Animal Crossing: Wild World

The Good
This game follows in the footsteps of Animal Crossing for the Gamecube, except it's portable! All the fun you had in the first game follows you around on your DS. Trading bugs, items, making money by selling, and now the addition of Wifi for your friends to come visit your town make this title a "must have" for the Nintendo DS. The stylus increases playability and eliminate the "clunky" button pressing of the first game.

The Bad
The NES games DO NOT appear in this title! And holidays have been reduced to generic offshoots of their more appropriate brethren to prevent offending others who do not share the same type of holidays. Graphics are the same as the console titles (no improvements), so those that were looking for a graphic enhancement will be disappointed.

The Bottom Line
This game is a great simulation and open-ended "sandbox" for you to play in day after day. The best part is it's portable, allowing you to easily check up on your village buddies from time to time without having to wait to rush home. If you like titles that have no real "ending", then this game is for you. Recommended for all age groups.

The Good
So, creating your own designs to go on clothes, hats, umbrellas, walls, and floors is interesting. Being able to visit other people's towns would be interesting if there was anything to actually do. Creating constellations has many many possibilities. Collecting items and being able to show them off is usually fun.

The Bad
But, these things still don't make a good game experience. The whole purpose of the game seems to be to complete collections, for no reason at all. I say no reason because completing the collections doesn't really get you anything to help you out in the game. Also, you're working to pay off a debt on the house you're given. Once you pay off the debt... well you can get a bigger house to put more junk, and incur a bigger debt as well.

There're no fun mini-games to break up the monotony of it all. Just collect stuff to either put in the museum, your house, or sell so you can finish collections, have pointless junk around the house, or make money so you can pay off your debt to have a bigger house. I guess money can also be used to create designs or wasted on fortunetellers that tell you nothing.

The events are pointless too. While they sound interesting, like flower contests, flea markets, and room decoration contests they are boiled down to basically how many flowers do you have around your house, I can buy things for cheap while selling my stuff for more than at the store, and how much junk do I have in my house? It was a little fun to remove everyone else's flowers in the middle of the night and place them all around my house, but no one seemed to remember that they had flowers the next day, so any sort of expected reaction like "Where the heck did all my flowers go?" were sadly absent.

One last pointless activity I'll mention before getting back to the overall experience of the game is letter writing. About the only thing this gives you is collecting different kind of paper to write on when getting generic often empty letters from the AI to the effect of "Thanks for your letter and present, you're the coolest. Here's something from me." in response to my letter of "Attached is a red rose from your flower bed. If you want the rest, send money!"

The controls can be clunky, resulting in unexpected game play that you would like to go back to a previous save point to avoid. This results in a visit from a mole man that explains you should never play this game like that because it's not like other games. Getting scolded at for trying to reverse a gameplay error is just not encouraging. The error you ask? While having a watering can I tapped on some new grass, hoping to water it, which is supposed to be the default action in this case. But, I instead rip it out of the ground forever destroying it. This other similar control issues negatively affected my experience.

The Bottom Line
An exercise in meaningless socially meaningful actions. If you're looking for a game that can be played with friends for a long time to come, don't buy this game. However, it does have some redeeming value somewhere. I really didn't give the title a chance and ended up traveling through time in the game, it's real time even when it's off, and changing the clock on the DS will actually cause the entire town to change. About the most interesting thing there is to do is to see what your town would look like in 50 years without you being there.