And it is Animal Crossing Wild World. Any web sites that do a top 20 or a top 50 are just going through the motions. There's not even any point doing a top ten or a top five. The other nine or four would be meaningless filler. We could pretend we like some other shit half as much as DS Animal Crossing, but you'd be able to tell. And we've been through too much together to start lying to each other now.




We were playing Animal Crossing when other people started playing it. We were playing it when those people then stopped playing it a few weeks later after not seeing what the fuss was about.




We were still playing it when those people started playing it again to see if they could work out why we were still playing it after a year.




We played it this morning and will play it again this evening. For reasons to do with turnips you probably won't understand. We have played it every day since last December - apart from, maybe, three or four days. That's not a stupid internet exaggeration either - you don't get an insect collection of this magnitude by only playing for a couple of minutes every now and again.




These are some of the hybrid flowers we have bred in the last year. This is just the tip of the iceberg.




This is a bit more of the iceberg, but still only the top part of it. We have THAT MANY hybrid flowers. This is not gay because it's only in a video game. Video games are not gay. Even ones that involve breeding and caring for flowers.




This is how much money we have in the bank. In Animal Crossing we are independently wealthy.




That's why gold-digging sluts like Marina live in our low-carbon-emitting super-town.




This is the main room of our massive house, or the Bridge as we call it. We have put on our Wesley Crusher uniform to show it off to its fullest potential. See that photo of KK Slider? You have to do the gaming equivalent of crawling 500 miles on broken glass using only your eyelid muscles to get that.




And there's still loads to do, even after a year. We haven't even seen let alone shot down Postman Pete thanks to his stupid anti-social working hours. We only have one of Gulliver's UFO items, the Modern furniture series is far from complete, and we're only half-way to Platinum membership of Tom Nook's Reward Scheme.




This is when the flying saucer crashed in our town. It was such an amazing event we had to take a photo of the screen. When has a game ever been so amazing you've had to take a photo of the screen to keep as a memento? NEVER BEFORE, that's when.




And Katie still hasn't sent us the Lovely Phone to put in the Lovely Room.




You know you're special when you get RARE ALTERNATE DIALOGUE sequences with one of the major characters.




We'd prefer it to contain a few more moments of double entendre, but there are still just about enough to make it worth 'following through' with.




This is how to make a snowman. This is mainly for our reference so that next year we can start off properly without the tiresome learning process of working out what size the balls need to be.




See? He loves it.




It's nice that he's a misogynistic snowman. We know full well that the snowmen come alive when the game is turned off and start harassing the female town inhabitants.




Got all those.




Got all those.




Got loads of these.




We left these acorns on the floor as a reminder of the good times had by all during the October Acorn Festival. Roll on October 2007!




Come back next year. We'll still be playing it. It's that good. And if you don't get it you can bugger off back to playing games about men shouting "HOLY SHIT" and shooting machine guns at each other with all the other 14-year-old morons.




The problem with giving Animal Crossing Wild World a number out of ten and placing it in the all-time lists is this - it's not much of a game. It doesn't test your skills. It's not like playing Quake III at the absolute limits of your gaming skills for hours on end. It's not like mastering Gradius V. It's not like getting to the last boss of Raiden on one credit or completing Hellfire using a third-party controller.




It's more like keeping a diary, or remembering to have breakfast.




Animal Crossing is just a simple little thing you have and do every day. It's like your kettle. It's not as exciting as your new LCD TV or your Sky+ box. It's simple, but you'd be fucked without it.




Animal Crossing Wild World: "Simple, but you'd be fucked without it" - 10/10, UK:Resistance Game of the Year By A Mile. Here's a review we wrote of it at the time and never got around to uploading.

A FREE PUBLIC SERVICE REVIEW OF ANIMAL CROSSING WILD WORLD FOR NINTENDO DS
This is a public service review. We don't often write reviews on the site for free, because they're a lot of words and a bit of a chore and then everyone disagrees with everything you say and calls you a cunt afterwards. But sometimes you have to tell people about a game because it's so great. Writing about good games for free is more fun than writing about shit games for money (not actually true, but sounds nice). This is one of those important times!

ANIMAL CROSSING WILD WORLD REVIEW
For Nintendo DS

Animal Crossing isn't a game. It's a career. A vocation, a mini alternative life. You could educate a child with it and it would turn out OK. It teaches you everything you need to know about the real world. It teaches you the importance of money, shows you the true value of patience, punishes you for lying, and when characters move out of your town it's an important lesson about the harsh realities of bereavement in adult life. Freckles is gone, Timothy, she's gone to another town very far away and she's never coming back.

It's not a game, it's a job. You HAVE to collect your fruit to begin with, else you can't afford the cool furniture. You HAVE to keep fishing, else you might miss a rare fish. You HAVE to collect all the fossils, fish and insects because something cool might happen when you do. Animal Crossing uses an enhanced version of the COLLECTEVERYTHING(TM) engine that Nintendogs used. It makes chores into games, giving you incentives to spend hours and hours doing nothing in the hope of finding one rare little thing no one else has got.




When we bought it we played it for an hour and a half in bed in the morning, we played it for an hour and a half in the afternoon, we played it for an hour and a half in the evening, then for an hour an a half in bed before going to bed. If anything that's an underestimate, because starting to play Animal Crossing is like stepping into a time machine where suddenly it's a huge amount of time in the future when you turn it off and look at the clock.

That's another reason why it's great. You can use it to fast forward your boring life. So anyway, we played it for six hours a day (minimum) for the first few weeks of having it. Some of those six-hour periods were spent fishing. Just fishing. Fishing, then running to the shop to sell them, or to the Museum to donate any rare ones we caught. The game keeps a list of all the fish you've caught, which is one of numerous mini, incidental challenges you have to complete. In your own time and whenever you like. We're now down to about three 15-minute periods of play a day, which is much more manageable.



Animal Crossing really suits the handheld. You can play it for ten minutes in the morning, a bit at lunch time and switch it on in the evening for a proper play. It's why Wild World is such a perfect game. We do all our farming/shopping chores in the morning on the train to work instead of reading about war in a newspaper, then spend the evening having fun instead of watching war on the news. And wi-fi play lets you do it all in another town, with the added excitement of random router crashes to keep everyone on edge. It's the perfect game and it suits DS to a tee. 10/10, again.

ABOUT THE ABOVE REVIEW:
We're releasing this review under the GNU Free Documentation License, so if you want to run a review of Animal Crossing Wild World on your web site, blog or student magazine, feel free to use this copy and put your name on it. It's free for everyone to reproduce! We're doing this out of love.

WHAT SCORE TO GIVE IT:
If your web site, blog or magazine scores games out of 5 give it 5/5. If you score things out of 10 give it 10/10. If you use the archaic percentage system give it 97 percent because anything more than that makes you look stupid like those American magazines who give games 100 percent. Nothing's ever 100 percent you pricks.

Labels: ENTHUSIASM