Retronauts - Retronauts Episode 285: Animal Crossing

Episode Date: March 16, 2020

Jeremy Parish, Bob Mackey, Mike Choi, and USgamer's Caty McCarthy chill out for an hour and a half to discuss the low-key world of Animal Crossing, from its primal Nintendo 64 version through its modern-day spinoffs. Music by Mike Choi; art by Greg Melo.

You're listening to Retronauts, a part of the Greenlit Podcast Network, a collective of creator-owned and fully independent podcasts focused on pop culture and video gaming. To learn more and to catch up on all the other network shows, check out Greenlitpodcasts.com. For this week in Retronauts, we welcome the new kids in town. You know, Hi, everyone. Welcome to Retronauts. I'm Jeremy Parrish, and this week we're going to be talking about Animal Crossing, the Capitalism Simulator that makes indentured servitude fun. Hey, so who else is with me here this week on Retronauts? I think that's enough chill Animal Crossing vibe for the podcast. Sorry, was that confusing? I didn't mean to be confusing.

I thought it was just our last recording of the day. No, I'm not that low energy yet. Yeah, so who is with me here in the studio, today to talk about Animal Crossing. Hey, it's Bob Mackey and Booker is a cop. Hi, I'm Mike Choi, hardware dude, flip-crup guy. I love Animal Crossing. Well, there you go. And finally?

And I'm Katie McCarthy of U.S. Gammers. This is like my fourth, Retronauts, fifth? I don't know. I've been on here a few times. A veteran. So this is your Retronauts New Leaf? Yeah. Yeah. If the listeners write in, tell us how many episodes she was on, they win a prize.

And yes, Any moment now, I don't know exactly what date this episode is going up because I forgot to look at the calendar, but it's coinciding more or less right about with the release of Animal Crossing, what is it, New Horizons? New Horizons. For Nintendo Switch. Talk about a perfect podcast game.

Yeah, absolutely. I drive to work now, and I'm going to find if there's a way for me to drive 80 miles down the highway, 80 miles per hour down the highway, while also playing Animal Crossing because it seems like a perfect match. Famous last words. Oh, no.

My famous last words will be like, whoa, I didn't see that truck because stupid Mabel, the, yeah, Animal Crossing New Horizons coming out for Switch, the first Animal Crossing game in, what is it, seven years? It's the longest gap.

I looked it up, I was like, wow, it's been a while. It's been six or seven years at least. There have been some spinoffs in there. Nintendo was like, man, This game did so well for us that everyone is thirsty for Animal Crossing, and we should explore lots of new avenues for Animal Crossing and make so many amoebo. And it was a bad idea, and now they're going back to basics and giving us what we really want, which is an Animal Crossing game on Switch. It also didn't help that Nintendo Wii U just, I think more people bought Animal Crossing New Leaf than bought Wii consoles. So I think they were kind of reserving themselves until they, you know, had a decent install base again.

And here we are. Switch conquered the planet. And now Animal Crossing will conquer Switch. So before we get into the actual conversation about Animal Crossing, I'd like to know when each of you kind of discovered this series and what your relationship with it is. Katie, let's go clockwise this time instead of counterclockwise. Yeah, so I was a weird kid. I didn't have a Nintendo console until the Wii.

I was a PlayStation kid So I didn't get to Animal Crossing until City Folk City Folk here, yeah And that game controls very strange Because obviously it's controlled by a Weemout But I feel like I've got really an Animal Crossing with New Leaf But before that, like growing up It was like the game I always wanted to play

Because all my friends played it and loved it And I was just like, I don't have the console for it I can't experience this with everyone But City Folk finally That was like my gateway into Animal Crossing in earnest All right Like? I started with the GameCube version, and I remember going to GameStop and selling, it must have been like eight Nintendo 64 games to get Animal Crossing.

And, yeah, I mean, I just dove fully into that game, just playing it every hour that I could. I remember the back of the box said, the game plays even when you're not playing. and for me that was my pitch to my mom I was like mom this game it plays when you're not playing that's that's a great value I always had to pitch my games to my mom and yeah I just remember

that was like my gateway into learning not just obviously about Animal Crossing and like as a kid it was like you know having all these friends in this little town but also a big gateway into like Nintendo culture and all the different little Easter eggs and stuff that was stuffed into it it was kind of a pathway to all that stuff for me

which is big part of who I am today so I really associate this with a certain time in my life because I was a little bit older than Mike and Katie. I was 20 when the GameCube game came out and I was living with a girlfriend for the very first time in my life. It did not end well, but we had a lot of fun times on the Animal Crossing and I got so burned out on this first game that I have not touched any of the other ones just because I played this so much. I was so naive, like I bought the DS game and I was like, oh cool, new Animal Crossing. I played it for a few hours. I'm like, this is just the game I played before. And it's kind of been that way since,

but I think after almost 20 years, I'm now ready to play it again. But I will say, one thing in my life is an Animal Crossing reference that lives with me. So I got my bird, Louis, my African Great Parrot, when Animal Crossing was new for the GameCube. And we didn't know what to name him.

So we had the Animal Crossing Strategy Guide. It was full of, like, character names. So we looked through that, and I landed on Louie, for his name, and his name is Louis. So my bird is named after an Animal Crossing character who I don't even care about. I have no idea your bird has been alive that long. Yeah, yeah, he was born.

His parents live a long time. That's crazy. He was hatching. That bird's going to outlive, like, all of us. He'll be buried with me, like, Smithers. But, yeah, he lives with me. And, like, every, like, six months, I'd be like, oh, yeah, I named you after that gorilla in Animal Crossing,

who never even lived in my town. I just, Louie's seen. I thought that was cute. Louis seemed like a good bird name in the strategy guide. So, yeah, that is the element from my, life that still lingers on, but I think now I'm ready for New Animal Crossing. That's like a baby naming book. It's true, yeah.

It really worked out. Yeah, as for myself, I discovered Animal Crossing with the GameCube version and picked it up when it came out and played it a fair amount, but I don't think I really got into it until the DS version, because

any game that I play, I'm going to relate to it more if it's portable. But I will say that the original GameCube version was the first time I ever got really wide exposure for a piece of games writing that I did. I wrote something for my personal site about the place of capitalism in Animal Crossing. And for some reason, Tyco at Penny Arcade really liked it and linked to it from the front page of Penny Arcade. And I remember this really clearly because not only did he do that, but I was

in Japan for the very first time. So it was just like, wow, I feel amazing. I'm like, visiting my, my girlfriend while she's doing her residency in Japan and seeing this cool place for the first time. And I'm famous because Penny Arcade liked me and everyone's reading my article. Yeah. So it was definitely Wild World that really got me hooked. And I spent a lot of time with that and with New Leave, like 100 plus hours. And I did not even touch City Folk because they did not make that a portable game. But the Switch Light is a very portable system. So I am going to play me some new horizons. So we should look back on the origins of Animal Crossing.

There's not really like a huge amount of drama around it because it's Nintendo and only a handful of games that they've created are very like have, you know, a sorted story. Or at least we are only aware of a handful of games with a sorted story around them. So let's just talk about the developers first who are kind of the creative visionaries behind this series. The original lead on Animal Crossing was a guy named Katsuya Eguchi, and he worked with Nintendo R&D 1, which is now SPD, I think,

the software planning division, software planning development, something like that. Anyway, the first major role he had was on Super Mario Bros. 3. So that's a pretty good start in the industry. He worked on Star Fox, another game with funny animals, Yoshi Story, another super cute, soft, like, gentle game. Wave Race 64, which is actually very much the opposite, like butt rock and fast water skis. And Mario Artist, which is probably the most relevant to Animal Crossing. Other important people in the series, there's Aya Kiyogoku, who is notable for being Nintendo's first female lead director.

And she did not start with a series, but she came on, I think, with Wild World or maybe Cityful. and she's now, I feel like she's kind of the lead on the series now. Aguchi has, you know, he's older and he's kind of stepped back and is in more of the production supervisor type role. And so she is really sort of the visionary who spearheads the new games.

And she's really great. I've interviewed her a few times. And she's, have you talked to her? No, I've never, I want to. Yeah, she's so good. I love the new Animal Crossing interview. She's super down to earth and very like warm and, like, you can just understand why she is in charge of Animal Cross. Crossing. I would gladly

follow her into hell is what I put into my notes. It's true. Like, there aren't a lot of game developers where I'm just like, wow, this person is really great, but I really feel like she is. Newley was the first one that she was like in charge of, right? Yeah, I think so. Yeah. I just read that

the direct opposite of Animal Crossing, she co-directed a wizardry game before Nintendo. It's like such the exact opposite. Wizardry Tale the Forsaken Land 2001, assistant director. So she was with, What was that success? Atlas.

Atlas published it, but he developed it. I don't know who developed that one. That's weird. We should talk to her sometime about wizardry and be like, hey, what's up with that hardcore, like, super death RPG you worked on? Oh, the developer was R-A-C-J-I-N. Rock Jin. Okay, I've heard of them. Yeah.

I don't know what else they did, though. All right. Other people involved in Animal Crossing, Hisashi Nogami? Well, he's been, he was actually kind of the director on a lot of the game. games. He is the crossing boss, as I put in the notes. But before that, he did a lot of in-game art and design in the 16 and 64-bit days. So he was not, he didn't come into being a director from directing, but rather from being an artist and an illustrator. And I think that kind of fits Animal Crossing because there are so many graphical assets in this game. There's so many

kinds of furniture and just characters. Just characters. Just like, yeah, it's a game that every time you play, you're going to see something different in small ways. That is burdensome. That's a lot of stuff to create. So I can see that. Isao Moro is another character, or another, another character working on the series. He probably is a character in the game. But he actually recently departed from Nintendo to work in education, which is interesting.

Hideki Kono, who we've talked about before on the show, he came into the series with the mobile spinoff from a few years. ago, Pocket Camp. He's the guy who basically oversees the work that IndyCube, which is a joint venture that was established by Nintendo and Dentsu, which is a huge marketing firm, like the marketing firm in Japan. They started this like collaborative side venture together back at about 2001 to create games like F0 for Game Boy Advance. Anyway, they work on Pocket Camp and he is the one cracking the whip on them. He worked on Mario 2, 3, Mario World, and of course, Mario Kart. He also directed Luigi's Mansion, which is why Mario Kart Double Dash is so weird,

because he didn't direct that one. I see, I see. He was busy scaring poor Luigi. And finally, last but definitely not least, is Kazumi Totaka, who is the guy who does the music. The music is so good. The music is always amazing in Animal Crossing. every hour of the day

there is a different theme and it's always good and his music is so good in fact that they turned him into a character in the game he is the dog KK Slider and every Saturday he'll come to the cafe and he plays music for you and he

sings for you there's a lot of music in that game too a lot. Yep and I really feel like it is kind of his magnum opus in a lot of ways. Not any one game just the series in general. And apparently New Horizons has all new themes for every hour, so I'm looking forward to my 24-hour marathon.

Yeah, you mentioned like the genesis of the game or the kind of origin story, not being, you know, dramatic or anything like that. But I remember reading somewhere that A Gucci was inspired because he had moved like 300 miles or whatever to start his job at Nintendo. and being separated from his friends and family kind of inspired him to make a game where he had that feeling of community and that feeling of like, you know, being part of a village of people and that sort of thing.

So that's kind of dramatic. So Animal Crossing, I believe, originally started as a 64D game. It was the Japan-only magnetic disc add-on for the Nintendo 64. The device actually came out, but only like a handful of games came out for it because it was a huge flop. By the time it actually released after all kinds of development delays,

it was pretty much unnecessary. So they didn't really do much with it. And Animal Crossing did originally come out on N64, in Japan only, but as a cartridge. And I feel like they would have had to cut back a lot of the things they wanted to do because so much of the game is about persistence and, you know, creating a world and coming back to it, and it's always the same, coming back to a save file 10 years later, and there's roaches and weeds everywhere, but it's still the same,

and the animals are like, so realistic. Where have you been? It's only been 3,246 days since I saw you. Right. So Eguchi did work on one of the Mario artist games for 64D, which was actually released. And the game he worked on Talent Studio

doesn't really have a lot to do with Animal Crossing, but there was this performance element where you were like creating a character who could sing and stuff. And I feel like there is some kind of spiritual connection there. Maybe I'm reaching a little, but I feel like he kind of got drafted into working on Animal Crossing because it was also going to be a 64-d-d-game and also kind of like a sandbox for creativity and expression. And then it turned into its own. The whole art engine, too, in Animal Crossing, right?

Which is, I don't know, is that kind of like the Mario Artist Studio thing? It's much simpler. It definitely has the Mario paint, like, stamp maker in it. Like the pattern maker in the old games was just the Mario Paint thing you did on the SNES. Yep. So it does kind of come out of that side of Nintendo, but then it's turned into this other thing. And around the same time, it's worth mentioning that Animal Crossing launched in Japan on N64. Very early in 2001, where the system was pretty much more abundant.

I mean, it was always kind of more abundant in Japan because it just didn't sell that well there. But by that point, the GameCube was really close to launching. So there wasn't a whole lot of excitement around it But it came out just a few months after the release of the Sims by EA I definitely wanted to bring that up because I think it was lateral thinking But it's so interesting how like two different cultures found this idea around the same time Both games being very huge a Sims being much bigger of course I'm not so sure anymore but yeah

I mean at this point the Animal Crossing games sell more than 10 million copies each Yeah yeah it's definitely the winner now but yeah like right close to each other in time is the Sims. You are a person, you move into a new home, you make new friends, you get a job. It's much more like hardcore, capitalistic, but a fantasy version of that than Animal Crossing. But yeah, it's so cool how these two ideas emerge at the same time. Yeah, and I definitely don't think there was any, like, copying from each other's notes. No.

It was really just memory and technology had gotten to a point where that was feasible. Like you look at 1997 we got Fallout and that was a game that kind of famously tried to be persistent in a way

that actually became burdensome by the end because all the changes you made all the things you had done everything you dropped on the ground it was saved in the game and I don't know how it was on PC but I know on Macintosh

the game would actually like kind of overload with the save files and could actually have such a huge save file that it would crash. But the idea of creating this persistent world was there. And Animal Crossing

and the Sims both took that concept of like, here's a persistent world. And that was also something that Shige Sato Itoy wanted to do with Mother 3, the sepal to Earthbound, when it was supposed to be a 64D game, was to create this persistent world. It was something

Microsoft and Lionhead were all like, persistent world, oh my goodness, with Fable a few years later, Like, just the idea of creating a world that you could change and that reflected that always. But both the Sims and Animal Crossing turned it into something other than, you know, a murder RPG where you go around killing stuff to save the world. It was about, like, you know, instead of saying, hey, what if you plant a tree or plant an acorn and it turns into a tree when you come back years later. Right. Because that would be a thing you could do in an RPG for some reason.

And here it's, hey, what if you planted a seed and it turned into a tree and every day you could come back and you could see how it had sprouted a little more and there were new leaves on it and then, you know, a week later, you had a proper tree. And it becomes part of this dynamic changing world that you're constantly interacting with and shaping. Before we move on, I think the real difference between the Sims Animal Crossing is the Sims is really like a simulation of the perfect meritocracy where like every bit of hard work pays off. There's no other influences in your success.

and you can just, like, live that simulation where it doesn't apply in real life any way. I think Animal Crossing is more like a child's view of adult life where it's just like, I'll pick berries today. And, like, you don't have a job. You can opt into many of the capitalistic features of the world. And, like, all the jokes about Tom Nook being, like, a greedy fee for, like, a scheming, money-grubbing jerk. Like, he is the most forgiving lender in the world. Like, I'm like, exactly. And you can pay him whenever you want, right?

Yeah. Yeah, there's no. No deadline. If you don't pay him off, then he's like, okay, you just can't make your house bigger. As home ownership alludes more and more of us, these Animal Crossing games are just becoming like a simulation of the ideal life for a lot of people, I think. Well, I think another big difference between the Sims and Animal Crossing is that the Sims is very much a reflection of American suburban life in that it is based around the home.

It's based around like creating your perfect home, building it, expanding it. and most of the interactions you have are within the home. When you go to work, you like your SIM goes off. You don't go to work with them. Whereas Animal Crossing is much more a Japanese perspective, where it is about the community that you exist in. And you can take the time to decorate your home and you can pay off your loan and expand your home

and then you have new rooms to fill. I always have a room full of gyroids because that is something I do. That's the basement for me. That's the entrance for me. Welcome. Yep. So, yeah, you do have that home element, and you can take pride in that. And in fact, you know, some of the more recent games, you have the Happy Home Academy

who come and judge the quality of your home and how much feng shui you have. But that's not really the core of it. The core of it is going outside the home and mingling with the other residents, getting to know them kind of on their own terms, visiting their homes, doing things for them, contributing to the community. you know, in the most recent game, New Leaf, you became the mayor and you were improving the community kind of from your own pocket by building, you know, residential improvements that all the towns people could enjoy, but also contributing to the museum and adding artwork and just getting to know everyone, making the place more beautiful. And it does really seem to me like America versus Japan, where it's inward focused versus outward focused. and correct me if I'm wrong, but I feel like that is true. One thing about that is like with Sims,

I kind of feel like it's sort of like a sandbox like you're sort of running experiments with these people in this world, whereas Animal Crossing, you are the human in this little animal world. And I think one thing that's interesting about that is with like Kasumi Totaka. You know, he's always putting like these little bits, the little Totaka song in all of his games where it's like this little secret part of him that's in all these games. And in this game, he actually like puts him.

in the game as like a as a character that might have been him and that might not have been his decision but I think it's an interesting example of that in Nintendo games All right, so let's talk about how Animal Crossing works. And it's pretty straightforward. It's a very low-stress kind of game. But basically, every game begins with you arriving in town. I don't think you talk to a rover anymore at the start, do you? Is that something you still do?

Because I know that was the first game. I'm trying to remember a new leaf. It's been a while since I started. No, you don't talk to Rover at the beginning. Okay, but in the original, you were actually, you started outside the town in a train or a bus, and you were riding that to, yeah, that's right, there's the train station.

So you're riding the train to the depot, and on the way there, you basically answered some questions that determined what your character would look like. Sort of outside your control, you didn't know what the answers were going to cause it to do, but you could affect it once you read a guy that was like

here's how you make your character look the way you wanted to. But basically you randomly generate yourself a boy or a girl and you arrive in town with nothing to your name, your mom sent you there or something and Tom Nook is like, well we can't have you loitering so let's build you a home

and you owe me 180,000 bells and bells are the currency and sometimes you find them buried in the ground sometimes you hit a rock and they pop out Sometimes you sell fruit or bugs, and you can get more bells. I was starting a new file for the GameCube 1, and Rovers friends with Tomnick, and he says, hey, I have someone coming in, like, can you hook him up with a house? And then he goes, I guess under the pretense that you're going to pay for it when you get it.

And then Tomlin is like, okay, it's this much. And he said, I don't have any money. Or you have like a thousand bells or something like that. And then he's like, all right, well, you know what? I'm going to let you live there, and I'm going to give you a job. And so he is a really nice guy. There is that kind of element of like it seems a little bit like it's rigged against you. And, you know, you're not told in advance, oh, yeah, I'm going to build you a house that you can pay for.

It's just like, oh, I'll set you up with a house. Or you could be joining a cult. Right. You're not aware of it. I mean, there definitely is kind of like a pervasive meme online about the cult element of Animal Crossing. There was a very famous, I think, a long play or a let's play on something awful that was kind of, Kind of, it was highly fictionalized and was, you know, basically went off into a direction that was not supported by the game where someone was like trying to bust out all the animals and free themselves from this town. You know, a lot of this just comes from the limitations of the original version where you basically didn't have a world outside of the town.

Like the only way you could go outside of town was to use the link cable to communicate with a Game Boy Advance and go to a little island where you could play some mini games. But otherwise it was like you were kind of trapped there. That feeling has really gone away a lot. You could put in someone else's memory card and then go to their town. And the scary part about that was that sometimes your villagers would move to their town. That was terrifying if your favorite villager would just go to the other town. I think also their GameCube internal clock could mess with your town because I gave a friend my memory card because he had a pro-action replay. he was going to give me the locked-away NES games on Animal Crossing.

When he gave me back my town, it was essentially destroyed because my animals are acting as if I had been gone for a year. Right. So I think maybe his GameCube clock was set back a year. So when they were on my town, like, oh, a year has passed since we were active. So very weird. I mean, you could do all kinds of experimentation like that because it came with a memory card with a little rover on it. Yeah. And there'd always be like one fruit your town would be lacking sort of like Pokemon.

So you'd need to visit. You only have one fruit. Oh, you only have one fruit? You don't start with one. Yeah, that's one of the trademark elements of the series is each town has its own fruit. There's like five or six kinds of fruit, and what type you start with is randomly determined. And any fruit from outside of town is worth much more money to sell than your native fruit. So you can take fruits from other towns and plant them and make some really easy money early on the game that way.

So Tom Nook, the Tanuki businessman. set you up with a home, and that puts you into debt. And so then you're basically just working to pay off your debt. But again, as we've mentioned, it's not really a super urgent thing. You can kind of take your time. And if you don't want to expand your home, then you don't have to pay off your home. You go to the post office and like pay at the ATM, basically, to pay it off. So it's kind of, it's like the game is very concerned about money, but is also kind of polite about it.

like it doesn't want to get in your face all the time and then, you know, when you do pay it off that everyone celebrates and then Tom Nook is like, oh yeah, I add it on to your home, you owe me this much now. Yeah, like you want to have a bigger home now, right, now that you just finished paying it off? Yes, exactly.

So in Animal Crossing, one of the things that kind of sets your character apart from every other character is that you are a human and no one else is. Everyone is an animal. But remarkably, there's nothing fetishistic about it. I mean, if you put aside

Put aside internet illustrations of Isabel, she's everyone's wifu, and they've gone some weird directions with her the fans have. But otherwise, it's just like these cute little talking animals. They're not furries or something. There's no

like undertone of sexuality or anything to it. It's just like these little talking animals who walk around, they speak in gibberish, and they want you to do stuff. there are hundreds and hundreds of possible villagers that you can interact with. They have something like seven or eight different personality types.

And so depending on their, I think their species, their personality type, and their gender, they have all kinds of different conversational options and directions to go with you. So you can play these games for 100 hours or more and rarely come across the same dialogue that you've had before. The amount of the volume of dialogue in there is exhaustive, and it's a tremendous localization effort.

I can see why the N64 version did not come over here. Yeah. Yeah, I'm just thinking like the dialogue is kind of like procedural, but that could be a bad word for it. But it's just like a collection of elements that are existing within the games like memory. And to make this game work in English, they had to work very hard and they did because there are so many very Japanese specific things. Like the gyroids are Hanyahuas statues from like the pre-current civilization of Japan, like the Japan-specific holidays that are in the game that they have to rename and change. Like so many things outside of just pure localization they have to work on. They changed like the shrine in the center of the town to a wishing well for America.

Yeah, that too. Yeah. So many like text and visual elements like really cool. Yeah. I think my favorite personality is the mean boy personality. That's my favorite one. My favorite villagers, Tom. Really deep voices, too?

Yeah. Yeah, that's another thing about the game is that the animal language that they speak is actually phoneme-based. So when you stop and listen, they're basically taking every single letter that appears in a word and pronouncing each letter very rapidly. So sometimes some of the words come out sounding like the actual word. And I think that probably works a lot better in Japanese because every phoneme there is like a syllable that ends in a terminal vowel. So

they're not saying like M instead of mm. They're actually saying mm because that's the sound. Yeah. So you can actually turn that off in the options too and it says that it's animal knees. Oh yeah, yeah. Which is kind of a weird name for it. It's kind of like

simlish, but it's but for animals. Another comparison. I like it. Yeah. And one of the things that I am always really impressed by is the way there's this memetic element to your interactions with the villagers. So you can

come up with catch phrases or nicknames and things like that and they'll start getting passed around from animals and you don't really know what the vector is going to be or where it's going to resurface but randomly a character will be like, oh I heard someone say that you like to be called

such and such so I'm going to start calling you that now or they'll just like give you a nickname name and then other people will pick up that name even though you didn't want it and you know it's just like jerks all my villagers started calling me m money at some point i guess this is my life now yeah and you can trade t-shirts with like t-shirt designs with characters and they'll like wear them with pride but then after a while they'll give them away to someone else so you'll see like clothing that you created circulate from character to character in the village i remember i forget what the Wii functionality was, but there were some

fake scandal about how there were some naughty contents in the game, but it was really because somebody went online and got a naughty word from somebody or like a naughty stamp from somebody or something like that. Yeah, it was like a racial slur in one of the animal catchphrases. Yeah, good.

And it was, I think, in one of the review copies, I could be wrong about that. So it was like very easy for it to propagate because the sample size was so much smaller, but, you know, people trying to corrupt this innocent little game. How dare they? I know.

one approaches the game. Katie, how do you approach Animal Crossing? Is it methodical or is it just like willy-nilly? I kind of like had, especially a new leaf, like maybe it's more fresh in my memory because I was a few years ago-ish. But I would like play it every day and I had like a schedule of what I would go and do. It's like, okay, I'm going to go hunt for fossils and turn them into the museum and, you know, shake some trees and sell the fruit and like all that type stuff. But I also got really into designing stuff and sharing the QR codes on like Tumblr. Which with New Leaf, that was a huge thing of people sharing their designs. And it was kind of like an extension of what was introduced in city folk of, like, sharing your stuff online.

But it was like way easier with New Leaf because you could just post a QR code. And now you can download like a Chiari Pamu, Palm you dress and whatnot. So it's like pretty easy and fun. And I got like really into like that aspect. I'm like not a good designer or drawer, but like it was pretty easy and fun. You just zoom in really close. Mike, what about you? You know, I played them all, all the main series ones.

I haven't played Amoe Festival, and I haven't played a ton of Pocket Camp. But going back to the GameCube version, it showed me just how many quality of life things they've introduced over the years. Like for the fossils, for the GameCube, when you blathers... It's agonizing. He can't. He doesn't have the license to... He says in the game, like, I don't have the license to evaluate these fossils. You need to ship them to the fossil place or whatever.

and then you have to wait for them to come back and then you turn them in and you can't even in the game key one you can't even fill a hole with your foot like you have to just put your shovel back into it it's like little things like that but um you know it was still i think the the game people one is deceptively simple at first you think like oh there's not that much stuff to do but there's such a a deep i don't know i don't know what you would call it but there's just like there's so many things to do if you really stick to it and go in and every day and you discover all these little secrets like the presents flying through the air or people who wash up on the shore and stuff like that. So I don't know. I mean, I think it's one of those games that if you play it

every day for a year and you experience all the content, it's absolutely massive. It's huge. Yeah, one of the things that is really impressive about Animal Crossing is how the game world does seem to change with the seasons. I mean, it's kind of hard boundaries. It's like July 1st. and here's the locusts or the cicadas, they're singing. But, you know, it does create a different tonal quality for when you play. Like, playing in the spring is very different than playing in the winter or the fall. Yeah, yeah, because all the bugs change and the activities change and all the conversations are so contextual.

Like, you know, one of my favorite things about Animal Crossing, and I think it was only in the GamePue version that they did this, but during the winter, some animals they would set up igloos, and they have a little bubbling color. of chowder in the middle of the igloo, and you go and then you play gambling games with them. They're like, I'm thinking of three numbers. If you guess it correctly, I'll give you a chair or something like that. Classic toy day activities. Yep. Gambling over stew. Bob, what about you? When I played the original a lot and a bit of the DS version, and I really

played with no real agenda, like I've known people who played the games very methodically where they'll have like a spreadsheet or they'll have a list of things to check off. Like, I have to make sure I get everything out of every day possible. But for me, it was like, what will I find today? And then when I started scraping up against, like, you know, not seeing new things in a certain season, I would be like, okay, how do I find the rest of the things in this season? And try to complete them that way. But for me, it was more like, what will I find today?

What will I discover today? And it was very open-ended for me in that way. Yeah, I tend to be somewhat structured, and that each day I kind of start out by walking around, looking for the fossils, and smacking the money rock. trying to get the cash, trying to get the money bag that pops out if you hit it fast enough. Just like a Super Mario Brother question block. Yeah, exactly. I don't tend to shake the trees a lot because I hate bees.

Oh, so scary. Anyway, so, yeah, I do tend to do that. And my overarching goal is usually, one, to complete my museum and just get everything in there that I can. and two, to make the town pretty, to make it beautiful, create pathways and line it with flowers and trees. I tend to be sort of not a, like, GMO, but I definitely create a monoculture of different trees, like fruit trees.

Like I get rid of just about every tree that does not bear fruit except for a few pines. And I might put like a bamboo in the corner someplace, but you have to be careful with those, because bamboo sprouts, like, it spreads. It's kind of like a virus or something. And you have to be careful because if you don't pay attention and you let bamboo go, it'll just override everything.

You know, I think for me, the game, the biggest part for me, especially as a kid playing with the villagers and, like, fixating on one villager as, like, my best friend. Yeah, that's what I would do. Like, I quit playing city folks, my favorite villager moved away. Oh, that's so bummer. It was anchovy, who was a lazy bird. He had, like, big eyes.

And he was just, like, so funny. So he was, like, my best friend. And then just, I think I took a few days off and I logged back in. And it was like, oh. It was just like a note. It was so sad. I don't know if they made this any better, but it feels like a betrayal because they're just gone. Yeah, they're just gone.

And they're just like, hey, I'm sorry. I pieced out. It's a real Irish goodbye. In New Leaf, they definitely changed that a lot because I think they got a lot of feedback that it really bums people out. So sad. So you have more influence over characters leaving. They'll start to drop hints in advance.

like, yeah, I've been thinking about moving out. And you'll have opportunities to be like, no, don't do that. And so you can kind of nudge them to stay. I feel like you can even get to their house when they're packing up and you see all the boxes in their room. And you can be like, no, don't leave. And they're like, you know what? You got me.

I won't leave. Sometimes they will, though. Sometimes they're like, no, I've got to get out. Yeah. See you later. Yeah, of course, it's more important to me to be able to get rid of villagers that I don't want. Some of the villagers, I'm just like, get the hell out of my town. Smacking with the nets.

Smag him with the net. Especially the ones that are always actually. during the hours that I'm active because I usually tend to be able to play at a certain time in a day. And there are characters, you know, depending on their personality type, they may not get up until, you know, 11 a.m. Or they may get up really early. And being stuck with characters you don't like who are active when you're around, you're just like, you're ruining my experience, get out of my town. Yeah. You put them in a pitfall.

Smack them with a net or an axe. It's weird that these characters can evoke such emotional reactions from us. when they are just like, they're just different versions of the same character model. Like pulling from a database of dialogue. Yeah, and they all,

you know, kind of have a pretty set amount of dialogue that they can give you, but it just seems so organic. It's really impressive how they fake that. So you're asking how we played the games. I just remembered something. It will tell you how old I am

and how old this series is. So when I was playing the game, I loved Mario Payne as a kid, and this was like almost 10 years later. So I love making patterns and stamps and stuff. And what I would do, was on my computer, I would go to this website that let you put in any JPEG

and it would spit out essentially the pattern for Animal Crossing. I would print that out and then bring it over to the TV and then sit down and fill out like dot by dot on the grid the entire thing. It took me 20 minutes, but I made a Clanoa to put on my front door. That is how old I am and how old the series is.

There were no smartphones to look at it. There was no touch interface. It was me printing out a piece of paper and then looking dot by dot on the TV and doing it. That's okay, Bob. I want Clanoa. I mean, I'm sure you can put them in the new game too. It's worth it. I remember doing Paper Mario,

but it was Luigi in Paper Mario style, making that pattern. I imagine that that interface is like a lot of young pixel artists kind of like first tool for designing that sort of stuff, which is really cool. They say with a little bit more than age comes wisdom.

Well, over here at the cartridge family, we only have one question. Question. Who are they? Join three imperfect dads as they juggle kids, wives, and jobs while indulging in their favorite hobby playing video games. The Cartridge Family, a greenlit network podcast. How does Bloodbourne stack up against, say, Oregon Trail? And is Bomberman just loadrunner from a different point of view? Find out on Hardcore Gaming 101's top games, where we objectively, definitively, and scientifically rank the games you nominate for our ever-growing list. HG 101's top games. Twice a week, every week, right here on Greenlit. Running Diagnostics in three, two.

Men like that is a podcast. Good so far? That really sucks. Oh, no. Shut her down. Shut her down. They thought they could make something funny. They can't do anything.

They can't do. Before mission. We can. Listen to men like that. So let's go over all the things you can do in Animal Crossing. So let's go over all the things you can do in Animal Crossing. And I'm sure I'm going to be missing some things. So please, step in to correct me.

But first, there's fruit. We talked about fruit a little bit. But fruit falls from trees. If a tree can bear fruit, it will grow fruit every few days. And it'll sprout one and then, like, more will show up. And if you shake it off when there's just one, then it'll take longer to regrow. So you kind of have to be patient and let it properly sprout. But you can eat fruit.

There's no real value to this. You can give it to villagers. It's like in real life. Yeah. Or you can suck. Or you can plant it and another tree will grow that will bear that kind of fruit. So, yeah, I don't know, are there any interesting strategies or memories you have regarding fruit?

I mean, like what you mentioned earlier about getting a fruit from another town and then selling that was, I guess, like, I feel like it was back in the day with the Wii version is I would look online for like a lot of strategies, like in like old forums and whatnot of like I was always a lurker. I think I only posted a guy online in, like, middle school. But it was a lot of, like, okay, what are other people doing? Like, how are they getting the most bills? Like, what can I do to pay off my loans?

Like, build another room or whatever. And it's just fascinating. I think I'm not obviously grew with, like, Tumblr and the 3DS for, like, with New Leaf. That was, like, there's just strategies everywhere. And that was, like, a harder game to game with that, like, you know, resetting the clock and everything. It was like much harder to like figure that out. I don't know how it's going to work on Switch. Probably not. Yeah, it's probably going to be like it'll chat with the central database or something. It'll be a server. It's a bummer. You know, it's okay. I never, I never,

I never, I never, I never, I never game the clock. I always did it on week. Oh, I claim, I game the clock all the time. Yeah, yeah, it's like that's, I did that a lot. But I didn't do it on New Leaf at all. Especially as an adult. Yeah, especially as an adult, it's important. I think in New Leaf, they acknowledged that and they made it easier for you to switch that so you could experience different parts of the day so that you weren't always there tonight. There's Q-O-L improvements in the life. Yeah. So you don't have to cheat the clock because you don't just cheat the game, you cheat yourself.

Yeah. You can also, like, introduce what town decrees that make everyone stay up later? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, you're a tyrannical mayor. It's a new mayor, but tyrannical. You know, for the fruit, in college, my fiancé, Joanna and I, we were in a long, distance relationship and the fruit was like such a nice shared goal to be able to try and like you know it was kind of like Pokemon you know you like want to complete the Pokedex we remember we were

trying to get every fruit and and propagate them in our respective villages and so I have a lot of fond memories of like oh my goodness you got a peach from your mom yeah I was it over I was really worried about how I'd be able to fill out my town because when you know wild world and New Leaf came out I was working in the games press so I was around people playing Animal Crossing at the time it was easy to trade stuff. Thankfully, I just got a job at a game publisher, so I'm no longer isolated in my home anymore. I go to the office, and I'm going to be hooked up.

So that's good. Also, something to remember about fruit is that starting, I think, with New Leaf, there's the island, and that grows tropical fruit, and each town has one kind of tropical fruit, which is like a banana, a pineapple. Like a mango. Coconut. No, no, coconuts wash up on the shore.

A mango, I think, is another one. I think there were four total. I can't remember. Isn't there a durian, right? Yes, that's right. Yes. And then in the town, you can have like orange, cherry, apple, pear, or peach. And I think maybe one more.

I don't know. Anyway, there's plenty to do. There's lots of fruit to cultivate. And I kind of get obsessed with it sometimes. There's also fossils. I mentioned those. We didn't really explain what it means for blathers to appraise them. Do you want to talk us through that, Mike?

Yeah. So, I mean, in the GameCube one, you basically find these fossils there's like three that generate every day or something like that. And, you know, if there's a little X mark on the ground, you dig it up, you take it to Blathers. And in the GameCube One, he just says, oh, wow, this is great, but I don't have the license to do it. You have to ship it and see it have to ship it to this. Well, you have to explain the fact that when you dig it up, it's just like a miscellaneous rock. You don't know exactly what it is. Yeah, you just see like a little swirly and a little star on it. And then when you get it

back, it's like a dinosaur skull icon. But it can, they have actually like a really thorough selection of fossils like the head of a triceratops, the torso of a triceratops. Yeah, there's like 20 dinosaurs, and they can be like one or two pieces. You can, like, you know, there's maybe ammonite or something. Yeah, like one fossil. But then you can have, you know, a T-Rex with, you know, five or six pieces. And once you finish all three parts, Blathers gives you like a lesson on what it is and like this was during the paleo, whatever period.

And it's a lot of, I mean, like you said, it's a lot of dialogue, but, and it definitely takes a long time to do. But if you get a multiple or like a duplicate of a fossil, you can sell it for big money. Yes, big money. Fossils are worth a lot of cash. Yeah. And actually, you don't have to give every fossil to the museum.

Yeah, you could just sell it. Yeah, even if the museum doesn't have it, you can be like, no, I'm keeping this to myself. Why would you do that? If you want to watch, someone just want to watch the world burn. Those bones are mine. You can also do the same thing with fish. You can create a collection of fish in the museum, the aquarium.

And fish can be caught in rivers, off the beach. There's a pond. And then you can go to the tropical island and catch fish there. Are there any other ways to catch fish? No, but you can get like trash. That's true. You can get boots or tin cans or whatever. Such a statement.

Yep. And there are a certain fish that are much harder to find than others. I think the hardest is the sealicamp, which is like basically a fossil fish that still is alive. But that's kind of the big one. And it's a very simple, basically fishing game kind of mechanic where you'll throw out your rod or your line. And there's a bobber and a fish, if it sees it, you can see the shadow underwater. It'll come and nip at it and make little rumbles. It'll twitch a little bit.

But then when the fish really takes a bite. the bait, there's more of a dramatic pull on it. And that's when you snag the fish and then pull it in. It's very satisfying. In fact, I just played the very short game called a short hike. And there's fishing in that game. And the fishing in that game is the exact same fishing as Animal Crossing. Yeah. I mean, it works. It's so good. And the Rumble in the GameCube controller kind of gives you a cue on when to actually pull it in. One thing is after the fish bites, I would always like furiously smash the A button and then like maybe a year ago someone

was like, you don't need to do that. You just press it once. It's automatic. Yeah. Yeah. Changed my life. Also, tapping or pressing the B button does not help you catch Pokemon.

Oh, yeah. Sorry. There's art, hang in the museum. And this is a little harder to come by. Yeah. Because basically as far as I know, unless someone trades it with you, which happens very infrequently, you get art by going to

Red's tent that pops up. Crazy Red. Crazy Red. He pops up a tent and he lets you take a piece of art or buy a piece of art. And there's a chance that's going to be a forgery. And you can always tell the forgeries if you look at them really carefully because there's tells. But I will say

that in the arts favor, it's the only way you're going to find nudity and a Nintendo game. Oh, yeah. Because there are accurate depictions of classical art. You can also get those peeing mannequin statues. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. So, it's a very naughty.

Very naughty. So naughty. Other things with the museum, insects. There are insects all over the place. Sometimes you have to look for them. Sometimes you have to dig them out of the ground. The elusive giant stag. Yes.

You go to the island. Yeah, I was about to say there's like that strategy. If you go to the same island and you just very carefully creep around. to get the giant bug thing, beetle. Yep. And Blathers doesn't like the bugs. Every time you get the ugly. He freaks out.

But he'll take them and he'll put them on display. And yeah, there are some really great insects, like very, this is very Japanese, is the beetle collecting. But there are also very mundane insects. Even the bees that attack you count as insects that you can catch and take to the museum. That's right. There are, you know, flies and grasshoppers and there's like the mole cricket that you have to dig out of the by listening to where it is. Yeah.

So a lot of fun details. And you can pull, they fly, they buzz, they burrow. Yeah. You can put all that stuff in your house, too. I forgot that you just, like, put a giant T-Rex, you know, fossil in your house if you want to be a true baller. There are constellations which you cannot collect, but you can define. You can, like, create your town constellation, right?

Was that, that was in wild world for the first time, yeah. Yeah. The first game had like a town song and the town crest or flag maybe, I think. Yes. Yeah. Because Wild World had the top screen. And so the top screen is where you got the constellations. Right.

Right. And so Wild World introduced Celeste, who was Blather's sister who works at the observatory and looks at the sky because that is her name. She was doomed by her parents to be an astronomer. Yeah. But of course, the main thing to do in Animal Crossing is town improvement and home improvement. by, I don't know, especially with New Leaf. Like, there's a lot of things you can do in town.

Like, you can add bridges. You can buy benches or statuary or what else is there? You can add the reset in New Leaf that you can add the reset center, the reset surveillance center, which they got rid of because Mr. Reset he was scaring little children with his yelling. Offensive Italian stereotype. He was like a mobster, though, which, was what I liked about him.

His brother is Don Resetti. Oh, you're right. That's right. Yeah. But not like Mafia, Don't Reset. We'll talk about Resetti a little bit later. It's a good point. Okay.

There's a lot you can do. You have to be vigilant to prevent weeds from growing because they will diminish the appeal of your town. And if your town has left to be ugly, the animal villagers are more likely to move out. You can plant flowers. You can plant trees. You can create pathways by creating like stone pattern. or brick patterns or any pattern, really. But laying that down on the ground,

yeah, you can get as elaborate as you want. Of course, you know, all your hard work can be for naught because it is possible for a new villager to come in and just destroy something that you've created by planting a house, you know, just any old place. But what can you do? I'm trying to think, are there other things you can do in town to make it awesome?

They don't like when you chop down too many trees, right? Yeah, there's like an optimal... You can have too many, and then you can have too little, which is you start with too little. The Japanese title is Animal Forest. I've got to make it a forest. I've got to max out each acre with as many trees as I can get. Yeah. I mean, Animal Crossing taught me what a mortgage is, like, truly.

Because, like, my parents have never owned a home, so, like, that word was just never thrown around when I was a kid. And, like, hearing it for the first time at Animal Crossing, I was like, what is this? And then learning, it's just, you know, horrible. I will say that it is not an accurate mortgage. Oh, yeah, for sure. Yeah, definitely. Speaking of someone who has one, there is no property tax, which, by the way, just went up for me. It's very exciting.

And you don't have to pay mortgage insurance and things like that. I like the Animal Crossing version better. They don't get after you if you don't pay it every month. It just seems nice. No HOA. I was going to mention that, yeah. There's the HHA, which is much nicer. They just come in and are like, hey, good work.

Your house is really cool. Or your home could use a little improvement. They're not like, hey, you didn't pay us $250 bucks last month, so we're going to charge you extra money and we're not going to mow your lawn anymore. Going to break your windows. And finally, the coolest collectible and also the scariest collectible is NES games.

That was only in the GameCube version. Oh, yeah, and for some reason, two were locked out. Punchouts and Super Mario Brothers were locked out, and you could send them to the Game Boy Advance, too, into the RAM. Yeah. You know, for me, the NES games, so growing up, my dad worked in an electronic swap meet, and so there were stores there that had, even, my dad might have even sold them. I might be snitching on my dad right now. He sold these, like, you know, there's like 3,000-in-1 consoles that had like, you know, it was the same like 200 NES games just repeated over and over again with different titles.

Right. And I remember it was like an N64 chassis, but like with the cartridge molded in. And it was N64 controller, which is like. Oh, that's great. But I remember that was sort of like, as a kid, like drinking from the fire hose for retro games, right? Going through and playing like you're a kung fu and like, you know, all the different NES games. But in Animal Crossing, I remember first getting balloon fight from Jingle during Christmas. And that was like such a more special focused experience where it's like, okay, I have this NES game.

Like I'm going to actually like play it instead of, you know, having the, it's sort of like with Netflix paralysis. Like, oh my goodness, I have so many things I could watch. I'm not going to watch anything. That's kind of how I felt with those pirated games. Yeah, there was like a slow drip of these NES games for me because they were sort of the rarest thing in the game, I think, because they were playable things in the game. So I got really good at CluClooland D.

Oh, yeah. It was the first time I actually sat down to play that game and figured out instead of like playing the ROM for 30 seconds. Well, that was where I discovered that there was a CluClund D as opposed to the just standard CluClund. It was kind of weird that they included this one random Japanese only release. from the Famicom Disc System as part of the American Animal Crossing release.

But they did, and it was opened up a new world. Yeah, one thing about that is that you could, like, go to Tom Nook and enter, like, this crazy alpha-numeric code to get, I think, any piece of furniture. Like, once you get to a certain point in the game, certain kind of, like, store level with Tom Nook. And so you could get, like, those NES games, I think. Or at least, like, you could get a bunch of crazy Nintendo collectibles

and stuff like that. Oh, so The Legend of Zelda, was the one game that you needed the pro-action replay to actually get. So that was in the game. Some of the other ones like Punch-Out and Mario, those were through a giveaway, like a Famitsu thing or a cheating device. So, yeah, but it's crazy that, like, Zelda was just on that GameCube disc. It's interesting because Zelda, when I played Animal Crossing on GameCube for the first time,

like it really reminded me of Zelda the way it moved from screen to screen. instead of being like free roaming I was like man I'd love to play a Zelda game with this engine I know like I don't know like for the the new game does it keep up to the sort of like rolling world or is it like what does the world look like in the new game I'm a weirdo and I prefer the only time it was like screen by screen Zelda style but I yeah I totally give what you mean

All right, so jumping back in here, I think it's time for the Animal Crossing character elimination round. Oh, no. Sudden death. Sorry, Resetti. No, I'm going to call out character names, and someone is going to talk a little bit about that character. Starting with a rover. I love rover. I have a plush, a rover on, like, my, I have, like, a figure shelf, like a five-year-old,

but I have, like, a little rover there, very cute. I got a target randomly. Like, I was just a target, and I was walking by it. I was like, why do they have all these animal crossing plushes? When was this? Like, a wild, like, a few years ago. I also got, like, a weird decut link toy that they had. They just have, like, random, cool Nintendo toy just on this, like, weird.

It was almost like a clearance shelf. It was just, like, so out. the way, and I was like, what the heck is going on here? They have, like, some cool stuff out of Target. But, yeah, I have a rover. I love Rover. I like how he's kind of creepy looking. Yeah.

Yeah. I remember when I, because, you know, just going up with a GameCube version, I was like, Oh, Rover's awesome. He's so cute. I had the memory card with his little, him and his little Argyle sweater. But I remember when I first showed it Rover to my fiance, she was like, oh, my goodness. He's scary looking. Like, look at his eyes.

It's like bloodshot eyes. I'm looking at dialogue. One of the first things he tells you is, I promise I'm not crazy. Right. I'm going to sit next to me. And then if you say, I don't want you to sit next to me, he just sits and he's like, I'm going to sit here anyway. You get the angry face now forever. I love Isabel. I love all these animal cross the characters. Isabel's like so cute. But yeah, like as you mentioned earlier, the fandom around her is really creepy. Like people have been really weird towards her. But she's just like, you know, cute and clumsy.

And what I really love about newly is obviously, like, being a mayor, you have like a lot more control over your town. which is really cool and I like how she's just like so helpful and everything and it's just so sweet and it was a nice person to greet

or animal to greet every morning, you know? Oh, I would not blame the fans entirely because I think not in a creepy way but I think they wanted to make like a Moe character

Oh, for sure, yeah, definitely. And more like anthropomorphic proportions than the other characters in the game so I can see why that fed into people sexualizing Isabel not to get too far into this but I can totally understand

like why it happens. So someone pointed out to me once The fact that her name Isabel means Is a bell And her hair Her hair looks like a bell bag Yeah and if I can play as Isabel in a game

I will play as her I feel like she is the face that Animal Crossing needed To branch out and start appearing In like bigger Nintendo franchises Because now she's in Smash And before that she was in Mario Card 8 And that was kind of the point at which like, wow, here's a non-Mario character racing in Mario Carve.

That's pretty rare. At that point, I think we just had Link. And so it was like, you know, he kind of stopped and said, what's up? Isabel is in Mario Kart? This means something. This is important. Yeah, Isabelle is my main in Smash. And it was funny, too, because when Smash Ultimate first came out, she was like breaking the game

because she could pocket assist trophies. And so you could see her unleashing Ratheloses from her pocket. she could unleash an infinite amount of ratholosis from her pocket and, like, break the game. Wow. Nice. Tortimer. Hmm. Old.

So much for Katie's love. I'm trying to remember, like, who Tornamor is. He's the mayor. He's removed from office. Yep. He's been excommunicated. He's on an island, just like Napoleon, right? Yes.

Yeah. Abel was I here? I saw a job. Rissetti. So good. There's an amebo of him. There is. Yeah, I have, like, all of the Animal Crossing Amoevos.

They are still the cheapest Amoebo. Like, there was a clearance. It was a huge miscalculation, but I'm glad they exist. I have them all. I think they make up, like, 40% of the Amoebo library. Just like, here's every character. It was for that Amoe Festival game, right? Well, it was, but it was also Nintendo.

I think they really wanted to break Amibo out of just Smash Brothers. Yeah. And, you know, that works. really well when you've got one or two amoebo for a game. When you've got like 20 plus cards, don't forget the amoebo cards that they released that have an icy chip in them. Yeah. NFC.

NFC, that's it. Yeah, I think they just, they flew too high too fast. I miss Amibo, even the bad ones. Yeah, I miss Amibo, like in general. It just got me a Richter Belmont. I mean, they exist, but they don't do anything anymore. You don't get, like, costumes. Smash, really.

And it's like, they're kind of useless for smash. It's like they're like AI characters, right? So it's like, well, it's even the point. I saw like a cute yarn yoshi, like I, or we had all three, but then we sold some on eBay. So we just had the pink one, but. My yarn yoshi are at my office with me. Well, my pink yarn yoshi is so cute. You know, Resetti was cool because he, I don't know, it was like a fourth wall breaking character in the GameCube one where he could, there was one interaction where he would pretend to shut out.

the CRT effect and pretend to shut off your game, which is very like, uh, eternal darkness sort of kind of like effect. And the other thing about him is you could respond to him. You'd say, okay, you need to apologize to me or something like that. And if you type in like the words like die, mole or like dirty mole or something like that, he'll like get extra mad at you and be like you ungrateful little twerb or whatever, you know, racist. Scary thing. He's just a huge racist. KK's slider The greatest DJ KK

Now DJ KK Yeah I don't like the DJ For him it's like I was just watching the Splatoon concert Like the live hologram Spatoon concert And KK Slider is the opening act

For that And it's just It's so fun to see him on stage I did not know there were a Splatoon concert Yeah they did it for the Calais Marie and

Marina and Pearl Yeah. It's like the Tupac Hatsune Miku style hologram. Because I saw Miku a lot a long time ago. That was an experience. Yeah. But I'm also really, or I used to be in the vocal music. I don't, not so much anymore, but it's just, I really wanted that, like, when they were

doing this, platoon concerts, like, fairly regularly in Japan, it was, like, a couple year for a bit. And I really wanted on to bring that just, like, for, like, even just like a show in, like, L.A. and New York or something, like, I would fly to see that. Like, that would be so sick. and yet no it's so weird

the way William Gibson's writing has become reality I don't think that's how he envisioned it Let's talk about Bob and Bianca. Who are these characters again? Oh, yeah.

Who is Bob? They're related. They're like two white cats. Bob is just, no, Bob is the purple cat that's, that one of the creators. I forget which creator thinks that he's like, that's his spirit animal or whatever. Oh. But Bianca is the blank-faced white cat that you can. and draw her face.

Yeah. And then she goes on to other towns and face spreads. It's actually kind of creepy. It's super creepy. Yeah. But it's like it's probably based off like some Japanese like urban legend, right, of like, I don't know, like some no-face cat or something like that. I don't want to know about it. But Bob is just a regular villager. Apparently he's a lazy cat villager and he's purple.

And he's very popular. Yeah. Lazy is the best personality type, I think. All the lazies are so chill. He's a good character. Honestly, Bob is one of the most popular villagers, I think. Maybe that's why I put him down. Yeah. Joan, did any of you ever get sucked into Jones' world of stock trading? It wasn't stock, it was turnips.

Yeah, but. It was like the STA-L-K markets, like turnip stocks. It taught me about how, you know, that system is completely arbitrary, and our entire country is based on lies, the money system. I never gained money on that. And it was really tough because it was on, you have. to see her on Sunday morning. Yeah, it was like a weird time. Yeah.

She would only be in your town until like noon on Sunday morning, and she would sell you turnips for a set amount, and then throughout the week you could sell them back to the store, but the value would be either more or less than what you paid. And what you really wanted was for the value to go way up and to be able to sell for a huge profit. But if you waited too long, it was probably going to drop by the end of the week because I guess the turnips had gone bad.

so you would lose money. But everyone's town was different. So people would get online and be like, whose town has high turnip values today? Or people would get on like Reddit or whatever and say my town has turnips are being sold or bought for like 250 bells. Turnip arbitrage.

Yep. Yeah, I like Joan. She's a hard worker. I like that about it. But she requires hard work to get the most out of her presence. She's not worth it to me. In the GameCube one on the initial like train sequence you can see her in the background and she's dozing off and she's kind of nodding off

and then she wakes up every once in a while she's like in a constant loop of that that's how you know she's a hard worker she's falling asleep on the train you know so tom nook and the nooklings my favorite band uh bob i take it you're actually kind of a fan of tom nook i like him now yes actually i think they gave him kids to humanize him more to make him into more of a likable character i thought there was nephews well i mean like it's like it's a disney style thing where it's like tom nook is not a sexual creature. He does not reproduce. He has nephews, but... We thought that about Emperor Palpatine too. Well, that's

Jedi Magic. Spoiler. I don't want to know how he did that. But no, I love the... I mean, it's so cynical. It's like, here are three cute things that look like this other cute thing. But I love the nephews. They're fun. I forget where they came up. Is that a Wild World that they were introduced? I believe so, yeah. Yeah, and then eventually they take over. Yeah, newly they're like

the people. Actually, you know, in the original GameCube one, they might show up at, once you get to the biggest Nukington iteration of his store. He uses them as employees, I think. I could be wrong about that. All right. Gulliver. Oh, yeah.

I remember that. He'll take you to the island where you can get Wario's Woods and then you regret your choices. Gulliver? No, Gulliver is the pelican that just shows up on the shore. Who rose you to the island?

That's Capon. Capon. He sings little animalese sea shanties. That never gets old. so what does gulliver do what's his role he washes up right but i love about his arrival it was like just a villager's like yeah there just like something on the shore like go check it out and then you go over there and just he's just hanging out and i think in it might be in city folk i think he you shoot down a UFO yeah and that's how he arrives and he's just wearing a space helmet like an astronaut

helmet which is adorable and cool gulliver is the connection point from our universe to the Animal Crossing universe because he will quiz you on like, what's the largest ocean? And you have to say the Pacific Ocean, which means that we're in the same universe. Wow. As Animal Crossing. Somewhere out there is Isabel, and I'm going to marry her because I'm a Nintendo fan. Here we go. Red.

Red's cute. Red is really cute. But he's evil. He keeps selling me counterfeit art. He's so cute. Is the pun? I used to have a, we were talking about those cards earlier. I used to have like a card of red, like on my cork board because it's so.

Is the pun red fox, like the comedian? Okay, I thought so. Yeah. It's a real Morton Downey-style reference in Nintendo games. Yeah. I went to Korea recently and I got like this figurine that I can't find anywhere on the internet of Red Fox and you press a little button and he turns a wallpaper into a bag of bells. It's really cool. But I can't find it anywhere on the internet.

It's like one of my most prized possessions. Jingle. Oh, so good. Jingle, NES game. Before there was virtual console. before there was Nintendo Switch online, there was jingle giving you NES games for Christmas. It was much better than having to swipe

five paper cards into the E-reader. To get ice climber. Yeah. We haven't even talked about the E-reader. That was a massive mistake. But they did a good job with it. Animal Crossing was one of two applications for the E-reader that made it feel justified.

The other being all the weird extra levels in Super Mario Brothers 3. Otherwise, though, yeah. Yeah, there was a separate line of E-reader cards for the game. They just had random items on them, and a few of the NES games you couldn't get normally. Still, I think we talked about this earlier, off mic, but I believe like every item in the game, there's just a password for, right? Yeah.

You could just plug in. Yes, and to my great shame. In the first game. Long ago, on the GameCube version, when that was a new thing, Tom Hewlett, who now works out Way Forward, formerly of Konami, sent me some codes for furniture. But by that point, I'd kind of stop playing. I was supposed to return the favor and give him some code. codes and I never did. So Tom, I still owe you.

I apologize. I'll make it up to you with new horizons. Phyllis. Oh. She's at the bank, the post office. Yeah. The Phyllis is the mean one. Yes.

I like her. She's an old bad. Yeah. She's super sarcastic and she's like the entire time she's thinking, oh my God, what does this idiot want? It's really cool to kind of explore her dialogue options because if like, for instance, like if you fill up all the mail, she's like, damn, you got a lot of mail or something like that.

You know what I mean? Like, oh, my goodness. Why are you mailing so much stuff? Choose me. Bob is not a fan of Copper and Booker. Why not? Bob does not trust the cops. I do not know.

In this game, they're fine because it's an idyllic world. But Copper, like, Booker is the, how are they different? Are they just a team? One of them is, like, kind of an earhead, and the other is kind of overly vigilant. And they're based on the classic Japanese song about the dog policeman. That's very famous for children. Yeah, yeah. I have to assume.

was going to be one of the songs in Donkey Kong teaches music for Famicom. And it's the background music and Frogger in the original Frogger, yeah. Thank you to Chris Kohler for that poll. And finally, Capon. Yeah, Capon. Capon's the new rover. Capon brings you into the town in his bus. Does he?

Yeah. Oh, a bus. Okay, yeah. I've forgotten about that. I always think of Capon as being the boat guy. Yeah, he's the boat guy. I don't remember if it was city folk, or maybe it's the most recent one. you do ride with him into town on a bus with him.

He's the bus driver. Well, I'll be... An amazing pun because he is a Kappa. Yes, he is a captain and a Kappa and... Yeah, whatever. No, it's good. Good time. It was 2002.

Who could even say what a Kappa was, except Superweaves, like all of us. Or those of us who played Final Fantasy 6, except they called him... Imp. Imp. Bastards. How dare. All right, let's talk a little bit about the history of the games, but it's worth just very quickly going through the Animal Crossing series.

to kind of give a little more context to all the things we've talked about. I guess we did this backwards. But, oh, well, the very first game was called Dobutsu Nomori, which means animal forest or forest of animals. And it was called that because there are animals living in a forest.

That's right. It was an N64 game designed for the 64D add-on, which wisely was converted to a cartridge. But if you've ever played this game, it has a lot of the basics of Animal Crossing, but it also feels very basic. I don't know if any of you have ever experimented with this one. One thing I did recently was I went through and I listened to the soundtrack for it

because it is, it's so close to the GameCube one, but they did change some of the tunes. And so like the intro theme is like a little bit, it rocks a little bit harder and stuff like that. And so I don't know. For me, that was really interesting because whenever I can get more of that Animal Crossing music, I will. And I realize, wait, I've never listened to that soundtrack.

So it is different. Yes. And basically nine months later, they kind of retune. Animal Crossing or Dobutsu Nomori to release it as Dobutsu No Mori Plus on GameCube and that came to the U.S. as Animal Crossing and it was pretty much the same game except they added more stuff they polished some things up they tweak some things they added elements like the GBA link cable and the e-reader

they also included as you've mentioned before a special memory card for the GameCube not only did that have a special sticker on it with Rover but there was actually content on the memory card that when you used it to save your game for the first time, unique content. I don't remember what it was, but that would be saved into the game and then deleted from the card.

So if you tried to use the memory card again for another copy of Animal Crossing, it didn't work. Which, of course, you know, everyone who owned Animal Crossing had this memory card. So it was kind of meant as not a deterrent to reselling the game,

but basically like here's your bonus for buying it new as opposed to being a jerk and buying it used from GameStop or Funco Land. How dare you? 2002 was the real escalating pissing contest between Nintendo and Sony and Microsoft with their consoles. And it's funny how this release just a non-fuzzy N64 game during all of that mania, trying to make the shiniest, fanciest games ever. But people still were attached to it.

No one said this game looks bad or ugly or old. Yeah, I think the cartoonishness of it and the kind of whimsy of the camera. characters really, and just the overall vibe of it, really goes a long way toward making it not need to be realistic. And it made it very easy to pour to the DS. Yeah. Just because it started as an N64 game. I never really, I didn't play any of the Wii one or the 3DS one, but I have to assume, like, the general look did not improve very much technically from the GameCube version. Am I correct or incorrect on that?

It looks better. Okay. The Switch one looks really good. It looks like a modern game. It's HD. There's some cool, like, shading going on with the Switch version. I've noticed, especially as I've been releasing more, like, screenshots and, like, character renders and everything. Like, there's this, like, weird, almost, like, dithering effect.

Like, it looks, like, really cool and, like, interesting. But it's, like, so subtle that, like, most people probably won't notice it. But, like, in these, like, high-reslin, so I'm like, this is, like, a cool effect they're doing with everything in this game. It's interesting. I have read nothing whatsoever about this game. I am going to just jump into it and let it surprise me. Yeah. Yeah.

I mean, I'm kind of. I'm so excited. I'm like, I need to know more. I saw it like the Nintendo Direct trailer, the first one. That was it for me. So the GameCube version introduced the Abel Sisters who run a little clothing shop and they give you the ability to create and wear custom patterns. It introduced the museum and blathers. Is that right? I made these notes when I was very sleepy on the airplane last night. It might be mixed up here. You're talking about introducing them from they weren't in the 64D version? Yeah. Is that right? I actually don't know.

I thought the 64 version wasn't day-night cycle capable, right? No, it was. The 64 version had a battery in it. And real-time clock was a thing in cartridges, starting with Pokemon, silver, and gold. Right. Blathers first appeared in Animal Crossing Plus. Oh, okay. So, yeah, there was no music.

Interesting. Like, what was even on that game? I don't know. Like, what was the end goal there? It was the first game with Tortimer. It was the first game with Bianca. It was the first game to let you travel between towns because you could put your character on the memory card

and plug it into someone else's machine, which is really cool. One thing that I wanted to mention about the Able Sisters is like, I think for a kid it felt really cool that if you visit, there's two Able Sisters, one of them's like very extroverted and the other one doesn't want to talk to you. If you visit the introverted one every day, like slowly,

she starts to open up and she starts to talk to you more and eventually she becomes like, you know, one of your friends. And I think that's like a really good, cool example in the game of, you know, you put in the time, you sort of make your mark on this game in this little world. Yeah, I have a nephew like that, so it's relatable, it's real. Yeah, so basically it made lots of tiny tweaks, but also some big tweaks from the N64 version. It was definitely a more complete game.

And I think it's good that this was the game that the series made its international debut with, because I think if it had debuted with the N64 game, we'd probably have been like, eh. Yeah. I don't know. Yeah. But the first really big breakout for the series was Animal Crossing Wild World in 2005 on DS. And it was one of those games released right as the DS started to pick up. And as the DS started to catch on with kind of non-core gamers.

And along with, you know, Nintendo Dogs and Mario Kart DS, this was the other really big game for 2005 from Nintendo. And it was a big deal. I remember, like, even people, I was working at OneUp at the time, people at OneUp or posting on NeoGaf who weren't into this kind of game, who were super cynical about Nintendo at the time and were like, baby games, still really got into this one. Yeah. I mean, once you put that game on a portable system like the DS, right, it was just like a rocket ship. I remember not knowing about Wi-Fi around this time and thinking like, no, you need a cord for the Internet. What are you talking about? And then I found out of Wi-Fi through like One-Up podcast.

So I bought like a dongle for my, my desktop computer. And when you had to leave your game on and open for people to connect to it, and when there was someone on my DS in my town for the first time, that was like a holy shit moment. Like, how is this happening? This is not real. Magic. Yeah, that was, I think it was like the second Nintendo game to have Wi-Fi connectivity after Mario Kart DS.

And yes, it was definitely one of those things you had to get that special dongle and use it to connect to Nintendo Wi-Fi service, you could also go to McDonald's and use their Wi-Fi zone. I remember... DS all greasy and sticky. I remember when Mario Kart DS first came out

and they first opened up that Nintendo Wi-Fi zone, there was a McDonald's one block away from One-Up's offices. So I actually went and wrote an article about this, like sitting outside of McDonald's on Market Street, trying to play Mario Kart. I was like, wow, I'm actually doing this.

So you don't actually have to go eat a McDonald's You can just sit outside and everyone will stare at you like a freak. Enjoy the affiants. But yeah, Wild World, I was definitely a big fan of it and wrote about it a lot. It went up. I reviewed it. That was one of the reviews I wrote where it was actually a cartoon. And I drew like my character interacting with the different characters within the game.

Very little text to it. But for some reason, it seemed to work with that game. That game had so much more content than the game for one, too. It was amazing that it would go to that portable form factor and then it just got so much larger. I just feel like it's a game that really inspired creativity and really inspired community. It really got a lot of people sharing and visiting each other.

And that was one of the worst ways. One of the first ways, not worst ways, the first ways I really interacted with our community at OneUp was playing Animal Crossing. Like people who posted on the blogs there, you know, we would open up staff, Wi-Fi connections and I think the other big proponent of the game at the site was Jane Pinkard and we just like have time where we hung out and people from the community would come in and play

and drop fruit and leave messages and stuff and it was really cool. It was like wow, you know, this is a really fun way to interact with our audience that isn't so formal and stuffy. There was that high element of abstraction because Nintendo was like, oh, you can't interact too much on the internet because you might molest a child. So they kind of have helicopter mobbed it and it was okay like the abstraction of it and the remoteness of it made it more interesting because you'd see someone running around you were like who is this person do I know this person oh yeah yeah I think I recognize their tag um I just really enjoyed it one thing about wild world for me that's really sentimental is uh I mentioned you know being in a

long distance relationship I remember I actually would share I sent the cart to uh at the time My girlfriend, she's not my fiancé. And so she would start a file on the same cart. And then when she would go back to the room, I would be in the bed and I would be sleeping. Like my character would be in the bed sleeping. And it was kind of, I don't know, it was like a nice way for us to like be playing in this same. And it was a feeling of togetherness when we're obviously in a long distance relationship. That's really sweet.

So things that this game did over the GameCube version, it dropped the screen by screen navigation in favor of just a single continuous world that was easier to move around in. It added Celeste in the Observatory. It introduced the cafe with Brewster. Oh, yeah. He's like an eagle or hawk that makes, maybe he's a pigeon. Yeah, he's like a pigeon. He's a pigeon who makes coffee.

KK. Slider hangs out in there on Saturdays and plays music. They broke out more of the shops. So the Abel Sisters have their own clothing shop where they exclusively sell clothing. You can't buy it at Tom Nooks anymore. And, of course, they added the Internet element, which no longer exists because Nintendo shut down. Wi-Fi service in like 2010. Thanks, Nintendo, or 2014. RIP. So Katie, tell us about Animal Crossing City Folk, because I didn't ever play that one at all. Yeah, so this is like my introduction to Animal Crossing after hearing about it for years and years and years.

and I admittedly had to do some research before coming to this podcast because I was like, I don't remember much about this game. But I do remember one thing I remember very clearly is how weirdly it controlled because you had to do the Wemo. And it was kind of almost like a point and click almost, like how you moved around. And one thing I really remember is when you're exploring, you could like see another villager across or like another animal across like a river and you can like click on them and wave to them. And that was so fun and so cute. And that's like the one feature I wish would come back somehow, like just a wave button because they would just wave back and it was just nice. But I don't know. It's a, like, I feel like I got into it, but I don't think I got like as much into Animal Crossing until like New Leaf where I played like every day.

And it was like a religious part of my routine almost. And like I mentioned earlier, I stopped playing once anchovy moved away because it broke my heart. And I was so sad because that bird was the best. But one thing, that was, I think it's called the We Connect 24. Is that what I wrote down? So it's kind of like Nintendo's way of delivering DLC to players. So like basically like what games do now as like live services where there's like holiday events and that sort of thing. Like Nintendo would just drop in random items for like Christmas or some Nintendo themed items like randomly and whatnot.

Personally, I never used the functionality because I think I was too dumb to know about it. So I was like in high school at the time. So I wasn't paying attention that type of stuff. but that was I guess like a banner like that was I think the only game I remember that used that like meaningfully unless I'm like misremembering entirely I think they did build that into some other services

and it was part of the system for the weed because you could do the me parade and if you were like me and filled out your friend code system because you publicized it on a big website you would have so many mes in your me plaza that it would actually cause your

system to chug and go blank for like five minutes at a time trying to load everything. This also supported WeSpeak, which was all the fun of a conference call in your living room. In CityFolk, I don't remember if that's the first one where you can actually make your character a me, right? You can go to the hair salon and turn your character into a me face. It was terrible. Yeah.

Who did that? I did it. And the other thing about CityFolk is it feels like CityFolk and Wildwood are the most similar. out of all of them. I think they had the shortest time span between them, too. It's like, 2008. Because I remember I was like a freshman in high school when it came out. So it was 2008.

And I feel like it's a testament to how much content Wild World had that you could essentially port that game to the console and it still felt like it was this fully featured, fully featured game with just adding that city. I remember when I first got city folk, I reset it. It must have been at least 300 times to get the villagers that I wanted from the GameCube version. Well, I did not play that one. I waited for New Leaf, which came out in 20. 13.

13, that's right. That's when we started Retronauts. It was a new game. Restarted Retronauts. Right. And, yeah, I wrote about it for U.S. Gamer when it was a brand new site. Back in the days when I could just write about stuff and not have to be the boss. Those are the good times.

So, yeah, that was like a nine-year gap between games for me, eight or nine. So that's just about the right amount of time, I think. to make it keep it fresh. So I was ready for it. And it also made really big changes to the game. You become the mayor because Tortimer pisses off to an island. And he leaves behind Isabel, the internet's puppy wifu, who basically is kind of there as a symbol of the quality of life improvements.

She lets you set all kinds of settings to kind of automate the town. You can change, as you mentioned before, like kind of how the time of day system works. and you can basically turn on one town improvement. So, you know, if you plan to be away and not play for a long time, you can kind of keep the town self-cleaning so you don't get overrun by weeds. The beautiful talent ordinance, I think that's it. Yeah. I think it's what I had, actually, even though I played every day,

so I shouldn't have done it everything. But, yeah, there's big civic improvement options. You can influence villagers to stay or leave more easily. Rissetti stops being such a dish. when you don't save at shutdown, which is kind of his role. He was like, hey, you're supposed to save the game instead of scumming by resetting without saving

because you'd want to get optimal choices. He toned it down a lot. And things like, you know, blathers, examining fossils and art and stuff, went through much more quickly. You have more fashion options. You could do more to customize your character. All the characters got longer in New Leaf.

And so they had more defining features. in Wild World you could change their hair and that sort of thing but this was one where you could really start to flesh out every part of them

including the pants and their socks and stuff like that. And finally we come to New Horizons in 2020 which none of us have played yet, right? No.

You haven't been able to demo it? Unfortunately, no. I don't think they've done any events. They didn't even demo it at E3 or anything. It's just like a secret. And it's like January at this point they just know it's going to sell.

Exactly. It's like they don't need to demo it. There will be an event next year or next month. I guess by the time this is recorded last month in New York and San Francisco and... I hope. I really want to play it. But in any case...

They can also just launch it and it would be fine. We're recording this less than two months from the game's release, so it'll be here soon enough. What a hotly anticipated game, too, right? Like, it's become such a meme now that people create these, like, Animal Crossing, Satanic rituals with, like, upside-down pentagrams with amoebo cards and stuff like that to try and summon the game. There was, like, this... or some magazine published like a renders of new things coming to Animal Crossing. And one of them is like a frog chair. And it's become a-froggy chair is a huge meme of just like this frog chair.

And people have been like remaking it in like 3D. I thought the froggy chair was already in the game. Maybe it was. I don't know. It just seemed like something that's like propagated from like New Horizons. People are just like clamoring for anything. Yeah, no, I saw that. It was a few weeks ago on Reddit just like exploded.

So huge. It was like the entire Animal Crossing Reddit was froggy chair posts with thousands and thousands of upvotes. It's crazy. Someone made it in real life. It's crazy. I don't understand what's. I don't know how it started. What's going on really?

But it's just been fascinating because they're just clinging on anything. The kids want their animal crossing. Oh, before we go, I didn't want to bring up one thing, that this series spawned a movie. Yes. The anime movie, 2006, it came out. Never was localized, but it's all on YouTube, subtitled. It's so good. There is an anime.

So you've seen it? Yeah. Okay. Yeah, I was pulling up on my screen, you were pointing at it. I was just wondering, like, can you tell us what it's about, or if it's any animation is good? The animation is really good, and it's amazing to see, you know, what, I mean, it just goes to show you. There's so many Nintendo franchises that would make, like, incredible animated movies, but this is definitely one of them. They made it, and the art style is really beautiful.

It's, like, anime versions of the characters, but they don't, they don't depart too much from it. Like, maybe the eyes are a little bit more expressive in that sort of thing. But it's about a villager, I think it's a female villager who starts. and she's going through the town and she develops friendships and there's sad parts of it too I feel like it tries to go through the arc of someone sort of playing the game

and developing these relationships and the things that sort of happen and it's a really good movie you should go watch it Yeah, it's like how there's a Professor Leighton anime movie that's never come out here either from around the same time. Oh no, that did.

That did come here? Yeah, I saw it at Comic Con New York. Really? Wow, okay. So yeah, the Animal Crossing still watch it on YouTube it's apparently it's good. It is really good. All right, there were a few Animal Crossing spinoffs to fill the void between New Leaf and New Horizons. Happy Home Designer was a frivolous little piece of fluff, but it was...

I love Happy Home Designer. But I enjoyed it. I got really into it. Everyone complained about that game. But it was just so fun. And then they brought all the home stuff into New Leaf, too, which is really cool. Like, they were just like, yeah, and now the home decorating is also way more robust. Oh, yeah, yeah.

New Leaf got a huge update called Welcome Amibo. Yeah. And not only did it add Amoebo function. but it also added a lot of elements from Happy Home Designer. My wife is an interiors photographer who shoots homes. So I let her play that for a while. And for like two or three weeks, she was really into it. And then she pretty much saw all there was to do.

And now she plays a similar game on her phone and spends a lot of money on it. But, you know, it kind of got her hooked on that style of games. So I guess it's my own fault because our Apple accounts are hooked to my bank account. There was also like a Sanrio collaboration with Happy Home Designer where you could get Hello Kitty in the game which is like perfect. There was also Amibo Festival which was a huge miscalculation by all accounts is not a good board game.

More like Amibo Graveyard. Oh. I went there. I miss Amiubo so much. And, oh. Well, I wanted to say I really wanted to, I've never played Amoe Festival but I wanted to play it because you have those like Animal Crossing models in HD. Yeah, that's what everyone was like, oh my God, they're making an Animal Cross for

This is the next step, and then it just didn't happen. The HD is coming soon enough with... And you saw the same thing in the Mario Kart 8DLC with Animal Crossing. You see like an Animal Crossing town in HD. And I just didn't. I mean, I'm glad they waited. But we already have Animal Crossing in HD with Pocket Camp. Oh, yeah.

Which is... 4K. Yep. It's the mobile game version of Animal Crossing, so it's got like microtransactions and stuff. Yeah. So if you like that kind of thing and aren't annoyed by monetization on a mobile phones the way that I am, then it's probably a good. I'm happy that they didn't make it, they didn't try to make it like Animal Crossing.

It is just like a completely different. It's kind of its own thing. Yeah. I got really into it for like a few months and then I fell off. And I tried to get back into it earlier this month because I was like, I just want to get excited for new horizons. And there's just so much new stuff now that I'm like, I don't even know how to play this anymore. It's like way overwhelming that it wasn't launched, which is cool. I guess, like it's a way more robust game, but I just think pocket cams not for me because there's

just too much weird stuff on. That's how mobile phone games are. It's just like, definitely. Blam in your face. It's so confusing. It doesn't make sense. Please give us more money to play longer. Yeah, like I was really in this dress-up game called Love Nikki Jessop Queen for like about two years. And then I stepped away for like six months and I tried to go back into it. And it was just, I could not, I cannot figure out how to play anymore because there's so much new stuff. and mobile games are constantly like that where they're just constantly adding new stuff because they have to retain players somehow

and pocket camp is the same exact way. All right, we're wrapping now, but before we go, Bob, would you like to make a closing statement about Stardue Valley? Oh, yeah, so Stardue Valley, the creators just announced that the game sold 10 million copies

and I really feel like Starry Valley was the Animal Crossing replacements in the seven years we haven't had a game. It came out five years ago, so Starter Valley borrowed a lot from Animal Crossing It's basically like Animal Crossing meets Harvest Moon, and the popularity of Starry Valley is so undeniable that I really wonder if some of it's going to run off on the new Animal Crossing

just because it already has crafting. We know that much. I feel like there might be some more Star-Do-ish touches just because that formula has proven to be very successful for an indie developer. All right. Well, we'll see how it goes when Animal Crossing New Horizons launches in a few days or last week or whenever this episode comes out relative to the release of the game, yes.

But I'm looking forward to it. I feel like I will play a lot of it and I guess I should just clear my April. I took an 18-year break. It's time to play again. It's time. Welcome back. Welcome back to our little animal friend.

There are so many cockroaches. You don't have to go back to that one, Bob. You can start fresh. That's why it's called New Horizons. I've forsaken my old villagers. Right. Let them die. All right.

So this has been. no to end on. Retronauts. Talking about Animal Crossing in a grim way. I am Jeremy Parrish and I am grateful for you listening to this episode. If you enjoyed it, you can find more Retronauts, not about Animal Crossing

but about other things at Retronauts.com and on most podcatchers. And if you really like it, you can subscribe to us on Patreon, patreon.com slash Retronauts, where by subscribing for three bucks a month, you get every episode a week early, each

Monday. And it's in a higher bitrate quality with no advertisements or sponsorships, which is cool. And if you really, really like us, you can subscribe for $5, in which case you get the Monday episodes early. And you also get every other Friday a Patreon exclusive bonus episode. So give it some thought. What's the right thing to do here? Anyway, even if you don't want to support us that way, just tell your friends about us. And they'll be like, wow, I've got I'll listen to that podcast, and that's how we grow. Bob? Hey, I'm Bob Mackey.

I'm on Twitter. As Bob Servo, I do other podcasts, including Talking Simpsons and What a Cartoon on the Talking Simpsons. It's at patreon.com slash Talking Simpsons. If you sign up there, we have all kinds of bonus podcasts, over 100 bonus podcasts that are not available on the free feeds, but you can also just listen to the other podcast for free if you would like to, and I recommend it. Thank you.

Mike, tell us about yourself. Yeah, unlike Choi, Mecha Choi on Twitter. I have a lot of fun, weird video game-related hardware projects for 2020. So go follow me there if you want to go see a bunch of weird mods and weird abominations of hardware video game stuff. And also go buy FlipGrip if you want to support me and Jeremy. Right on. Actually, the money from FlipGrip goes to Retronauts. That's right.

That's another way to support this podcast. It's the sweet as plum. Only $12. $12. All right. And Katie. I'm Katie McCarthy You can find me on Twitter

at UMA Katie It's Y-U-M-E-C-A-T-Y because I spell my name weird You can find my work on usgamer dot net I also host a podcast called Bad End with indie game developer Kyle Cookstel and writer Joshua Clixstow

and we just shoot the shit We just did a cool month of Game of the Decades type stuff with we had Ben Pack on from Giant Bomb we had Tim Rogers from Katako on and Emily Rose of Rebine so we had a bunch of cool episodes

last month. And yeah, I do that every two weeks, so yeah. All right. And finally, you can find me, Jeremy Parrish, on Twitter as Gamesbyte, and on YouTube, chronicling the chronology of systems like the Nintendo entertainment system and the Game Boy.

And I already did Virtual Boy, so I don't have to do that anymore. But please look forward to that each week, each Wednesday. And you can also find me at Limited Run Games doing the kind of stuff that I'm doing here now, but for Limited Run games and all the cool games that we publish there. from indies and from classic games.

So it's relevant to your interests if you are interested in this show. Anyway, thanks again for listening. And until next time, we're going to be out there catching bugs and smacking the people we don't like with a bug now. Thank you. I'm going to be I'm going to be the I'm going to be.

Thank you. Thank you. I don't know.