Up until a month ago, I was beginning to think that my Gamecube was going to be the most expensive ashtray I’d ever own. I bought it when it first came out (ok, my roommate did… I can’t even afford the hamburger portion of this “Helper” I’m eating right now), and I picked up two games that looked really cool – Super Monkey Ball, which I played non-stop for months, and Pikmin which I played through and lost, and have yet to restart (I still plan on finishing it, but I keep playing new games instead). Well, after the first 2 or 3 months, it’s sat alone and unused on the shelf, and I was beginning to think I’d just let dust build up on it until it looked hairy. However, that would not happen… Nintendo had something fiendish in the works… Something that dangerously combined the mundane city parts of Shenmue and furries, and created a whole new world that was so much better than my own, that I would lock myself in my room and play it for hours… Yes, I have spent the last month (when I wasn’t busy dealing with another family crisis) in Animal Crossing.

It looks so innocent here...

Just saying the name Animal Crossing right now made me run off and play it for another hour or so. I can’t stop playing it – it’s like a disease that attacks all my free time. Basically, Animal Crossing is a game with no point whatsoever. I mean, there are loads of things to do, but there is no real ending. Let me see if I can explain this quickly… it’s sort of like Shenmue without the overall story. You do loads of mundane things – like catch bugs, or deliver packages – and there is no overall point to it. I guess I’ll do much better to explain my point if I explain the first few days of the game.

When you start playing for the first time, you give yourself a name, and you find yourself riding on a train. To where? Why, your new life in a town you get to name! Now this is very important… I can’t tell you how long I sat on my couch and tried to pick a name that would bring pride to the local residents of the town… a name that would make people travel from all over the world to visit. The name I chose – Gonadia (pronounced Go-nah-dee-ah). After the half an hour I spent on the train picking a name, we pulled into the Gonadia train station, where I was greeted by my first neighbor – Tom Nook. Tom Nook runs the only store in town, Nook’s Cranny, and he also loaned me the money to buy my first house – with the condition that I’d work for him for a few days. Well, after working for two days, I was released from his work, and was left owing him a few thousand bells (that’s the currency of Gonadia).

Welcome to La Casa de Jeremy - like the flowers? I planted them myself.

And basically the game lets you go free from there. The first mini-objective you have is to earn money to pay back Nook. And how do you do that? Well, you start off by asking your neighbors to give you odd jobs – mainly returning things or picking up things from other neighbors. And your neighbors? All furries. That’s right – furries. I am the only human in a town that includes some sort of hippie ram guy and a bear that I thought was a girl but is actually a guy. There are lots of other things to do, but for a few days all you’ll be doing is collecting items borrowed by other neighbors and getting gifts in return. Eventually it will be harder and harder to get a job from your neighbors, and you’ll have to find other ways to earn money.

Since I mentioned my neighbors a second ago, let’s talk about the other inhabitants of Gonadia. So far, I’ve got a mouse neighbor named Anicotti that refers to me as cannoli. This is sort of indicative of all your neighbors… they’ve all got their own personalities and little personal touches to their dialogue. Anicotti says “cannoli”… I’ve got a horse in my town named Cleo that always calls me “Sugar”. I’ve got an angry bear named Grizzly that switches from happy to angry in literally seconds and says “GRRRR!” a lot. Some of the things that they say are a bit… poorly chosen…

This isn't photoshopped...

Actually, to guarantee I ruin a completely good visual joke, that sheep didn’t originally say that… after you talk to your neighbors enough, some of them will ask you to get them a new phrase. I started out innocently enough – I made Freckles the duck say “Buckaroo”. Then I lost control. I may have created the most shitty dickhead townspeople in the world of Animal Crossing, and that’s the way I like it. I want to live next door to a lion that always refers to me as “you retard”. This was a dangerous power to give your older (and extremely simple) audience Nintendo, but my sad little life is so much better thanks to your carelessness.

So, other than teaching your neighbors obscenities or delivering their borrowed goods, what other things can you do with them? Well, all the inhabitants of your town will stay or leave depending on how happy they are. Your job is to keep them happy. One of the ways to keep them happy is by writing them letters. That’s right, you have to send notes of friendship to everyone in your town. Now this isn’t necessarily a bad thing – sometimes they’ll send you crap back. I sent Grizzly the bear a note with a present of one of my old shirts, and he sent me a brand new cabinet (that I sold). There are a few major annoyances with the letter writing system though. First of all, you don’t get a keyboard – instead you are given a virtual keyboard and have to push each key with a mouse-like pointer. This makes even writing “How are you? Your dog is barking. I like apples.” a chore I don’t look forward to. If I had to type out my articles like that, everyone of them would be 3 pictures and the words “it sucks.” Actually… I think I’d keep more readers that way…

My other major annoyance is that after you manage to compose a perfectly coherent letter, you send it to your neighbor and they don’t understand it. They’ll send you an angry letter in return. I tested a lot of different things… “Hello. How are you? I am fine” – didn’t understand. “Hello. I like you” – didn’t understand. Eventually I decided that if my stupid neighbors didn’t understand my letters, at least I’d amuse myself.

At least in Animal Crossing I didn't get a restraining order on me after this letter...

Another thing you can do is after sending your neighbor a letter such as this, you can hang out by their house in the trees at night and bang on their door with a shovel. You think I’m joking? I really did this. I think I’ve completely lost my mind. However, I found out Grizzly is a guy… so I stopped stalking him. I didn’t want to seem weird or anything.

So that pretty much sums up your neighbors in this game – Furries that have problems returning each others items. As you continue playing, you’ll gain and lose members. I think I’ve already seen roughly 20 or so of them, and there are over 200 you can meet, so I could play this game for years and never see all of them. Then again, if I’m still playing this game after even a year, I’ll probably live in a hospital and only mumble and curse.

But the game is much, much more than just doing goofy crap with your neighbors. For me, the main purpose of the game is broken into two parts – making my house better, and completing the museum. I’ll get back to my own house in a little bit, but for now let’s talk about the museum.

This is the closest thing to "culture" I've been in years...

This was the first thing that made me think “Oh crap, Jeremy… what have you gotten yourself into again.” Basically, the museum is just like a real world museum, except that you provide all the exhibits. The museum has four rooms… an aquarium, a bug zoo, a fossil exhibition room, and a room for paintings. As you find these objects, you give them to Blathers (the owl that runs the museum), and he’ll put them up on display. There are only so many fossils, paintings, bugs, and fish, so eventually I can complete this museum. This is a dangerous thing for Jeremy. Remember in a previous article that I like to group things for collections? Well, if I know there is a set number of items total, then I get crazed until I have all of those items. I guarantee you, I this game continued this destructive pattern.

As far as acquiring the items, it’s not to hard to get started, and that’s where they get you hooked. It’s like any other thing I’ve been hooked on. Beer, sex, crack, and now Animal Crossing. I’d like to think this was the lesser of those evils, but I can’t think of the last time I rushed home from a party on a Saturday to make sure that I was able to have a beer. However, last weekend I left my friends for a few hours just to come back to my house and try to catch a certain fish… I hate you so much Nintendo… yet much like all my other vices, I keep coming back for more.

So how do you actually acquire the items? Well, after the first few days of playing, Tom Nook will start selling tools to help you in your new life. You can buy a shovel that will allow you to dig up fossils. You can get a net that you can catch the insects with. You must buy a fishing pole to catch fish. The only thing that I can say about paintings is that while I have been playing the game for the month, I have definately helped out the museum’s painting wing.

Here I am next to my painting "collection", which coincidentally is about as full as Poon's book of girls' phone numbers.

So I’ve got one painting. I have no idea what I’m doing wrong, but so far the only way I got one was that Tom Nook was selling them one day, and I bought it and gave it to the museum. I tried everything to get more. I look in the store every day – no pictures. I’ve offered my neighbors sexual favors – not only did I receive no paintings, but now I think the other neighbors are planning on burning down my house. I’ll get all the paintings one day… but who knows how long it will take. I’ve got lots of time, Nintendo, you won’t win this round.

I’d like to take a second to talk about something that is completely off topic altogether. When I write, I like to listen to music, mainly because it allows me to keep track of the time I’ve spent writing, but also because it makes me feel less like the internet shut-in I’ve become over the last few years. What does this have to do with anything? Well, I’m really poor right now, so I haven’t bought any new music in the last few months. I know, I could go download it all, but aside from being lazy, I’d hate to have someone steal my band’s music, so I don’t steal anyone elses. That wasn’t meant to be preachy, but it’s meant to explain that because I wanted to listen to something different, I just caught myself listening to Aha’s Hunting High and Low. I don’t know how I own this album, I know I sure-as-shit didn’t buy it… in any case, I’m finding myself sort of liking it, and that frightens me. Ok, back to the topic – Animal Crossing.

Aside from the paintings, the rest of the museum items aren’t too hard to get. You’ll see insects all over the town, and there are fish in all the streams through your town. There are only certain fish and bugs at different times of the year, so it’s impossible to catch them all in one day, but as long as you’re willing to ignore the real world and play this game for hours like me, then you’ll manage to catch all of those in no time at all. The fossils are a bit different… everyday you can dig up two or three. You don’t know what kind each is at first, so you have to mail them off to some other museum to be identified, and they’ll show up in your mailbox tomorrow. It’s kind of tedious to mail them away, but I don’t mind… my museum has a good number of fossils, and that makes it all worth it somehow… even though it shouldn’t.

Reading this article back, it's easy to see how my life has degenerated...

So that explains the museum part of the game (at least enough where I think it’s explained…), so let me get back to making my house better. Basically, there are loads of different furniture items that you can put in your house to furnish it. Some make sense – chairs, couches, tables, etc… but a bunch of the things you can buy make your house less like a house, and more just plain bizarre. For an example, here is a picture of my house from a few weeks ago.

Be it ever so humble...

I’ve got a couch, a toilet, a radio, a train set, a statue that spits water, and some assorted shirts. Your house ends up being extremely cool because a lot of the items actually do something when they are in your house. For example, the radio plays music, the dressers hold up to 3 items, the toilet flushes when you get off of it… but look in the middle of the floor – NES machines! And yes, they are playable. And I don’t mean you watch your big-headed freak character sit there playing the game – you actually play the NES game. So far, I’ve gotten Donkey Kong, Donkey Kong Jr., Excitebike, Clu Clu Land D, Balloon Fight, and Soccer. There are supposed to be 13 or so of them, and unlike all the rumors I had heard, at this point the Legend of Zelda is not playable in the game, period.

You know, I was thinking about this whole concept, and I still don’t quite understand it. See, I’ve got a shitload of emulators and perhaps even a few ROMs – hell, I’ve still got my original NES set up (because I need my Contra fix every once and a while). So why the hell would I care that I can play some of the older, simpler NES games on my GameCube? I’m not 100% sure why I care, but I do, and I’m thrilled that Nintendo put this sort of stuff in this game.

So as far as setting up your house, the main reason it matters is to get your house’s score to increase in the Home Room Academy (HRA for short). Every morning in my mailbox, I receive a letter from the HRA telling me my score (which is always dismally low), and insulting my house (”It looks more like a warehouse!”). Apparently the game has some sort of Feng Shui aspect that I don’t completely grasp. I just like putting bizarre crap in my house, much like in real life. And unlike in real life, nobody in town complain about my unmowed lawn, or that last night I somehow parked my neighbors front yard. Asshole, I was going to move it when I got up…

Well, out of the box this game has the possibility of consuming all my free time for months (which it has), but is this enough for Nintendo? Oh no… they know that fools like me must see every aspect of a game they are currently playing, so they’ve made it connectable with the Game Boy Advance through the use of the Game Boy Connector Cable, which unlocks Game Boy Island!

This is my island, which I cleverly named Boobies Island. Heh... Boobies...

Yes, to make me pay more, once I attach my Game Boy Advance to the GameCube’s second player slot, I gain the ability to travel to a small island with my beach house, and one other hermit furry that occasionally tells me not to chop down trees. Great… I get my own private island and I share it with some sort of Lorax ripoff. Well, here’s a thought – why do I need a Game Boy Advance for this? It’s obviously programmed into the game, so why do I need to buy a $15 cable? Oh… I get it now… to make more money off of me. Ok, sorry I didn’t get it the first time around.

Actually, the Game Boy connects for a lot of other little things as well… you can download your island and screw around with your islander, which I enjoy doing frequently. If you want you can design patterns on your GBA to upload to the game, although why you would do this is fairly stupid (Oh, you can use patterns to design your own shirts, wallpapers, umbrellas, and more in the game). Basically, if you make a pattern on the GameCube, it costs 300 bells, where in the GBA it’s free. Well, to give you a rough estimate of what 300 bells is equivalent to, it’s around $15. However, you can earn thousands of dollars in a day without even trying, so it basically boils down to about 43 cents in real money. Hey, I like the extras though, Nintendo… don’t get me wrong. It’s just that some of them I don’t quite get how useful they’d actually be. Then again, this is a kids game, and I am 25 years old (which on the internet makes me 1,407 years old)… so forget I said that.

But wait! Just using a cable still won’t give you everything… let’s talk about the e-Reader.

Left - The e-Reader makes my GBA huge like an XBOX (LOL.) Right - A card. Feel the power.

Nintendo released the e-Reader around the same time this game came out. Basically, it allows you to scan cards that will give you little games for your GBA. It came with Donkey Kong Jr., and a few Pokemon cards I didn’t care about… but I bought this thing solely for this reason: Nintendo was making an Animal Crossing series of cards that will interact with the game. How will they do that? Well, if you scan the card along it’s coded edge (in picture above, it is again the huge 1) you will receive a letter in your in-game mailbox with a cool item (like a lawn gnome or a picture of Scott Baio). Alternatively, you can type in the code on the bottom of the card (it is marked with a huge 2, and I smeared the code so I wouldn’t be a dick and give away the codes) and you will receive a letter and a different item. So that’s 2 items per card… I’ll admit that I was willing to bet that these cards would suck a rhino’s cock, but I still needed these things badly. Let’s do a breakdown of cost…

Animal Crossing itself – $49.99
e-Reader – $39.99
Connector Cable – $12.99

And that’s just to get the ability to purchase these cards. I’ve already dropped over $100 to play a game where there is basically no end and no goal to meet, and that was before I bought any cards… The cards come in packs of 5, and they should be $2.99 (although apparently some stores are selling them for $5.00 or more). However, Nintendo either didn’t make a lot of these, or stores thought “What homo would buy cards like these?!” and only ordered one box for the whole chain. Well, sirs, I am that homo, and I need more cards. After a week of checking around and calling all my friends that are still trapped in retail hell, I managed to get 4 whole packs. Four. In three counties in a fairly nice suburban area, stores received four packs of these cards. And, after making children cry by buying their cards, what sort of items did I get?

Items that I could find in the game already.

Wow… I was pretty pissed off at first, but much like my inexplicable need to play scratch-off lotto cards because I love the actual part of scratching (although winning money isn’t a bad deal either), I find myself hunting down these cards everyday. Speaking of that, I think I’ll go look again now… maybe the new shipment of 2 packs is in…