Boredom-Fueled Blog » Animal Crossing

My Animal Crossing Chronicles – 9/09-7/10

jacob — Fri, 23 Jul 2010 17:54:54 +0000

In the words of Robert Plant: “It’s been a long time, been a long time, been a long lonely, lonely, lonely, lonely, lonely time.” If I’m not mistaken, when he sang those words he was referring to the ten months he went without playing “Animal Crossing: City Folk.” I too went ten months without playing “Animal Crossing,” but I wouldn’t describe it as “lonely.” Better things came along: “Super Mario Galaxy 2,” my relapses into both “Mario Kart Wii” and “Super Smash Bros. Brawl,” and I’d be lying if I said that the Netflix Wii disc hasn’t spent an awful lot of time in my Nintendo the past three months.
But today, I decided to dust off the ol’ “Animal Crossing” disc, pop it into the ol’ Nintendo Wii, and take a visit down Memory Lane, Coolton, USA.
When last we spoke, I told you how I was trying to “unlock and receive every ‘gift’ from Tom Nook’s Point Tracking System.” I can tell you now, I have, evidently, done this. I must have done it at the end of September 2009, because the second floor of my house was filled with all the junk from the Point Tracking System. Well done, me from 2009!

One cool thing in the game that you can only access by neglecting to play for several months, is… cockroaches! Each floor of your house, minus the bedroom, will have three cockroaches scurrying around. As your avatar steps over them a light crunching sound is heard and a little cockroach ghost rises to heaven. Once you’ve stomped them all, you get a little congratulations:

I made the rounds to greet my neighbors. Many of them were excited to see me, saying they had been worried about me. My old neighbor, “Drake,” accused me of spending the past months sleeping. Others had more drastic accusations…

After about fifteen minutes of running around randomly, I began to wonder how this game had managed to hold my attention for most of 2009. I determined that, after finding all the fossils, catching most of the bugs and fish, and unlocking most of the unlockables there wasn’t much else to do, and that’s why a once-fun game seemed so dull now.
I did, however, find one gleam of incredible, intense, awesome glory while visiting one of my neighbors’ houses: a drinking bird. It’s not even sold at Tom Nook’s store (I checked), but somehow, one of the animals in my town got it. Needless to say, I was very virtually jealous.

So what does the future hold for “Animal Crossing: City Folk” and me? Probably not much; maybe I’ll dust off the disc in ten years and this blog will have a post about how my town has become a post-apocalyptic war-zone for blood-thirsty animals… or maybe I’ll never play it again. As for the future of my Nintendo Wii, that’s looking good: I’m very excited about “Donkey Kong Country Returns,” and if Nintendo ever releases “Tetris Attack” on the Virtual Console, I may never leave my basement.

My Animal Crossing Chronicles – 8/09

jacob — Sat, 05 Sep 2009 22:57:38 +0000

I mentioned last month that I didn’t know what to do after having donated every fossil to the museum, upgrading my house for the last time, and donating enough bells to my town to build a lighthouse. Shortly after writing that I didn’t know what to do, I decided what to do: unlock and receive every “gift” from Tom Nook’s Point Tracking System. For every 100 bells you spend at Tom Nook’s store he gives you one point. Once you get 10,000 points you will have unlocked every gift. Gifts can be exchanged for points, so if you ask for a gift worth 5,000 points you must 1) have 5,000 points and 2) be willing to give up 5,000 points and work back up to it. So in all, you’ll be required to earn 61,300 points, which means spending about 6,130,000 bells at Tom Nook’s store. To accomplish this I repeatedly bought the most expensive item available – a Nintendo DSi Bench worth over 18,000 bells. You can resell it for about 5,000 bells. It wasn’t long before I unlocked every item, and I’m currently working on racking up enough points to receive every gift; I hope to have every gift by… I dunno, let’s say October. (Cool in-game glitch that you get to see after unlocking the last item: The game programmers forget to/chose not to capitalize “kart.”)

After a long day of fruit-picking and fish-catching, I like to go to The Roost, the coffee shop inside the museum. If you talk to the barista, Brewster, every day for a while, he’ll begin to open up to you, and he’ll tell you about his interest in gyroids – the weird little robotic Animal Crossing collectibles that make percussion-like noises when activated. He’ll offer to store your gyroids for you. It’s basically like a little addition to the museum where you can try to collect all the gyroids.

My birthday was in August, so I received a cake from one of my least favorite animal residents.

My Animal Crossing Chronicles – 7/09

jacob — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 15:22:28 +0000

I wasn’t sure exactly what to do in July… or the rest of my time in Coolton for that matter. After all, I’d made the last upgrade to my house in May; I’d donated enough money to the town fund for a third bridge, a town fountain, and a lighthouse; I’d donated every fossil to the museum. This left me with a big gap. The next “tasks” to accomplish in the game require a seemingly unattainable amount of money: donate 100,000,000 Bells to the town fund and get a “green feather” (700,000,000 gets you a rainbow feather); spend 61,300 points worth of Bells (upwards of 6,130,000 Bells) at Tom Nook’s store to acquire all the gifts from his point system; spend 4,000 Bells at “Red’s” in the City every week, hoping that the painting for the museum that you bought isn’t a fake (which it most likely is). Other tasks don’t require so much money, but instead are impossible: you can only catch certain kinds of bugs/fish during certain months of the year. All this left me at a complete loss for what to do, so I decided to save my money until I figured out what to do.

Eventually, I decided to save my money to buy a complete living room set from Gracie Grace, that high-class store in the city. The interesting thing about Gracie Grace’s living room set is that the most inexpensive item in the set costs 68,000 Bells; the most expensive item is 220,000 Bells. Altogether, the set costs 1,542,000 Bells, but eventually I got enough money and I bought the set.

While I was saving for the living room set, I passed the 1,000,000 Bell mark in my bank account and received a gold shopping card and V. I. P. status at the bank – although my town doesn’t have a bank, just a little machine in the town hall… so, I guess I’m a V. I. P. of the square foot of space in town hall.