With February 25th marking an official end to the blanket of snow that has covered our village since mid-December, I thought I'd send you all an update on Adamsvil.
ITEM. We have a new human in town. His name is NESJoe and his responsiblity is to create the best NES arcade in town. In truth, NESJoe is a soulless automaton manipulated by yours truly, which allows me the dual purpose of finding out what the animals think of me and building a bitchin' NES arcade. Since I am covering NESJoe's debt to Nook out of my own vast bank account, I estimate that there will be a second lifesize statue by the train station within a few weeks.
ITEM. Groundhog Day completely sucked. I had heard that festivities began at 7am for the big ceremony at 9am (thank you, Nintendo Power Strategy Guide)... but in fact the ceremony was held at 8am. I showed up at the Wishing Well at 8:45am, and all I saw was the post-Groundhog afterglow.
ITEM. The winter Igloo experience was like pissing your pants. At first it's allw arm and great, but it soon reaches a saturation point where it just isn't fun anymore. After about two weeks of daily rimming from the villagers insane Igloo guessing games, we spent more time banging on the Igloo exterior with our golden shovels than actually going inside. We were extremely happy to see the Igloos disappear along with the rest of the snow.
ITEM. One winter trick we did master was building a snowman. Initially, it is a daunting quest: combine two snowballs from opposite ends of the map, crossing a terrain full of rivers, cliffs and questionable pathfinding subroutines, and get both balls in just the right size ratio so the resultant snowman instantly develops a healthy self-image. But once you get a handle on the size thing, it turned out to be not so bad. The reward for perfectly cut snowmen is random pieces of the snowman furniture series, of which we managed to collect eight unique items.
I also celebrated my birthday in February, receiving Donkey Kong from Olivia (I already had it), a birthday cake from Mom, and several thoughtless, common gifts from other villagers. And that was winter in Adamsvil.
Lupin himself is a "Gentleman Thief"... his name and ouevre blatantly stolen from a 1900s French literary figure in the days before copyright law. He's also a skirt-chaser and a showoff. He's into theivery for the challenge of it as much as the outrageous riches. His gang consists of Jigen, an American gunman, and Goemon, a modern day samurai. Sometimes they work with Fugiko, a conniving sexpot, but she usually tries to double cross them.
Although I'm sweating with anticipation over Pokemon Ruby & Sapphire, I must confess the slightest disappointment over the initial batch of screenshots. The battle scenes still look empty, and the world still looks like Game Boy Color. I guess I was expecting something a little more SNES-looking. But I suppose Pokemon really doesn't require an amazing graphical look, since the attraction is in the depth of the game itself.
The baseline defense against cheating in AC - in any video game, actually - is that it wrecks the game's experience as intended by the creators. As noble as that argument sounds, it isn't a very good one, as most casual gamers aren't likely to care about heightening their game experience. Much less the intents of the game's designers. Most casual gamers (and younger gamers) have a strike-first-strike-fast mentality, where they simply want to get into the game, skip all the cutscenes, beat it, and move on to something else.
So if speed is your purpose, there's really no argument against cheating that will carry any weight. In Animal Crossing, the need for speed translates to doing whatever it takes to collect all the game's rare items. There are two popular ways of cheating in AC: time travel and universal codes.
The cheater's response to this is usually the misguided complaint of "I have a life and can't play the game during every holiday." Well then you don't get the rare holiday items. That's like saying "I have a life and can't play SOCOM often enough to get really good at it." Then you don't get to be good at SOCOM. If you go into Animal Crossing with the goal of collecting absolutely everything, you're going to come out disappointed anyway, given some of the insane criteria you need to unlock the rarest of the rare. Gathering items is the engine that drives you onward, but the true mission of the game is to see how well you can fare living in another world.
Also, having the game guided by a real calendar means that all AC players everywhere are experiencing the same events at the same time (or nearly the same time, accounting for different time zones.) So it has the effect of building a community around the game as players talk about upcoming events on message boards. Most (non-MMORPG) high quality games have community flare-ups around the game's initial release... and then die off. IGN's Animal Crossing message board is still the most popular gameboard by nearly 100,000 messages, almost six months after the game's debut.
So when you trade an item like this, the code you generate contains five bits of information: the item, the sender's name, the sender's town, the receiver's name and the receiver's town. But, there are universal codes that only contain the item itself; these codes that will work for all names. Nintendo has already publicly provided some of these, as collectable e-Cards and as a fun bonus in issues of Nintendo Power. They're even a little more complex than the average code. When you enter in an NP code, Nook tells you that you have "won a contest in Nintendo Power" before you get the item.
Regardless of how my wife and I enjoy the game, many cheaters will turn defiant and spout "I paid $50, I'll play the game anyway I want to." And that's another argument with no convincing counter. If you're going to do whatever you want, all my flowery dialogue about the game's higher meaning isn't going to go anywhere. If you're going to wallhack in Quake, you're going to wallhack. But imagine cheating yourself to maximum levels in the first ten minutes of any Final Fantasy... you're robbing the game of its ability to entertain you.
