Animal Crossing: City Folk

by Nintendo

Product Features

• DS Suitcase mode included which lets you carry your character from your Wii console to a friend's.
• A living, breathing gameplay environment where there is always something to do.
• Multiplayer support up to four players when used with 'Wii Speak' microphone (Microphone sold separately).
• Extensive custotomizing options allow you to visit the salon and give your Mii a makeover.
• Befriend your animal neighbors by exchanging letters, gifts and favors in order to bring their memories and stories from their old towns into the game.

Product Details

• Shipping: Currently, item can be shipped only within the U.S. and to APO/FPO addresses. For APO/FPO shipments, please check with the manufacturer regarding warranty and support issues.
• ASIN: B001CM0PR8
• Product Dimensions: 7.5 x 5.2 x 0.8 inches ; 6.1 ounces
• Media: Video Game
• Release Date: November 16, 2008
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (217 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #989 in Video Games (See Top 100 in Video Games)
  • #2 in Video Games > Wii > Simulation > Life
• Discontinued by manufacturer: Yes

Product Description

Edition: Standard

Amazon.com

If you were given the keys to your own community, what would you do? Go fishing, collect shells or watch fireworks with friends? Build a snowman, exchange presents with family or decorate your house for the holidays? Take a trip to the city, go on a shopping spree or visit friends from all over the globe? In Animal Crossing: City Folk, life moves at a relaxed pace, but the world brims with endless possibilities.

Build your own community

Enjoy mini-games against friends. View larger.

Get to know your neighbors. View larger.

Play at all hours of the day. View larger.

Feel free to have company over. View larger.

Gameplay
You make the whole story, as you and up to three other players move into a town and just live life. Befriend your animal neighbors, decorate your house with cool furnishings, fill up your wardrobe, get to know the local wildlife, hop on a bus to visit the new city and just explore the world. There are a million different ways to play. Every charming animal character has a personality: some are grouches while others are chatterboxes. And there's no final goal or high score to hit. The game keeps going for as long as you want to play, and your town will always be there when you return. Move into town, buy a house and then do whatever you want. Time and seasons pass as they do in the real world, so there's always something different happening. Collect more than 2,400 items, go fishing for rare and interesting fish, catch all kind of cool bugs, dig up dinosaur fossils and buried treasure, hang out with other players or spend the day in the city. There's so much to do, and you have all the time in the world to explore it all.

DS Suitcase Mode
The DS Suitcase lets you carry your character from your Wii console to a friend's, thus giving people without an Internet connection the ability to experience multiplayer modes. Additionally, you can move your character from Animal Crossing: Wild World on Nintendo DS and play as him/her in Animal Crossing: City Folk.

Key Game Features

• There's Always Something New To Do: In the living, breathing world of Animal Crossing: City Folk, days and seasons pass in real time, so there's always something to discover. Catch fireflies in the summer, go trick-or-treating on Halloween or hunt for eggs on Bunny Day. If you're in the mood for something a little faster paced, take a bus to a new urban city area that's unique to Animal Crossing: City Folk. There you can catch a show at the theater or check out the sales at Gracie's boutique. But if you don't show your face back home for too long, your neighbors will miss you.
• Play With and Hear Up to Four Friends: Up to four people from your household can live and work together to build the perfect town. Design clothes and patterns, write letters and post messages on the bulletin board for each other, or play online using your broadband connection and invite up to three friends to visit your town using Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection. With the new optional Wii Speak microphone (sold separately), it's like you're all in the same room. The microphone sits atop the sensor bar and picks up the conversation of everyone in the room to encourage a more inclusive experience.
• Get to Know Your Neighbors: The heart of Animal Crossing: City Folk is building relationships with the animals in your town as well as with other players. Befriend your animal neighbors by exchanging letters, gifts and favors. Animals can also move from town to town, bringing their memories and stories from their old towns with them. And since animals are notoriously loose-lipped, they spill all the juicy details.
• Express Your Personal Style: Customize your town, your house and yourself by collecting bugs, fish, fossils, art, furniture, clothes and accessories. You can also go to the salon in the city to change your hairstyle and get a Mii makeover. Plus, if you design clothes in the tailor's shop, animals will wear them and maybe even bring them to other towns.

Your Neighbors
Familiar faces such as K.K. Slider, Tom Nook, Blathers and Mr. Resetti all appear, as well as a bunch of new characters like Festivale host Pavé and Bug-Off judge Bud. Many characters who occasionally visited your town in previous Animal Crossing games have now set up permanent shop in the city, so you can see them anytime.

Special Powers, Weapons, Moves & Features:
Use the Wii Remote pointer to type letters, use items, draw designs for clothing or wallpaper, drag clothing or items onto your characters, interact with animals or objects, or lead your character around the world. Use Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection to hang out in real time with up to three of your friends. You can also send them e-mails and text messages from the game. Play at different times of the year to experience different activities, holidays and seasons. And when visiting a friend in another country, experience the holidays native to their culture.

Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection
Up to four people can play together in real time via Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection. The host opens his or her gate to allow friends into the town, where they can perform all sorts of activities: fish, write letters to townsfolk, shop at the store, swap items, play hide-and-seek ... anything. Up to four players can interact in real-time, communicating via text chat, mic chat and emoticons.

WiiConnect24:
Using WiiConnect24, you can buy and sell items to friends by participating in silent auctions, view actual players' homes in the Happy Room Academy office or send letters to other players' towns.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

212 of 220 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars I LOVE this game but caveat emptor!!, April 18, 2009

By 

Lonestar fan (Portland, OR) - See all my reviews

= Fun:5.0 out of 5 stars 

This review is from: Animal Crossing (Video Game)

This game is totally addictive- I thought it looked pretty stupid when I saw commercials for it but it is a blast to play. HOWEVER, that being said, if you purchase this game be sure to do a good deal of research before beginning. There are a lot of things that you will not be made aware of until you are already well into the game and it feels like it is too late to start it over as you have built up an inventory, developed friendships with your neighbors, and paid off your house.

First of all, there are several different town layouts. I did not know this and just took the first one offered to me. Apparently if you are not happy with this layout you can keep restarting until you get one you like, and there are some really nice town layouts out there, one that I especially wish I had gotten with two rivers and an island that seems much bigger than my town.

Secondly, this is something that you are not really told in the instructions or in the manual-- DO NOT RUN AROUND your town!! Doing so will wear your grass down until it is gone and you have large patches of brown dirt everywhere. Some people's towns are practically desert wastelands. This is not just an aesthetic issue- it affects game play, as you need grass in order to catch certain bugs, to plant trees and flowers, and during the winter the snow 'is' the grass so where there is no grass there will be no snow. You need snow in order to make snowmen, for which you recieve snowman furniture that cannot be obtained any other way- it is not for sale, it can only be gotten by making the perfect snowman. If you have no snow, you cannot do this. And apparently making the snowman also kills the grass. This is a feature that was built into the game called "animal tracks." It is supposed to work where after a couple of months the areas where your character is always walking, such as to Nook's store or the museum or post office will eventually show trails. However, if you run, or if you log on multiple times a day, say to play different characters (which the game is designed to do- you have 4 houses and 4 potential characters and when families are playing they have to take turns logging on, yet the grass only regenerates a certain amount each day at 6 am, but each time you log on you counts as a day that you are putting wear and tear on your grass- therefore, your grass regrowth will be 3-5 times slower than its regeneration) and once it has been worn down you will see small dots where it is growing back but unfortunately one step on that 'square' and you will see that tiny bit of regrowth literally disappear under your feet. Nintendo's answer to this is to plant trees and flowers in those areas as that is supposed to make the grass grow faster. The problem is, to plant them, and then in order to water the flowers and pick the weeds and harvest the fruit, you still have to step on the area and there goes your regrowth and you are back to square one. It is unfortunate that the game has this built in and that they made the grass growth so much slower than its degeneration, especially when playing multiple players or when playing via wifi and having people come to your town. The wifi option also causes the grass to degenerate more quickly. I don't know why they would have it that way when the game was advertised as being pretty much for the wifi experience. I think possibly it might not be so much of an issue if you know about this from the start and are very careful with your grass. Unfortunately I had the game for 2 months, have been playing 2 characters and running around my town like hooligans before I realized that my grass was disappearing. There have been buttloads of complaints to Nintendo but they do not have any plans to try to fix the problem at this time. I have heard there are other ways to fix it, such as 'hacking' into your wii which can ruin your wii and void your warranty so I don't recommend it, or time traveling, in which you log in, log out and travel forward to the next day (using your Wii clock and calendar, not the game clock and calendar) and logging in and out, and rinse and repeat. However you will find that you have significant weed growth, turnip prices will plummet, and your neighbors will move. So far I am not willing to do this as I have a few neighbors I have grown quite fond of, one in particular (my town grump).

Anyway, aside from this issue it is really a fantastic game- when fishing you can actually feel the fish nibble and bite your line in the remote- its unreal! Hopefully Nintendo will eventually respond to this complaint with a patch or a release of a newer version of the game, but I am not holding my breath, as so far they seem to feel that the people who are complaining have already bought the game so they have no real motivation to fix it- at least that is what I feel from the responses they have given to people. They seem to insinuate it is your own fault by logging in more than once a day or playing via wifi and having people visit your town, even though that is how the game is designed to be played. That does not seem very cool to me. Again, its not just that it is an aesthetic issue but it does affect game play. And its kind of depressing having to feel paranoid about saving your grass- when animals ask you to play hide and go seek you don't want to run for fear of causing further damage, and it kinda sucks the fun out of it.

Anyway, I wanted to just make sure I put that out there so that other people who have yet to buy the game know in advance and can take measures to avoid losing too much grass by keeping to paths (some people even put down pathways although I have not figured out how they do this yet).

You can always rent the game and play it for a few weeks to see what you think- just be sure to take screen shots at the beginning and then when you are ready to return the game to see how much difference there is. The problem is that its hard to really notice until there has been significant loss. It wasn't until I went into the bug section of the museum and was marveling at how lush the grass was in there that I noticed how NOT lush it was in my town anymore!

Aside from this issue, its an extremely fun game. It would be more fun if you could make more than one town, or could play more than one character at a time without each person having to have their own Wii station (such as with the Sims, where you can plug in up to 4 remotes and play 4 characters at once). But I could live with that if they would fix the grass issue. Heck, I would even gladly buy a new game if it came out with that issue resolved without complaint.

Oh, one other thing when you are starting out-- you have 4 houses and be SURE to check each one out before you make your decision and tell Nook you will take it. You CAN say no and check out the other houses and do not pay any attention to what the interior looks like as you will be changing all of that anyway. The location is the most important thing. And I would say you probably want to be near the beach or a bridge and nearby the major places such as Nook's store, the museum, and post office to minimize the traveling your character has to do to get where he/she needs to go. Once you have picked a house you cannot change it- its permanent unless you restart the game.

271 of 286 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Moms choice!, November 29, 2008

By 

Kristen L. Norfleet "Graylons Mom" (Arden, NC) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

= Fun:5.0 out of 5 stars 

This review is from: Animal Crossing (Video Game)

I truly do live by reviews that people are kind enough to take the time to write. I have an 9 year old son and getting it right the first time is the name of the game. I have been saved many times by simply taking the time to sit down and read a review.

I have come across a game that I just had to review. I can not tell you how wonderful this game is. I also have to say that simply renting this game provided my son an I something to bond over. I saw how much fun he was having and I decided to make my own character. This is a blast! We ended up sending mail and presents back and forth to each other and it has been so great.

I woke up in the middle of the night not to long ago and just happen to go down and turn the game ion and ended up fishing in the moonlight. It was so peaceful.

This is just a happy game. My son is normally drawn to war or fighting games. This is a nice break from that. There is nothing you as a parent will object to. I even bet you will want to play as much as your child. Enjoy and happy holidays!

98 of 109 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars First impressions---Is this a NEW game? And is that good or bad?, November 16, 2008

By 

Suzanne Amara (MA) - See all my reviews
(TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (VINE VOICE)   

= Fun:4.0 out of 5 stars 

This review is from: Animal Crossing (Video Game)

Anyone who knows Animal Crossing knows it's hard to really rate the game until you have played for a year or so, but I thought some people might like to hear some first impressions from a huge AC fan of the latest game!

My BIG first impression---very little seems to have changed. This game seems like a real cross between the Gamecube version and the DS version, both of which used up many hours of my time! The setup of the city is a LOT like the Gamecube version. The town have the same feel,with lots of slopes and rivers and the same somewhat tiring to get around town plan. Tom Nook, the Able sisters, Pelly, all are there in stores that look about the same. Blathers is even MORE long winded, and it's just as long a routine to get a fossil identified. It sounds like I'm complaining, but I'm not really, it's the AC I know and love. You have to go through the same internship with Tom Nook,and do even the exact same tasks you always have,and the first payment on the house is even just the same amount!

You DO get to pick your house, though,from four around town. You don't share a house, and they aren't all in a square. I picked a house on the beach, for easy fishing.

I bought a shovel and a fishing rod. Shoveling up things is the same,fishing seems initially a little easier---and yes,my first fish was indeed a Sea Bass!

The animals I visited all had furniture I recognized---modern black and white, cabin themes,etc. The animals were also about half ones I've had before, including Ruby, who I think has been in every town I've virtually lived in!

A few things I did notice---the sound was noticably better. One resident, Reuben, had a scary sort of voice, and it was really echoey and cool. The tops for sale at Able's and the designs on display were impressive---they looked a lot more detailed than previously.

I know at some point I will be able to take a bus to the city---I haven't yet---and I know as I go along I will find a lot more changes (I hope) but for now, I feel like I'm returning to a town I know well. I love Animal Crossing, and I will be happy even if there doesn't turn out to be much new. If you love AC too, buy this. If you have never tried AC, you are in for a treat---BUY IT! If you didn't like the first 2 versions but thought this one might be different---well....maybe wait and see!

2115|R2DHGTDQSM7OAY;2115|R17XK30V3EDUUD;2115|R2CT9I2IAQOFJW;