The Gadgets Page

Here is some unverified rumor stuff about Animal Crossing for the Nintendo Wii. It looks like they are looking at more functionality with Nintendo’s connectivity. This is an interview with Katsuya Eguchi, who was the developer for Animal Crossing for the Gamecube and DS. He is excited to expand the capabilities of the game.

• Gamasutra – Interview – “Crossing into the Mainstream: Katsuya Eguchi on Animal Crossing”

If find it interesting that they talk about time traveling. If you change the date in your Nintendo DS, it will change the date in your town. You can go back in time and visit Nook’s store when he was selling something rare. You can travel forward in time and gather the interest on the money in the bank. There are consequences to time travel. The Animal Crossing forums are very split on time travel. Most people believe that it’s cheating, but it appears that the developers knew that time travel would be used:

“Well the first thing is that we knew people would be time traveling – and that’s ok! That’s one playstyle if people want to do it. But the thing to remember is that the game’s in a natural setting, so if you move forward in time, weeds are going to come, plants are going to die, and things like that. So what happened in this case is that when you turn your game on, the game saves where you are. So it saved his progress three weeks into the future, and the game considered that nothing had gotten water for three weeks. It’s not built in to punish people, it’s just by way of saying that time traveling is dangerous!”

Unless you count Daylight Savings, I have never time traveled with my Animal Crossing game. I avoid it mostly because I feel like my animal friends are real people and I imagine them sitting alone for months on end when I travel within an instant. I imagine them being alone and moving away thinking that I had abandoned them just because I wanted to buy a crown now that I finally have enough money to do it. It’s not worth it to me. The weeds and turnip prices aren’t as much of a deterrent as imagining my new animal friends alone and thinking I abandoned them.

Via: Animal Crossing (Wii) – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia