These days I’m playing a lot of Animal Crossing (the City Folk one, although it’s not like there’s any difference between two “iterations”, right, Nintendo?) and what can I say, this game is the devil.

(check out the hi-res version on Deviant Art)

Despite its light-hearted visual style and its simple premise, AC is a pretty dense game.

There’s a lifetime (actually one year, rather) worth of content in this game. You can fish, hunt bugs, pick up fruits, collect stuff, interact with the other villagers in various ways (only reading their quirky dialogs is already fun), and if that’s not enough, you can play online with friends, change your character’s clothing to some nonsensical extent (ever wanted to dress as a strawberry? Me too), and all that over the canvas of a real-time simulated little village that evolves as the seasons go by, with unique events occurring at given moments of the year, and content (fish, bugs, etc) changing according to the calendar.

My only gripe with this game (besides Nintendo recycling the same game since the Nintendo 64 version) is that although dense, Animal Crossing is not deep. All these activities, all this content, is very superficial. Fishing for instance is merely a simple “quick time event”, catching bugs requires only to get an idea of the range of your net.

What saves it is the collection component. You can collect all the fishes of the game, all the bugs, dig up and collect all the fossils, all of that to populate the empty museum of the town. This implies playing over a whole year since fishes and bugs are seasonal, which is clever on two levels :you get to play the game longer to get new collectibles, but you get to see the town evolving, which is usually cool enough to boost even further your will to play over an extended period of time. Nice and subtle compulsion loop right there.

The downside to this is that chances are you’ll have nothing more to discover after a year of playing the game.

Which leaves me about 9 months of running away from bees (those who play the game will understand ^^)!

Pixo.