July 18th, 2008 by ProfessorLayton
Animal History
What started as an exclusive Nintendo-published game in Japan has now turned into one of the most popular games of all time. Animal Forest was originally a Japan-only Nintendo 64 game that eventually managed to make its way to American shores.
Then came Animal Crossing, the North American version of Animal Forest. Due to Nintendo of America putting a lot of effort into the Gamecube version of Animal Forest , the end result was a game with a lot of text, way more than the Japanese port. This new version contained thousands upon thousands of lines of text, which was a lot more than a typical game. Nintendo of Japan was so pleased with how Animal Crossing panned out that they decided to translate the North American version back into Japanese as Animal Forest e-Plus, which was released in June of 2003.
Meeting the same fate as the original, Animal Crossing: Wild World went on to become one of the DS’ most popular titles and most successful. Since its début in late 2005, Wild World has sold over 9.53 million units worldwide. It then became quite apparent that Animal Crossing is one Nintendo’s most popular, and best-selling video game franchises. During Nintendo’s press conference at E3 2008, it was certainly no surprise to hear that Nintendo had another Animal Crossing up their sleeve. Set to be released this holiday season, Animal Crossing: City Folk takes advantage of its platform to deliver one of the would-be best online titles on Wii.
Chat Party
Like Animal Crossing: Wild World, City Folk plans to improve on the previous games in the series. Whereas Wild World’s biggest improvement was online play, City Folk’s biggest improvement is quite evidently going to be voice chat. Using a new accessory from Nintendo called WiiSpeak, players will be able to chat with another room of players that are playing City Folk. The accessory plugs into the USB port on the back of the Wii and resides on the top of your television like the Wii Sensor Bar. Upwards to four players can interact with each other online.
Little Town...
As in previous Animal Crossing games, players are packing up their belongings and heading to the wilderness to live with a bunch of weird, but fun, animals. Players can select the name for their village as well as a name for their character. Once they arrive in their community, players will select a house to live in, and judging by a recent trailer, there will no longer be a set spot for the houses to be located in. In the Gamecube version, there was always a particular place where the houses could be located. In the DS version, the place would be determined randomly after you answered a new question. One can assume that this will be what will also happen in City Folk.
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