event coming to TRU: Stop by your local, presumably North American Toys R Us on November 8 or 9 from noon to 4, and you can download a special level 50 Dragonite into your copy of Pokemon Diamond or Pearl.

Longtime Pokefreaks will note that there’s really nothing special about getting a Dragonite – IE, it’s not a new character or an unavailable evolution – but this one does arrive with a suite of attacks that normally cannot be learned by an average lv50 Dragonite.

In other Pokemon news, the Pokemon Ranger DS sequel – Shadows of Almia – will receive two exclusive Wi-Fi levels, one featuring a Manaphy egg and one featuring the Lucario pre-evolution Riolu. Both the egg and Riolu, once found in the Ranger missions, can be transfered to Pokemon Pearl or Diamond. The Wi-Fi levels will only be available until January 31 of next year.

Hironobu Sakaguchi with the namedropping. This month’s Power Profile is of Final Fantasy creator Hironobu Sakaguchi. He declares the first FF his favorite of the line, suggests his favorite RPG class would be a “female bard,” and completely avoids answering the question of what other video game developers he would like to work with.

But he does name Apple founders Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak as personal heroes, and Heiankyo Alien as an inspirational video game. Although Heiankyo Alien was initially a 1980 arcade game in Japan (and did receive a Super Famicom release), it is only known to American audiences as a 1990 Game Boy game.

Screenshots found at MobyGames.

Kind of a puzzley Pac-Man, you had to dig holes to catch aliens, then cover them up before they escape. I totally owned Heiankyo Alien back in the day, when I would buy absolutely anything for my Game Boy. It’s not exactly the stuff of legends, but if it inspired the man who has been a part of Final Fantasy, Chrono Trigger, Kingdom Hearts and Super Mario RPG, maybe it’s something we should give a second look.

Shop Channel Staff Picks: Mega Man 9 (WiiWare), Mega Man 2 (NES), Super Mario RPG (SNES)

Top scoring Wii review: Dokapon Kingdom, 8.5 (all scores out of 10)
Top scoring DS review: Three-way tie at 8.0… Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia, Ninjatown, and the confusingly pluralized Spectrobes: Beyond the Portals.
Lowest rated Wii review: SPRay, 3.0
Lowest rated DS review: Shaun the Sheep, 4.0

Other notable scores: The Rock Band clones seem to have performed to expectations… Ultimate Band for Wii scored 6.0, while Konami’s Rock Revolution landed 5.0 on DS and a measly 4.5 on Wii. LEGO Batman seems to have unfairly suffered from the general ennui with LEGO ___ games, scoring 7.5 on DS and 7.0 for the Wii version. Meanwhile, the long-awaited DS Tecmo Bowl sequel fumbles at 6.0.

More bad news about Sonic Unleashed: Nintendo Power pegs the split between 3D and 2D gameplay at about 70/30. Yep, that’s what we’ve all been wanting all these years, Sega.

Neopets is a totally huge and real thing: It’s a real internet success story… Neopets.com began in 1999 as a low-rent Pokemon/Tamagotchi ripoff and was bought by media giant Viacom in 2005 for $160 million. There’s already been a couple Neopets videos game, but the latest one may be the first one you care about because it’s a Puzzle Quest variant. Coming to Wii and DS next month, Neopets Puzzle Adventure will unlock codes that players can use to enhance their accounts on Neopets.com.

The vegetarian Link debate continues: Last issue, a reader suggested Link might be vegetarian, but an unnamed reader points out that Link eats fish soup in Twilight Princess. That would make Link a pescatarian.

The curse of print: This issue contains no mention of the DSi, Sin & Punishment 2, Club Nintendo, or anything else that we learned from Nintendo’s media summit earlier in the month. Maybe next issue.

Next month in Nintendo Power… celebrate the tenth anniversary of the game that many still call one of the best video game of all time: The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time.