Gaming: Animal Crossing

There's this new wave of "real-time" games out there: games like Everquest, where people do nothing all day but walk around a real-time fantasy world interacting with other people, probably because in real life, they have real trouble interacting with people. Animal Crossing is one of those games, but I don't understand how people get obsessed with it: nothing happens. You don't kill anyone, you don't have enemies, you just kind of walk around a weird town making friends with people. Seriously, people, the sun is your friend. -- Alex Koppelman I don't really like Animal Crossing very much. It's a bit weird, there's way too much text and the game gets a bit tedious. That being said, I can't stop playing. Whether it's the promise of getting to play old NES games hidden in the game (including Punch-Out!) or simply an overall laziness, I can't stop playing. I haven't found any games yet, but I'm excited at the proposition of getting to play as Little Mac (what my mommy used to call me) again. -- Daniel McQuade Animal Crossing is like that Japanese cartoon that gave all those kids seizures. Its sickly-sweet graphics and characters that go, "Beep, beep, boop, boop. Hello my friend." make you want to bang your head against a wall, whip out the duck hunt gun, and blow the little fuckers to 64-bit pieces. But the game in itself is pretty fun. Just give yourself a lot of time, cause it's slow as hell. -- Lehua Chong A common problem seems to arise with many of the games we've reviewed: they are slow to start. Animal Crossing starts out really slow, but it never seems to pick up. It might be geared towards younger players, but even many of them will probably get turned off by the snail-crawl pace. -- Dean Agnos