A basic rule of thumb around here is that if your game has a way to save out screenshots, I'm going to post them. So in lieu of retreading the same old weblog ground with Animal Crossing, I'm going to just run my shots and nonsensically chat around them.

I think I'm sticking with the Mii head for now. My AC character has a really lousy haircut and the Mii mask hides that. Haircuts at Shampoodle are expensive and the Q&A that leads to your selected color and style is a miserable guessing game. So, Mii. Although Mii heads can't wear hats or accessories, which is insanely stupid.

Notice my town has pears. Same fruit I had in the original Animal Crossing. I need Friends to bring me fruit. Should I re-establish Open Gate Night?

This game cracks me up. Look at that junk about elastic bands!

If you can't PhotoShop some obscene text into that Yahoo! box text window, you're not really trying.

Check out the Li'l Dred t-shirt. Of course that's the first thing I do with my bells, design shirts. That and buy a Bubble Wand.

Or go to get some emotes at Dr. Shrunk's show. Just like in Wild World, you're limited to keeping four emotes (WTF). I got Disbelief, and there's Mii trying it out. At least the emotes work on Miis. It would have been so Nintendo to have the Mii masks remain emotionless. Somebody had to work a weekend to make this happen.

This, however, is THE SHIRT. This is what I look like all the time. To make that Hawaiian Ghost shirt, I started with the game's premade flower shirt, made it look like it was unbuttoned, and then added a scared blue Pac-Man ghost.

Oh, and Clark is playing too. He really likes the Bubble Wand.

They say the craziest crap in this game. Fully 80% of the development time must have went to typing up bizarre random dialogue bits.

And there's me checking on sleeping Clark! So real life.

This week in Animal Crossing... a visit from Wendell, a look at how I'm molding the town, and of course the pro-veg cruelty-free Harvest Festival.

You know who still sucks? Wendell. Wild World pretty much ruined this guy. Time was, you'd give him food and he'd give you a rare wallpaper. In the DS version, he was reduced to a pattern delivery service, no more actual items. And just like in the portable, low-memory, card media version of Animal Crossing, you're limited to owning eight patterns at any one time (with plenty of out-of-pocket storage, thankfully) and of course Wendell has fifty or sixty designs to dole out. Want to use Wendell's patterns to lay down a fun road throughout your town? Then that's all you're doing, because the road designs will fill up your pattern slots.

"Where do [I] want it?", indeed.

Katrina sucks too.

I've already fallen back to seven year old gags... I'm teaching everyone in town to say Mitchell!

That pig has great taste in clothes.

Zydeco? Chuffed? What is up with this game. Greatest English localization ever.

Bit of a twist to the Crazy Redd formula... you now need to score an invitation from one of your villagers before you can enter Redd's shop. Once you get that, then Redd gives you one sheet of his special paper so you can invite someone else. Pretty cool. I like how Redd (and even Katrina) are now constant citydwellers, rather than having to wait for them to randomly appear in town.

Son of a bitch still sold me a forged painting though.

The point of the Harvest Festival is to steal the silverware and give it to Franklin the turkey so he does not get eaten. Then he gives you a random piece of (ugly) Harvest furniture. As long as you ditch the gift back at your pad, you can keep doing this all night.

I played the Festival for over two hours, trying to collect the entire Harvest Series. Didn't happen. I'm still missing the Sofa, Bed and something else. I have plenty of dupes of other items so maybe I can trade for the rest of the set.

Good ol' Franklin! Spreading the vegetarian holiday message through Wiis everywhere.

Clark loves when his Mii makes silly faces like that.

Here's a look at our houses. I have a lot of Mush furniture simply because it will end up being sort of rare, but as soon as mushroom season is over it's all going back into storage because it is hideous. Note the snowy weather forecast on the TV; I will be very interested to see if that image changes throughout the year.

Clark's house has a toilet, a fan, and a jackhammer. Connect those dots however you like.

The latest from Animal Crossing... problems with Pascal, making song requests with K.K., and what Gracie thinks of Miis.

OK, you know how Pascal wants scallops? White scallops don't count. Crap in a hat. Here's Pascal floating downstream after not wanting my white scallop and not giving me any cool pirate furniture.

I think Bunnie may be my new favorite.

We have the Nook-n-Go, but I don't expect it to stick around very long. It sucks because the Nook-n-Go is the only store with decent hours, open until 1am.

Hey, you can preview the paper style before you buy it? Cool. I don't recall that being in previous ACs.

Great shot of K.K. Slider. He's still our Saturday Night Thing, but his "cool cat" jazz talk is far more obnoxious than ever before. The localization team really cranked the cliche on this guy and it stinks.

Also, you can totally request songs, just as ever. I don't know who started the rumor that you can't.

Brewster: debatable hygiene since 2005.

Gracie's comment about makeup is directly referring to Clark's Mii mask. I can't tell if Gracie is being sarcastic about it, or if she's cool with it. She's not always around in her store, and I'm fine with that after all the times she made me wash her car for crap.

And hey, interest! I'm sure that will encourage time travellers everywhere to screw up their game for big bell payouts.

Rhonda is way ahead of me in Animal Crossing. She just got her second story and I still have 100,000 bells or so left on the house upgrade before that. At this rate, she is going to get the gold statue. I wonder if it will have the Mii face? I bet not...

Rhonda also happened upon Wisp one night, which only happened once or twice to us back on the GameCube. Wisp has undergone a genie makeover. I like how you now have to meet him in your attic to collect on his boon.

I thought I was on to something here. The strategy guide mentions that Chip will give out a silver fishing trophy if you show him a particular fish (this is separate from the gold trophy you get for beating a bunch of cheating AI characters to win the tournament). So when I noticed the picture on his cart of him and a koi, I had Rhonda give him a koi she had caught previously. No dice. Chip ate the koi. Just another example of how the strategy guide is complete vague bullshit.

Meanwhile, I'm cozying up to Sable.

The snowman scripts contain some of the best dialogue in the game.

Saw Pascal again. This time while holding the proper damn scallop. Got a Sea View wall.

I like the new bit where stupid villagers drop their house key in the river.

Jingle is back, and he is far trickier than in '02. These days, you'll find him either wandering outside OR inside somebody's darkened house. I think this is the only time that you can enter a house with the lights turned off (because the animal owner is out walking around). This is something else that the guide does not explicitly discuss, and although Jingle himself offers a clue that he will be "inside," that still leaves you with a dozen houses to check... and if you want to find him again, it's another dull search of houses and the entire exterior town.

He'll give you a present right away, but if you want more you have to come up with different combinations of shirts AND accessories. You can no longer fool him by simply changing your shirt. Luckily, he does not recall specific elements... you can get him by putting together different combos of the same gear. And the Mii Mask is completely invisible to Jingle, by the way.

I'm sure this will be valuable information for you in December of 2009.

Some shots of the first time I wandered online...

Jack was hosting his friends Tobias and Youtubes. By pure luck I happened to check the WiFi door and noticed his gate was open. I friended the two I did not know - you do not need Wii Friend Codes when you encounter Friends of Friends, which is a small concession on Nintendo's part - and proceeded to enjoy what I could of the woefully underdeveloped Animal Crossing online play. IE, stealing fruit. It would be really nice if the game had a live Friend list that showed who currently has open gates without having to click through all the obnoxious text and menus from Copper. Really, really nice.

Although everyone can have a seat at Brewster's, once you sit you can't type. Also, you can't all go to the City, WHICH IS AMAZINGLY STUPID.

I love the Power Ranger styled costumes. We're hoping to collect those for Clark.

The floating name bubbles are nice. They let you know who is nearby because they hover onscreen in accordance with everybody's map position.

Another cool feature is that you can now send letters to people in other towns via your own City Hall. Previously, you had to be IN somebody's town to send them a letter, which was nuts. I think you have to actually visit that town first at least once, however, you can't just send in-game messages based on Friend Codes alone.

Ever since I read that Brewster eventually offers up secret Gyroid storage, I've been hoarding them. Once again, the strategy guide just tosses that nugget out there without specifically telling you how to do it. You have to buy coffee (and drink it hot) on at least seven different occasions. I don't know if they have to be on sequential days. Then you have to have a Gyroid in your inventory when you talk to him WITHOUT BEING SEATED. He will not offer up his secret storage unless he "sees" you holding one, and he won't bring it up when you sit down to have coffee.

There's a ball of shit right there.

And I love how pro-science Blathers gets. He's all into evolution and stuff.

This has been Animal Crossing canon since the first game, but I think a lot of players dismissed this as unfounded rumor. You can't argue against the unPhotoshopped screenshot! Sable and Mabel's parents died quite some time ago when Mabel was very young. Sable is about ten years older and has been taking care of her little sister - and the family business - even since then. Maudlin!

In other depressing AC news, Lyle is the equivalent of Gil on The Simpsons. He previous job was a Bee Sting Insurance salesman, and now he works for the Happy Room Academy and hates it.

And can somebody please tell me of the purpose behind the Shopping Card? You do not require it to make deposits/withdrawals at the bank, and Nook does not notice when you carry it into his store.

Yep, the Silver Rod. Randomly for sale at proper Nook's everywhere.

Not sure what it actually does. We still can't catch a coelacanth. But it's rare so there you go. When you're shopping for the rare silver tools, look for the green highlights. Also, noticing more than one fishing rod for sale in a single day is a dead giveaway.

This could be huge. Tonight Nook asked all three of us if we would prefer variety or better hours. We all voted for better hours, because it is crazy that he closes at 9pm. Crazy awful. Could the game really be willing to alter Tom Nook's long-established crap hours?

I was all set to scoff at this claim that Nate - a bear - had gone veg once I noticed him still walking around with a fishing rod. However Rhonda pointed out that maybe he still fishes for the sport of it, catch-and-release.

We're up to three or four genuine artworks for the museum, after so many Redd-sold frauds. We only need six more fossils and we'll have the dinosaur portion finished.

Ah, the days of snapping cute photos of your son out playing with his little friends in the backyard... running, laughing, talking, pulling fruit off trees... in Animal Crossing.

So GracieGrace held a half-off sale, which almost brought her furniture prices down into the stratosphere. Of course, most of the stuff is gone. For a second I wondered if Gracie's stock was "shared" among my Wii Friends and that other players had grabbed her clearance stock before I got there... but there's no way AC:CF is that progressive.

Also, did you know that Redd pays you for sending out those membership invitations, once that person signs up (at a cost of 3000 bells)? If I refer two more people, I'll have made back my own fee.

Remember a week ago when I was excited about this exit poll at Nook's?

Seems like a great idea, right? Here's the game taking the time to find out how you play and adjusting itself to your liking. We all opted for "better hours," figuring that we would sacrifice the rare item stock for store hours that fit our lifestyle... we usually only play Animal Crossing at night, and it's a sucky rush to get to it by 9pm when Nookington's closes. Or else our pockets fill up with unsellable fish, fruit and fossils.

A few days later, this notice went up on the bulletin board:

Cool. We're excited. Best case scenario, Nook pushes his hours to something awesome like 1am. And we lose the frequency of Nook's item specials. Big deal; I already have most of the rare junk in my catalog from the Wild World import.

We were not prepared for the Worst Case Scenario.

Fucker went back to the Nook-n-Go!

With the same interior, too! So it's not like a TARDIS thing where it's small on the outside and good ol' huge Nookington's on the inside. Unbelievable.

We told the guy we wanted better hours instead of item variety, but we assumed that would just dial down the rarity... not turn us back to a minimal daily selection of tools, seeds, furniture and everything else. We were willing to ditch the quality, but not the quantity.

All for a bullshit 11pm closing time.

The worst thing about this is that Nookington's is a place of pride. Now anybody who comes to our town will think we're some kind of amateur pikers who can't even upgrade Nook's to the top level. It's embarrassing. And thanks to the strategy guide being garbage, there's no warning anywhere that something like this could happen.

This is unsettling enough for me to not ever want to play Animal Crossing again. It feels like I've been punched in the gut. Because there's no going back to an earlier save, or any of the usual gaming preservation and backup tricks. All decisions by Nook are final.

Running the numbers, it looks like Nook brought this up approximately two months after we started playing. Maybe he asks this every quarter. Will he ever poll us again? Or will we have a lousy small-town Nook's forever? I will be inconsolably pissed about this if we're truly stuck.

Talk about an accurate life simulation. Even in Animal Crossing, the economy is falling apart.

We'll never know, but at least we know that Easter (or Bunny Day, or Egg Day, or whatever the heck they call it) is actually a for-real questing holiday.

One nice thing about this... the egg hunt reset for each player. So all three of us had a decent shot at the fun of digging up eggs. I managed a complete set of Egg furniture, since I was the only one of us who cared to collect them all.

Zipper reminds me of those rabbits from Silent Hill.

You guys recall how pissed I was when Nook dumped Nookington's in favor of a wimpy Nook-n-Go, just based on our desire for better hours. Well, Nookington's is back, thanks to another hasty exit poll.

Here's a happy me back with the monster Nookington's.

Of course, leave it to Blathers to work in a jab at Nook's expense.

Rhonda ran into Wisp again, but this time she opted not to help him out. And she kept his lamp! His rewards suck anyway.

And there's somebody I haven't thought about in a while: Pippy. Clark ran into that nasty ugly rabbit up in the city zone. Stay out of our town, Pippy!

No, Blanca. You do not want a mirror.

We do the worst things to her.

And there's the latest coolpants item: the DSi sofa! It doesn't turn on, but it does look pretty cool. Like the Pikmin Hat rare item that appeared a few weeks ago, the DSi sofa can be ordered from Nook's catalog once you touch it... so these rare items will thankfully not stay rare. (Thankfully if you missed the distribution period, anyway.)

A great many things were lost when my Wii's onboard memory exploded, but perhaps the greatest loss was the disappearance of 100+ hours of Animal Crossing: City Folk. Thanks again, Nintendo, for inventing visible save files that can't be copied to an SD card.

I sort of had no intention of restarting the game. I mean, there's just so much that we accomplished in AC:CF that was now gone. Finding all the fossils, opening up Brewster's gyroid storage, participating in holiday/seasonal events, receiving Nintendo's WiFi collectables, upgrading the houses, finding golden/silver tools, designing our own patterns, getting access to Crazy Redd's. I really didn't have the stomach to face that game knowing all of that had been undone.

But then Tony got the game and sent me his Friend Code, unbidden. So what the hell. Be brave.

Since this is my second shot at this game, I'm far looser in my classically rigid rules for playing Animal Crossing. The above map is actually my second town on this reboot, since I didn't like the layout of the first town the game generated. The first map had all the houses in ghastly locations, plus it had a terrible thin peninsula along one edge that would have been a right bitch to canvas for fossils and whatnot every day.

I took the northernmost house for easy access to New Adamsvil's civic centers. Makes me realize how lucky we were on our original map, where all our houses were in a neat little line at the top of the screen.

Yes, Tortimer, this is deja vu. A painful, terrible deja vu.

The exercise-obsessed personality type makes for some hilarious conversations.

I cracked through the Nook tasks as soon as I could, because you need to finish that in order to turn on the WiFi. There is a cow in town whom I hate, because her house sits right on top of a bridge.

This new town has a slick boot-shaped island that I plan to populate with coconut trees.

For my guy, I did the DS import again. All this does is give you a decent starting catalog. No extra money or anything.

This game really does have some of the best creative localization ever. Even just in terms of sheer weight, it's impressive.

Had to dash over to Shampoodle to get the Mii head. I can't imagine playing the game without it now. Of course, this means none of the hats work. NICE.

Clark restarted his character as well, and chose the house on the left that is currently surrounded by animal homes. Then he found this cool gyroid room over at the HRA.

I have enlisted the help of my cousins to get me the secret Nintendo furniture items that I had and then lost. Even though we exchanged Friend Codes, I don't think you can send items via in-game mail until you physically visit each other's towns... so we have to set up an Animal Crossing visitation. If I could get somebody to hand me all the fossils, bugs, fish and paintings... plus about a million bells in cash, well then I'd feel like I had not lost much on this reboot.

Tony came over to visit.

He's new to Animal Crossing, so we had much to discuss. AC text chat doesn't wrap, and the character limit is worse than Twitter.

Naturally, you have to visit each town's Nook-n-Go.

Through a weird coincidence, as Tony and I were "playing," I noticed that Stephen had put out an Animal Crossing all-call on his Twitter. So I messaged him and he joined the "fun."

We decided we would play Halo.

What is even odder about this impromptu evening is that all three of us recently started playing the 2008 game. Tony just received it. Stephen found it super-cheap somewhere. And I, of course, am struggling to make peace with a full restart.

Tony and I caught the K.K. show. Nintendo WFC died shortly after this.

Here I am tickling Tony with dandelion fluff.

Then we went to see Blathers.

Now that we've hung, we can send each other in-game letters and items. Which is pretty key. Today Stephen sent me an apple (thus completing my fruit collection), and I sent him an axe since his Nook has yet to get them in stock.

My house is about to get upgrade #4 (basement?) I think, if I'm diligent, I should easily be able to clear 100,000 bells a week in fruit sales. I haven't bothered to do much decorating, except to show off all the Nintendo WiFi items. I really miss how Wild World allowed for multiple rooms and, thus, several different interior design showcases. There is so much this franchise could be doing, but I highly doubt we'll see another installment in this generation.

Have I mentioned that I have a genuine Mona Lisa? Or "Famous Painting," whatever?

Colin sent that to me. Colin also sent Clark this King Tut mask...

Which, which caught in a pitfall, sort of looks like the Boy King is rising out of the ground. Clark got a kick out of that. Zombie humor, ar ar.

Had another Tony visit. late Saturday night. We both made crazy amounts of money selling our crappy native fruit in each other's town.

Awkward conversations abounded.

We were actually supposed to spend Saturday at Josh's real-life animal house, but the snowstorm forbade. Mother Nature hates Game Nights.

Knowing the blizzard was coming, on Friday Tony put out a half-hearted push for Josh to quick buy Animal Crossing. Josh put out a full-hearted rejection.

I don't think this is the best way to go about convincing Josh to get the game.

I forget what this conversation was about, but I like the internal monologue:

I usually never talk to the animals, which I have probably already mentioned. Blathers and Nook are the only ones I ever speak to.

And that is only out of necessity.

But on my birthday, I tried talking to everybody in hopes of getting some free presents. I struck out on that score, but I did trigger something I had never experienced in any Animal Crossing: the hide and seek game.

Alfonzo warped me to the Town Hall courtyard, where he laid down the rules. 15 minutes to find him and his two idiot friends. Here is the kind of fantastic hiding skills they exhibit:

For my trouble I got an Automatic Washer. I think I left it outside. It would be so hilarious if AC allowed furniture dropped outside to look like what it does inside. My yard would be a massive junk pile.

Just noticed that Midge moved to my town from Tony's. Again, I never talk to these guys.

I did achieve a personal AC goal, one that I had not even accomplished on my pre-Wii-memory-explosion save, that being PAYING OFF THE LAST LOAN.

Spoiler: after coming up with the 534,000 bells, you get a flag on your house. Pretty cool.

My fruit trees generate just under 200,000 bells per harvest (which takes me about an hour to lope through; this town needs some orchard automation), so now I can work on the landscape upgrades you get by donating to the town fund. Or I could dump it all in the bank and try to get my monthly interest up to worth-a-damn levels.