Animal Crossing: Wild World

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Welcome to YourTown, population: nine. A vibrant, self-contained community, with beach access, a river, beautiful woodland areas, a well-stocked local shop and buzzing town hall. It has everything you need for a fantastic stay - and the locals are friendly too! Upon arrival you'll be shown to basic but clean accommodation, consisting of a modest, single-roomed apartment at the fashionable north end of town. From then on, the possibilities for entertainment are unlimited!

You may choose to spend several hours each day fishing the abundant sea and rivers, taking your haul to the shop to sell and using the money earned to enhance your house. Or you may instead opt to take on the life of a fruit farmer, planting trees, watching them grow and harvesting the crop to sell on or trade with visitors. Other possible career paths include that of turnip grower, antique trader, fossil hunter and collector, or you may simply prefer to relax, chat with the locals and enjoy a life of leisure. The Animal Crossing world is one to enjoy at your own pace.

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Your first appointment once you're settled in YourTown should definitely be a meeting with friendly village shopkeeper Tom Nook, owner of Nook's Cranny and a crucial member of the community. Tom gives you a uniform and sets you up with a menial delivery job, sending you out into the community to meet the other inhabitants. And what a crazy bunch they are too! You might encounter Goose, the bodybuilding bird, Roscoe, the fossil-obsessed horse, or Bianca, the cat without a face. There's a huge number of characters, all different, all moving in and moving out, leaving you with a constantly changing, unique group of locals to get to know.

A character may emigrate, only to be replaced by someone you've met in another town while travelling via the Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection. You also receive letters from distant townsfolk you've met on your Wi-Fi wanderings, with the easy transport system opening up other towns with ease. Should you travel to another location via Wi-Fi prepare to be amazed - when in another town you have full access to the local characters, shop items and buildings, making Wi-Fi tourism of the local area another must-do when in the Animal Crossing region.

Excellent Social Scene
The villagers of YourTown and those you meet on your Wi-Fi travels chat to you and also hand out a variety of simple tasks, from entering fishing contests or tracking down specific items of furniture and clothing for your neighbours, to bartering for goods and services. As your stay in the Animal Crossing region lengthens, the events become more complex and demanding, and consume much more of your time.

Take turnips. Each Sunday morning - and only on Sunday morning - local trader Joan will appear in your village. Joan is the turnip seller, dealing in red and white varieties. Red turnips come as seeds, need to be planted and require watering every single day to keep them alive. After a week your turnip is ready to be dug up and sold, for the mighty sum of 16,000 Bells (the local currency)!

Numerous special events are also planned to take place on certain days. Keep checking the local noticeboard for news, and expect to see day-long fishing contests, flea markets, special greeting days where everyone in the village has to talk to each other, and many other organised events. Don't go expecting any short-term, quick-fix thrills while staying in the Animal Crossing area, because whether you're dealing turnips or slowly paying off your mortgage, this is a place that takes weeks, perhaps months, to really come alive.

But you can visit for short stays if you're busy. The great thing about YourTown is that there's always something to do, whether you plan on visiting for five minutes or several hours a day. Basic fruit harvesting is an easy way to make money, especially if you've swapped fruit with another village and have a rare five-times-the-price import to sell. Once YourTown is full of foreign trees the daily harvesting process can take up to half an hour, but you're rewarded with upwards of 70,000 Bells for your troubles.

Of course, you don't have to do this. Casual visitors can spend five minutes a day in their town, reading letters and checking out the shop for furniture, then coming back the next day. There's no hurry to pay off your mortgage at all, and that's the beauty of the Animal Crossing kingdom - you really are free to spend your days however you like.

Long-Term Bookings
Serious immigrants who plan on spending several months in the village will get much, much more out of it. For starters, there's the entire collection aspect, with an empty Museum just begging to be filled up with all sorts of collectables. If you're the sort of Nintendo fan who has to 'catch 'em all', Animal Crossing is definitely the place for you!

Look at the fish, for example, which are displayed in the Museum's numerous tanks. Many fish are seasonal creatures, meaning it's impossible to collect everything in your first few weeks of play. You have to keep returning to YourTown throughout the year if you want to see everything, catch everything and build up a fine Museum collection. Insects are also elusive, paintings rare, fossils need careful digging out of the ground. It's a colossal task that will take months, if not years, to complete.

Vibrant Trading Community
The economy of the entire Animal Crossing: Wild World region is based on trading and the barter system. If you want to increase the size of your house it costs money, ranging from under 100,000 Bells to a staggering 948,000 Bells once you've expanded your house to the full-sized, five-roomed mansion.

As ever, it's all about accumulating the Bells. The beauty of the Animal Crossing economy is that there's no fixed method of acquiring wealth, and no set time period for buying things. If you want to aggressively farm fruit you can, spending hours planting foreign fruits, picking them all, trading with other towns via Wi-Fi or local link-up, and making loads of money. Or you can live the life of a fisherman, flogging the odd sea bass to Tom Nook.

But many villagers can't help but be forced down the collection route, thanks to Nook's daily selection of furniture. Each day he has something new in his shop - a different sofa, a new wallpaper set, an alternative flooring - and each day you feel the burning need to own it. The more you own the better you can equip your expanding house, with the demanding Happy Room Academy rating your property on its appearance and contents once a week.

Not much is known about the shady manner in which the HRA appraises homes, but it's believed the better your house scores the higher your luck rating is, meaning you catch those rare, valuable fish more often, further helping you pay off that mortgage and build that extra room on your home.

So you might want to fill your house up with special items to earn the respect of the HRA. Items such as the Snowman range of furniture cannot be bought from Tom Nook's shop; instead it has to be earned by building snowmen in the winter months. Create a perfectly formed snowman and he thanks you with a letter containing an incredibly rare piece of furniture. There are numerous other special items, even extremely rare presents sent to you in letters from Nintendo as a reward for connecting to the Wi-Fi service. Collecting these items, along with wall coverings, carpets, furniture and clothing, is a massive part of the day-to-day goings-on within YourTown, tasks that will keep collection-minded visitors busy for months.

Excellent Travel Amenities
Of course, you're not limited to spending all your holiday time in YourTown. Fantastic local Nintendo Wi-Fi links let you escape at will, thanks to the gate located at the extreme north edge of the village. If you feel like travelling, simply ask one of the gatekeepers to open the gate - other people can then come to visit should they be online at the same time, or you can pop out to another town if you've got the Friend Code of someone else in the Animal Crossing region.

You'll be amazed by how easy it is to visit other towns. Up to four characters can run around each town via Wi-Fi or local Nintendo DS link-up, with the entire village - complete with characters, shop, shop items, fruit and fish - all coming along for the ride. This is no simple visit with stripped-down options; when you visit another town it's you, in that town, playing that town's game.

You can talk to other characters in other towns, completing missions for them, delivering items, engaging in fishing contests and doing everything you would in your own home. It's a great innovation. You may notice the odd bit of slowdown or glitching, though, and please remember to save the game regularly - if one visitor experiences Wi-Fi connection issues the entire town may blink out of existence and all your progress will be lost. Annoying, but thankfully a very rare occurrence.

Getting out of YourTown every once in a while like this is essential. If you're serious about paying off your mortgage and increasing the size of your house, a supply of imported fruit is a necessity. Occasionally a coconut may wash up on the beach - don't sell it! Foreign fruits are worth five times as much as your local crop, so chopping down your rubbish original trees and replacing them with imports is a boring but rewarding task. And at least it's a pleasant way to spend the weekend.

Many Attractions
Once your house is set up as you like it, you may want to start investing more time in the local community. YourTown boasts an excellent, if rather poorly stocked, Museum, curated by knowledgeable owl Blathers.

Should you find a fossil, catch a rare fish or manage to trap one of the many seasonal insects that flutter about YourTown, be sure to take them over to Blathers for a friendly, informal appraisal. If you've got a sort of fossil that's yet to be displayed Blathers may ask you if you'd like to donate it to the Museum so other residents can study it. The Museum is a cultural hot spot as it also houses paintings and hosts the occasional music gig in the coffee shop on Saturday nights.

Collecting all the fossils, catching all the fish, buying all the paintings and maxing out the size of your house are all massive tasks. Each little challenge is at least the size of all of Nintendogs. Animal Crossing is not something to be experienced for a few days - the novelty will stay fresh for years.

And still we've only covered the tip of the iceberg when it comes to things to do while staying in YourTown. There's a vibrant local textile industry that lets you spend hours designing and selling clothing, a hippy character who teaches you emotions, fortune tellers to laugh at, a fashion designer who'll kit you out (and rip you off), and you never know what new themed day is going to pop up next.

In fact, there's so much to do here we doubt you'll ever want to leave. Animal Crossing isn't a place you get bored of; it's a constantly growing, changing world that simply gets better the more you put into it. Whether you decide to be a farmer, trader, fisherman or simple layabout messing around with your friends via the Wi-Fi Connection, it's the happiest and most pleasurable destination in all of Nintendo's joyous world. We hope... no, we know you'll enjoy your stay.