Animal Crossing: Back to Wiiville

Over the summer I spent a fair amount of time messing around with Dolphin, even throwing Animal Crossing to see if the NES games would work in it. They didn't, but seeing as I had my old town loaded up I thought I'd take a wander around and take a few screen-caps anyway.



Jealous? So yeah, as you can probably gather from the statue, I played a lot of Animal Crossing on the GameCube. In my defence, I really was at a pretty loose end gaming-wise at the time.

I picked up a copy on eBay in 2006; I think in early November. It was only meant to be a bit of a diversion before I strolled into my local gaming establishment to pick up a Wii the following month (hence the town name). Of course, there were no Wiis to be had, anywhere. So until I decided "fuck the Wii for now, I'll get a PS2" in the Summer, I had to make do with this, a few half-finished games ,and a couple of eBay purchases to tide me over. It was a pretty rough time; I played freaking Doshin the Giant for goodness sake. To completion! :D



To the right of my glorious monument, it's the Able Sisters, still sporting a bunch of my patterns on their wares. Got to say I never got tired of seeing my fellow villagers in that blood spatter shirt.



Looks like I've got mail. Not sure who was the worse spammer: the Happy Room Academy or my in-game mom. Also, a random billboard with my shoddy Tetris pattern on it.



Tah-dah! So, having started this town just before Christmas, I was just in time to grab a bunch of stuff from Tom Nook, allowing me to live out my secret fantasy of having Christmas decorations up all year round, as well as a few bits of snowman and Jingle furniture.



Mmmm, nice!



I do have a few bits of ranch furniture too though, which I thought worked well with the festive theme, even if those bastards at the HRA didn't agree.



But down in the basement is where all the really cool stuff is. Like cockroaches. Also down here are a collection of the shirts I wore while playing through the game. Ugh, how pathetic is that?. Probably not as bad as saving the letters you get from your in-game mom in the post office.

Which I also did, for quite a while.



There's some stuff down here too from when I popped the game in a few times in late 2007 to check out the events I'd missed the previous year, like my birthday and Thanksgiving.



Over here a few tiles from the model Animal Crossing town. I couldn't bring myself to throw them out, but equally I couldn't be bothered to complete the set. Oh, and I think that's a fishing trophy from the tournament in June. I think some time travel was required for that after I missed it the first time around. That's something I did a lot, either to go back to stuff I missed, or to play through several in-game days at once. Like I said: loose end. :D



In the corner: a couple of lockers storing even more of my virtual junk. Pretty sure they're mostly full of wallpapers and carpets, which I almost never changed so I don't know why I was hoarding so many of them down here.



And finally, the only reason for me to come back to Animal Crossing these days: my game room. Man, those NES titles were such a great addition to the game, and the possibility of acquiring more was certainty the chief reason I played as much of this as I did. Well, at least until found about universal codes. Never going to happen again though. (Thanks, Obama.)