ANIMAL CROSSING: NEW HORIZONS

i think i would be a very bad parent because i think my first instinct would be to bribe the child irl to do the thing you want her to do in the game

like "hey, if you donate these 5 pieces for the museum in the game, maybe we'll go out and get some ice cream later! ....(after coronavirus is over, ahhaha)"

yeah the first couple days of the game have some railroaded stuff that you have to do to open things up and i think after that the primary player stops mattering as much

oh that's good to know. i was bummed that there was all this content i won't get to see.

setup a swap shop. will post up a dodo code later
https://i.imgur.com/FZEPkP9.jpg

alright i'm downloading, you fuckers better give me stuff

should i post the only negative take i've seen so we can tear it down?

We are all seeking an escape. It’s that desperate need for the world to slow down, for the people to take a minute, for Republicans to develop an ounce of compassion, Democrats to grow any sort of backbone, and all us schmucks with zero power to just...take a goddamn breath. Animal Crossing, a game where you join a bunch of anthropomorphic animals on an island, is literally a virtual escape from the world. When you show up ready to board the plane that’s what the two little raccoons even tell you. Animal Crossing is meant to be the balm to our anxiety riddled little lives. Only it sucks beyond measure.

I am not unfamiliar with Animal Crossing. I definitely ignored my friends for hours while they played it and I smoked vodka-spiked hookah back in like 2005 (don’t do that). I gamely checked it out on the Nintendo DS and gave up when I missed like two days of gameplay and all my in-game friends abandoned me (don’t do that either). I even spent some time with the mobile version of it a few years ago. Most things are pretty consistent from incarnation to incarnation.

You are a human in a world of cartoon animals that speak in a digital rhythm that Nintendo translates into human-speak in text bubbles below them. You collect fruit and bugs and rocks. You build stuff. You go into massive debt to a bunch of raccoons and work all day and night to pay off that debt.

Which is really my problem with this game. Right now the real world we’d all like a vacation from is run by capitalists with no concept of beneficial socialism. Powerful men and women think a single $1,200 check will make up for months and months of lost income. These people will gladly give trillions to billion-dollar corporations but let hospitals languish. People starve and children go uneducated.

The world is already run by the raccoons so why on Earth would I want to deal with them in a game?

Animal Crossing isn’t the only real-life sim that puts you into a grind similar to the one you probably experience in the actual world day-to-day. Games like The Sims and Stardew Valley can absolutely feel like work. You get up. You work your butt off. You welcome the sweet release of sleep at the end of the day.

But those games are a lot less aggressively simulacrums of the capitalism you’re forced to reckon with daily. By forcing you into a long term and unwilling relationship with a landlord/loanshark raccoon, Animal Crossing is a closer reminder of the world we’re living in. At a moment when so many folks are clamoring for a rent freeze, the last thing I want to do is head into a simulation where that’s not even close to a possibility.

My many friends and co-workers would claim that I should just play Animal Crossing more (Gizmodo Editor in Chief Kelly Bourdet told me not to write this blog until I’d played for at least a week). They would say I should embrace the best-loved feature of the game—seamlessly traveling to your real-life friends’ island to hang out or wreck their own digital limbos.

But I didn’t want real-life people in my real-life house before a highly contagious pandemic made standing close or touching hands a veritable Victorian scandal. Why would I want you on the overgrown island that I am but a serf inhabiting?

So, even though I’ve only played 5 minutes of the game and done little more than erect a tent on a patch of land I do not own, I can safely say Animal Crossing sucks and Stardew Valley rulez.

https://gizmodo.com/animal-crossing-needs-a-rent-freeze-1842495016

This sad person doesn’t understand that you literally never have to pay off your debts in Animal Crossing

Yeah, even my daughter realizes that.

Or that the raccoons will literally buy moths and sand dollars off you for actual cash

Yeah fuck that person they completely missed the point.

"I didnt play it at all, now or back in 2005 but I will rain shit on it anyway lolz"

the "i only played it for five minutes" stuff is trolling, but as an animal crossing newbie i did find it mildly shocking to start up the game and immediately be in debt and charged with paying your way out of it. you don't have to pay it off, sure, if you want to live in a tent for the whole game, but not advancing/improving is antithetical to playing a video game. what i find dumb is how many articles/tweets/whatever comment on the capitalistic aspects of the game like the author is the one giving a cheeky adult take on it, when the satire/commentary is obviously intentional and part of the game.

the whole game is about buying stuff, which is easy but puts you deeper into debt to the nooks, vs. doing it yourself, which is slightly harder but keeps you outside of the nook inc. monopoly. it's not subtle

Yep. They could have skipped all that and just said “buy an upgrade for your house for 99,000 bells!” and it wouldn’t change the gameplay at all. They made it a loan so they could make funny jokes about landlord/tenant/capitalism stuff that would fly over the heads of children

https://i.imgur.com/XwrEh7i.jpg

my partner played once, put her tent directly in front of my house, and then never came back. I keep sending her gifts that she never sees and it’s starting to remind me of middle school

ok, the tent is sort of to the side, but it’s off-center and it cuts off the walking path along the river, I mean come on

i put D to work i told her if she's going to be player one she has responsibilities and she can't do the fun stuff she wants to do until she labors doing the unlocks so that the rest of the family can enjoy the game. i'm considering this a meta-level explication and analysis for her of the capitalist themes already present in the game.

i zipped through the 5k miles in my first playthrough, looking forward to opening to a house. My partner has no intention of playing this game, which is a bummer.

xp lol

“D, you must make some sacrifices so the rest of us can have more fun”

The price Timmy is willing to pay for imported fruit is a revelation

This has significantly increased the value of having two switches in the house

i finally visited another island (a mystery resource island, basically) and it happened to have the same native fruit as my own (pears). we eat a lot of pears here on Boneyarden

I'm telling you people, need to get on the poxyfule slack so we can share announcements of when airports are open

fun slacks < fun discords tbh (slack doesn't have killfiles)

honestly, i'm afraid that if i get on poxyfule slack i will lose any shred of productivity i ever had, whether working or free-time/creative hours

mark Brokelyn down as another pear island

i did manage to steal a coconut tree from the island i visited, though. hope it's not an invasive species!

whoa how do you steal trees

send me pears

xp

eat your mega native fruit, and attack the tree with a shovel

just looked that up last night so i could do some landscaping around the front of my house

and to steal coconut trees, of course

i built and paid off a house in two days, so i’ve decided i’m moving to this island in real life, it’s the only way i can get ahead in life now

Hey guys it ocurred to me that I am playing southern hem and y'all are playing northern, so we absolutely need to visit each other - opposite season fish and bugs! Right now I got seasonal cicadas, grasshoppers and such til end of March. Tombot I saw you online earlier but your gates werent open dammit.

Alas now I am working for the next 3 hrs.

Oh also I landed on a mystery island y'day and it had BAMBOO all over the place. I assume it will be a future very handy building material so I yoinked as much as I could.

y'all haven't lived until you catch an oarfish

Ive already caught a few of the rarities! Coelocanth, dorado and arapaima!

But New Horizons is also a seriously stressful game. Tom Nook increases your debt about a millionfold in, like, the first 20 minutes. Spiders sprint after you at breakneck speed. And don’t even get me started on how passive-aggressive some of the island’s citizens can be. (They should’ve called this game Crossing Animals, amirite?

wrong! incorrect! this is a chilled out game! it can be a stressful game, in the same way that meditation/yoga can be stressful fi you make it that way

however, the main point of the article is to teach you how to multitask, so i will put up with this nonsense and read on

https://kotaku.com/how-to-multitask-while-playing-animal-crossing-new-hor-1842514200

man, fuck that article

and it doesn’t mention audiobooks/podcasts once

hope more nintendo items appear in-game. got some nice areas setup on my town now: a little beach hangout, a market with stalls, a swap shop... would like to move some residents' houses but it is spenny...

PRO TIP: instead of collecting items around the island and selling them to timmy one at a time, simply roll the rich fucker

lol

tap A to teach timmy a lesson about the real world

my island anthem
https://imgur.com/f3g1rSJ

the second pic is very animal crossing

The seemingly miles of beds being set up at Javits. It is absolutely unreal to see what the National Guard & first responders have put together here in just days. pic.twitter.com/dD0AQg4PO4

— Sarah Boxer (@Sarah_Boxer) March 27, 2020

Heh.

My daughter has learned you can apparently travel to an island full of tarantulas, protect yourself with holes you've dug, and then harvest at will.