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It's a difficult task to convince someone, simply by describing what's involved, that Animal Crossing: Wild World is an enormously fun and engaging game experience. I mean, much of the focus is turning menial, real life tasks like housecleaning, landscaping, and scavenging, into gameplay elements that, when combined, make the design come together. What it does, and in turn where it excels, is give the players a really excellent sense of accomplishment and personal expression, and the Nintendo DS does more or less everything that the GameCube version did, with the added incentive of going online and opening up their pride and joy for everyone else to enjoy. This portable version doesn't go above and beyond the original GameCube design that kicked off the series, but for those who haven't hit the forest before, you may find yourself surprisingly addicted to the chore-laden animal world.

The original Animal Crossing was one of Nintendo's first "non-gamer games" for the not-so-hardcore player, a demographic that the company's been targeting a lot harder lately. Like its Nintendogs product, Animal Crossing doesn't really have an end or even a hard goal to accomplish. It's an evergreen design where players live a life in a fantasy world the way they want. Alone or with friends, players simply enjoy themselves in a laidback environment making the village their own; customize the landscape with trees and flowers, create clothing patterns and trade them with the inhabitants, catch fish and bugs and donate them to the local museum. It's a design that's meant to grab players' attention for not just days, but for weeks and even months after the purchase. There's no twitch action or even challenging gameplay here, but Animal Crossing still manages to suck the player in with tons of stuff to do and enjoy.

Even after several weeks of hanging out in Animal Crossing, only a fraction of the game shows its face to the player. Events -- flea markets, timed holidays, appearance of out-of-town animals like hair stylists and merchants - are all based upon the Nintendo DS system's internal clock, and half the fun is booting up your game to see what's the next scheduled event to pop up in your village. The designers do a fantastic job making the game feel like it's a living, breathing world no matter if the system's on or off - Animal Crossing keeps on going even if you're not there to enjoy it.

Animal Crossing: Wild World is meant to be an original design in the franchise, yet for people who have already gone through months and months of building up their villages in the GameCube version, it really feels like a repeat for about 90 percent of the DS edition. The designers didn't do enough to make the game its own design, so it's not entirely attractive to people who've already experienced all this before. There are plenty of reasons to do it all again - mostly the online aspect - but it's clear that the company is holding a lot of its drastic changes for the next-generation design.

You can "beat" animal crossing by completeing Tom Nook's shop, getting the highest points, getting all golden items, get full house, etc.

It kinda sucks when you can't drop things on the top floor.
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I thought the highest you could go was 30k...
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ITs a frickin DS lol...Would you expect Nintendo to have better graphics than Sony at any system? No...Good. And Animal Crossign is actually a great game. My 21 year old cousin plays it on WiFi.
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SSBM is probably one of the most graphically true games out of all the consoles.

Only GCN I can think of that beat it are WindWaker, RE4, and Soul Caliber 2.

What? Wind Waker looked cool.
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