In our interview yesterday with Takashi Tezuka and Katsuya Eguchi, we learned several new details and got some clarifications on features for Animal Crossing DS. One of the driving forces behind the development is to encourage communication between players. They feel that the DS's touch pen and wireless features really help to facilitate the next step in Animal Crossing's evolution. The touch screen simplifies the gameplay significantly, allowing you to access menus and type more naturally or even navigate the world by pointing the stylus in the direction you want your character to run or by tapping objects to interact with them.

Obvious benefit. Typing in AC was always a chore, and aside from a couple notes written largely to amuse myself, I bailed on it pretty quickly. There was only the barest suggestion that the AC townspeople could actually understand your letters to them anyway... and I think that was only based on a simple grammar checker. As for controlling your character with the stylus, that's fine. I would suspect we'll get both methods of control anyway, stylus and d-pad.

When asked about what specific character interactions we could expect, the developers didn't say much about what they had implemented into the game, focusing instead on how players can interact with each other as they would in real life to create their own games of tag or have fishing tournaments or negotiate with each other for items.

Now that's lame. If that's final, they just dumbed down AC multiplayer to trading and selling items. No one is going to self-organize fishing tournaments or a game of tag, come on. There really ought to be some sort of unique features and options that pop up when you meet other real-life players... items that can be activated to trigger mini-games. Like a jump rope to start a timing jump game, NES Balloon Fight to play a 2P match on the top screen, little sailboats to do a mic-blowing boat race. There needs to be some level of game-directed multiplayer. Playing tag. WTF. It's that kind of silly ephemeral junk that gets Nintendo in trouble with the mainstream.

Eguchi did confirm that the game will allow you to play cross-regionally with players across the globe. As opposed to the region-specific versions of Animal Crossing on GameCube, the DS game will be the same worldwide, with holidays specific to the Animal Crossing world. Basically, the way multiplayer works is that one player will act as host, and up to three others will be able to visit that person's town.

I read elsewhere that going wi-fi might bring up a list of towns you can visit, presumably placed on the network from players across the world and labelled as "accepting travellers" or something. This raises the question, will you really be able to open up your town to anybody? Or will there some kind of block so that only pre-approved people can see you online (like parental controls)? I don't know what to expect here... on one hand I'd love to interact with gamers in Japan and all over, but what's to stop some jerk from chopping down all my trees or painting obscenities on the town bulletin board?

In terms of local play, you can now build your house wherever you like in the town, whether you want a beach house or want your pad close to Tom Nook's shop. Four players can still play using the same card, but they all live in the same house. As your house expands, you can build separate rooms for each character and negotiate with each other to determine who gets which room.

This will require some thought: where do I put my house? Do I go for that seaside view, or keep it close to Nook's and the post office? And how big will it get... I don't want to place it so that future stories will block something awesome. I have a feeling this will require some soul searching.

Four players on one card is a nice favor. They could easily have said "one person per card!" and made you buy a second copy of the game if you have a wife or sibling who wants to play too. Sort of demonstrates how much storage space those DS cards hold, since it took an entire GameCube 59 memory card to one an AC saved game... the DS card has to keep the save file plus the game data.

When asked if Animal Crossing had any sleep mode features, similar to the bark mode in Nintendogs, Eguchi stated that they have not implemented anything yet, but are considering an option to allow someone to draw something in PictoChat and post it directly to the bulletin board in the other person's Animal Crossing town. They are also open to explore other ideas as development continues.

It's good to know that PictoChat isn't stuck on its own little LAN island... hopefully Nintendo left a back door in that will get PictoChat online as well. That said, I don't really understand what that example actually means, and it certainly has nothing to do with the Nintendogs sleep mode that started the question.

Many of the special NPCs such as Mr. Resetti and Tom Nook will return, in addition to some new characters. Likewise many of the popular items and furniture sets will make a return, with a number of new sets and new types of items such as the hats and face gear seen on the show floor. One set of items that will be left out of the DS version is the collection of NES games. This time, the developers have decided to focus on the Animal Crossing world, instead of including the classic NES titles or Game Boy titles as some people had hoped.

Or rather, Nintendo Revolution's new downloadable game library means that they don't want free NES games hidden inside Animal Crossing DS, which is a big mistake. The NES games were a major buzz topic that helped the original AC get attention. It sucks that we won't have that to look forward to.

AC DS better have a ton of new furniture and items. 5x as many as the first game would be nice. With wi-fi play, the random distribution of the rare stuff shouldn't be near as obnoxious, since I'm sure AC DS trading zones will pop up as soon as the game is released. In fact, if the tech allows it, I'll open up my city for regular entry and post about it here at fourhman.com. And hopefully we'll all have more to do together than trade sofas and play freakin' tag.

The last bit of info we gleaned from our time is that players can now set the Animal Crossing clock to match their play patterns. So if you usually play the game at night, but want to experience daytime events in your town, you can change the time settings in the game without having to change the main clock in the DS firmware.

Guh? You could do this before, and it was called cheating. No thanks.

What would be cooler - and still tricky - would be to travel to somebody else's town who lives in a different time zone if you missed an event. Depending on the holiday, you could literally have two full days to catch an event... just hop over to a friend's town in Tokyo.

Still, these details are bare and a lot can happen until the November release. Animal Crossing DS has been consistently referred to as the DS killer app, so it has a lot to live up to.