1. I don't know what kind of creature Dr. Shrunk is supposed to be, but he reminds me of the Heffalumps from Winnie-the-Pooh. He's a random visitor, like Saharah or Wendell (how are we supposed to know when these folks are showing up?!) and he gives out emotions. Today, I received shyness.

What that means is that your character can perform the same silly visual emotion animations that the animals can do. I hope that you can eventually get some of the cooler ones, like the horwf-horwf-horwf laughter or the bit where the single leaf blows across their heads. Compared to emotions like that, blushing isn't that impressive.

2. Villagers will walk into your house. I was talking to Pinky, a recent addition to Adamsvil and she said "Hey, I'd like to see your interior decorating." I said "Sure," figuring she would cop out, as they did every time something like this came up in the first Animal Crossing. (Remember "Let's start a soccer team!" followed by "Gosh, I'm not really that good at sports..." thus dashing all hopes of a surprise soccer minigame.) But instead, Pinky asked for a specific time she can come over and the screen changed to an interactive clock! So I told her to come over in an hour, she would refuse anything sooner than that.

And in an hour, there was a knock on the door and Pinky walked in. (I made sure I was in my house at the time.) She talked about how much she liked the place and then meandered about aimlessly. It got awkward after a couple minutes. I was guessing she would give me something awesome, a rare item, so I was waiting for something to happen. Nothing did, so I left and she got pissed. Still not sure if I bungled that one or not.

3. You can send letters to yourself in the future. Weird. On your address list, it says "future self" and when you send that letter, the Post Office staff asks when you would like that letter to be delivered. I chose a year from now. So next December, I'm going to get a dopey letter from me. I even attached the cheapest seashell I could find.

Multiplayer went better than I thought. I exchanged friend codes and set up a time with two other guys, Mr. Snap and Johnny. Once you and your friend(s) have registered each other, then the systems look for each other's availability online. The only snag is that you should arrange who is hosting, because it's two different menu options to "visit elsewhere" or "allow visitors here." If you want to travel out of your town, Copper opens up a window that I assume is constantly refreshing as it looks for open towns. While this is going on, you can't do anything else. However, if you want people to visit your town, you just tell Copper to throw open the gate. This does not freeze you in place, so you're able to continue whatever you were doing. When a friend sees your open gate (they have to be in waiting-to-travel mode), they can enter your town and you get a happy warning when they walk in.

I first travelled to Johnny's village, Pickles, where I took a handful of pears and sent some letters to a couple of his villagers. Then I went home and opened my gate, and Johnny and Snap soon joined me. There was general amiable chatting, some oohs and aahs over our clothing and items, and they managed to buy most of Nook's (and the Able Sisters') available wares.

I noticed some slowdown (!) as all three of us ran around, particularly on the tool actions like digging or picking something up. Snap warned me that the online mode can sometimes lag out and force a shutdown, so it's wise for the host to save often. And sure enough, a couple minutes after I saved, we hit a bad lag patch and the fun was ended. Anything that happened after my save was lost, so hopefully the guys had grabbed their Adamsvil Home-Grown Oranges in time! ACWW doesn't seem to want to penalize you for a non-saved shutdown in the way that the GCN version did, although Mr. Resetti does appear on the "Oh crap you lagged out to all hell" bluescreen.

So I'm officially starting a players' group. I'm going to open my gate every Thursday around 8pm EST, and all mutual friends are welcome. Right now, nobody has much to do, but once people start figuring out what furniture they're looking for, it should be more interesting. Since you can potentially hook up with a ton of fellow players, I think the average gamer has a shot at completing the catalog this time. Plus we could use it to arrange Mario Kart matches.