Animal Crossing: City Folk: with two cats in the yard life used to be so hard

Time to make the donuts. Already made the donuts.

Nintendo's newest release Animal Crossing: City Folk is just the game to teach little Billy how the grip of the real world can trudge on with no real end in sight to only be taunted with an inflated overpriced economy and large communication problems with neighbors. Ok it's not that bad but if you were to play it non-stop for 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, most of the year it would feel like that.

I myself did not purchase or have any intention of playing this game whatsoever but alas a wife that loved the original Gamecube version was almost destined to buy a sequel. The only real great reason and reward for playing the old Gamecube version was the ability to play classic Nintendo games such as Balloon Fight and Super Mario Bros as they could be collected as items to place in your character's house. Not doing any research or reviewing prior to buying AC:CF was probably a large mistake on both of our parts. What makes a sequel good for a franchise is more of the same with new innovations (Fallout, Call of Duty). AC:CF has barely anything new to it when compared to the original and in the end feels like the old grind of collecting, fishing, and conversing that was great the first time but leaves a bad aftertaste to have to do it all again without any new types of experiences.

Very few games that are not MMO in nature utilize the time system employed in the Animal Crossing series. It's a great long term experience to witness the real time changes, events, and environment evolution dependant on the time of day or year as long as it was only done in small snippets every few weeks. There are holiday events, birthdays, bugs to collect that only appear at night, etc and all of this could be experienced in the short term if you were smart enough to mess with the console's time clock to pull an 88mph fast one.

The largest goal (if there really even is one) was furnishing your house with lots of random quirky items some of which were so rare that people would gloat and tout their findings on forums and phone calls alike till you became so disgusted with the game that a running microwave oven seemed like a good home for the disc. A new feature to AC:CF is the ability to travel to other player towns via Internet connectivity and even go to an auction house setting where collected items can be bid on or sold between players.

Overall AC:CF is great for those that have never played an Animal Crossing game before but for those that have, I'd suggest skipping this one entirely. Instead go spend your cash on something more worthy like a new suit and tie so you can go out an get a real job like your parents did. The bums lost Nintendo!