I’ve been trying to get to grips with the indie survival game The Long Dark. I’m sure there are other scenarios that video game fans have drifted into during lockdown – I’m deep into trying to tick off every side mission within 2019’s astonishing sci-fi adventure Control. But for most of us, if we were lucky, our childhoods were pleasant and simple, and we presumed our adulthoods would continue to be. Not that we – and we can only speak for ourselves – were unhinged enough to think we’d grow up to live on a tropical island surrounded by anthropomorphic animals. Where The Sims reached for, then accentuated the trials and tribulations of adulthood, it’s tempting to view Animal Crossing as akin to what, as children, we thought life might be like when we grew up. The Sims is just a year older than the Animal Crossing series, having come into the world on February 4, 2000, but whereas that series embraced the drama of modern life – then sped it up and asked you to maintain order in the name of competition – Animal Crossing did anything but. I suppose you’d call Animal Crossing a ‘life-simulator’, a little like EA’s massively popular – over 200 million units shifted worldwide! – The Sims series, only not nearly as stressy. No seriously! Grab yourself a drink! No, I’ll do it, you just sit yourself down! Put your feet up, even. But if you don’t, that’s totally fine too. And you’re given the opportunity to go fishing, pick fruit, chop wood or engage in many more activities to generate resources for you to do so. Sure, loosely speaking you’re supposed to build a house – entering into a mortgage agreement with anthropomorphic Japanese racoon-dogs (that would be ‘ tanuki’) and shop-keeping, series-stalwart Tom Nook – and make it look really nice. No obligations placed upon you whatsoever. No stressful tasks to fulfil against the clock. If you’re new to the Animal Crossing series or if you haven’t picked up a game in some time – and the complete absence of any Nintendo Switch consoles for sale, for which the game is an exclusive, suggest that’s true for many people right now – you should know that the game doesn’t follow the standard video game formula in any way. Release day felt like an explosion of joy. But, as players started to log into the newly released game and looked for fruit – fruit! – to pick in-game, the rest of Twitter’s trending topics sidebar read like a shopping list for the corner shop we were now only allowed to visit once a day: “oranges”, “pears”, “apples”.įor the astute gamer who’d lived with the creeping dread of what COVID-19 might mean for us, some months before our lockdowns, it was clear that we really needed something that wasn’t COVID-19. There was an uncomfortable balancing act taking place between being terrified and trying to laugh reality away. COVID-19 was there I believe “plague” and “end of the world” were too. In our 9/10 review of the latest, IGN said: "Animal Crossing: New Horizons is an expanded, polished, next-generation reboot of a classic Nintendo game that's full of surprises.Consider the top Twitter trends of March 20. The longest gap of seven years was between New Leaf on 3DS and New Horizons on Switch, though a new entry typically arrives every three or four years. Nintendo has released five mainline games in the franchise over the last twenty years, starting with 2001's Animal Crossing on GameCube that IGN said was amazing. That being said, people are mostly playing older games this year, including Animal Crossing, so at least the option is there for those who love their islands enough to return for decades to come. Somewhat oddly, it therefore appears the game can't function outside of this 60 year period – it's not immediately clear why.Ī new Animal Crossing game is likely on the way given the success of New Horizons though, so it's unlikely fans will need to stick to this version for that long. Nintendo seemingly actually condones this form of time travel though, as the message actually tells players to restart Animal Crossing after setting a date between January 2000 and December 2060. A Reddit post by user AdTrue4863 (spotted by Nintendo Life) seemingly shows that anyone who plays the game for another 39 years (or who does 39 years' worth of cheating by moving the internal clock forward) will be forced to set their Switch's clock back to keep playing.
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