Animal Crossing Thread

[bluaki]

There isn't already a thread for these games so I decided to make one

Announcements from/since E3:
There's no word yet of a Wii U (or NX?) real Animal Crossing game and instead we're getting two amiibo-filled spinoffs in 2015
Happy Home Designer is a 3DS game about home decoration
Amiibo Festival is a Wii U board game, basically like Mario Party (but no minigames)

Happy Home Designer:
Releases September 25 (US), already released on July 30 in Japan
It releases alongside and works with Amiibo Cards, which depict AC characters
Amiibo are not required to play, but some of the characters/objectives are amiibo-exclusive
The game is priced at $40 and includes 1 card (physical version). There is also a bundle with the 3DS NFC reader.

Amiibo Festival:
Releases "Holiday 2015" in US and Japan
There is a physical bundle of the game with two figures and three cards
No pricing info yet on the game or bundle in any region, but there are rumors the digital game is a free download
The game requires an amiibo for each player
Supposedly, it also has some kind of compatibility with amiibo cards, not just the figures
It has online features

Amiibo:
Figures: Isabelle, KK Slider, Tom Nook, Mabel, Digby, Lottie (the new HHD girl), Cyrus, Reese
Cards: They come in random 6-packs (for $6) that are guaranteed to have one "special character". A total of 100 cards are available in wave 1.

[ME##]

There will be no more console Animal Crossing: source my transdad who works at Nintendo

[bluaki]

Since HHD is already out in Japan, I decided to look more at it

I'll probably buy both games >_<'

Anyway, HHD has some neat changes, many of which I'd like to see in the next full AC game:
* Customizing your character is a matter of actually picking the options you want for eye/hair/skin, rather than weird questions
* Furniture arranging can be done with the touch screen drag-and-drop, which works so much nicer than pushing around
* The lawn around a house can also be decorated similar to the interior, with plants and furniture
* Furniture and plants are now aligned to half rather than full grid units (alternatively, you can say every item has an even size of at least 2x2, while grid units are half as big as before)
* When selecting furniture, flooring, wallpaper, songs, etc., you now see thumbnails of what it looks like before placing it
* In floor customization, flooring and rugs are two separately-changeable layers
* Windows can be customized too

Other details:
* When you get a decoration item once, you keep it forever unlocked and can place it as often as you like (tbh I'd like the main series to adopt this too, but I doubt it would)
* Each objective you accept gives you a bunch of items, most of which suit the theme you were given, but you're free to use the items you got from previous objectives for it too
* Random villagers request to have their home decorated to a theme for most of the objectives, but some objectives are about decorating specialty buildings like a school or shop
* Some villagers ask for exterior too. For them, you click where on a town map to place the fenced-in house and lawn. It's not just open areas: the lawns can be near or even partially including some rivers, cliffs, bridges, lakes, etc. You can customize roof/door/fence/bridges. The fence-enclosed lawn is fairly sizeable at about 12x8 tiles (minus terrain features in some plots). But you don't actually (to my knowledge) actually walk around the village outside that fence.
* There is a City-like area that you actually do walk around, which has everything but the villager homes (which you warp to).

[bluaki]

Pretty much nobody but me cares about these games

I enjoy Happy Home Designer, although I haven't put much time in it lately because Danganronpa, Yoshi, and Triforce Heroes have been higher priorities to me.

Nintendo's announced more details on amiibo festival in the last couple months:
[spoiler]* Yes, their E3 marketing sucked and almost seemed to deliberately made this game look scarce on content
* The board game is just one of several game modes, although it is the most detailed one because the 12 months play very differently in events and the board is customizable
* Desert Island Escape is another mode, which plays like a very different type of board game on a hexagonal grid.
* There are several minigames, including: Resetti Bop, Balloon Island, Mystery Campers, Acorn Chase, Fruit Path, amiibo Card Battle, and Quiz Show. That might not be all of them, but unlike Mario Party you don't play these minigames in the middle of a board game.
* While the main board game uses a figure for each player, the other modes use cards. Cards can also be used in town customizing: add that villager (and their HHD-designed home) to the town.
* In a stroke of terrible game UX and control scheme, repeating just one of the many mistakes Mario Party 10 made, it seems everything is designed to be played by sharing one controller with amiibo-tapping being a common recurring input for actions like rolling a die or ringing in for the quiz show
* Releases November 13 for $60 (physical only) bundled with two figures of Isabelle and Digby.
* KK+Resse+Cyrus figures are in a 3-pack bundle, the others are sold by themselves
* Besides the 8 announced this summer, there are 4 more figures: Blathers, Celeste, Kicks, Resetti[/spoiler]

Well, the nature of being a party game like this does fundamentally limit how good a game can be. Judging from what I've seen so far, if you can overlook the price of entry and silly controls, it probably at least compares favorably to the older Mario Party games (which are much better than the newer ones). Requiring figures to play does kind of suck, but it doesn't matter for me because I want amiibo figures more for the figures than any gameplay purpose.

I wonder if maybe these spinoffs are leading up to an upcoming main Animal Crossing game, maybe for NX.

[Hiro]

nah I'm a huge Animal Crossing fan it's one of the few games I still play
Don't have HHD yet because money
that E3 trailer for Amiibo Festival probably looked bare because that's all they had at the time, good to know there's actual content but I'm still pretty wary of the game. either way I'm going to get as many of the amiibo as possible, which will likely lead to getting the game

[ME##]

Pretty much nobody but me cares about these games

idk i liked new leaf whilst i played it but so much of what should be interesting just doesn't have enough going on in it and too much is put behind dumb 'do x an obscene amount of time over multiple DAYS'

[Kalahari Inkantation]

http://www.usgamer.net/articles/honestly-we-just-wanted-animal-crossing-amiibo-aya-kyogoku-on-the-genesis-of-amiibo-festival-and-happy-home-designer

... honestly, we just wanted Animal Crossing Amiibo. We wanted the company to make Animal Crossing Amiibo, so that's why we made a game that works with them.

a shame that this generation's best animal crossing game is actually mario kart

[Kalahari Inkantation]

on the bright side:

animal crossing for wii u confirmed

[ME##]

on the bright side:

animal crossing for wii u confirmed

so the wii u gets ds games in virtual console form yet the 3ds still can't play snes games........... does nintendo not realise how FUCKED up it is

[TooB]

on the bright side:

animal crossing for wii u confirmed

so the wii u gets ds games in virtual console form yet the 3ds still can't play snes games........... does nintendo not realise how FUCKED up it is

ds doesn't even get gba games. that too went to wii u for some reason.

[bluaki]

On the Animal Crossing topic:
It's long been confirmed that the Animal Crossing cards will get a total of 4 series. The first released in September and second will be in January. At that rate, the set won't be completed until next Fall, but I question whether Nintendo really expects these spinoffs to be relevant a whole year later.

This could be interpreted as a sign that maybe a new actual Animal Crossing game is coming next year.

on the bright side:

animal crossing for wii u confirmed

so the wii u gets ds games in virtual console form yet the 3ds still can't play snes games........... does nintendo not realise how FUCKED up it is

ds doesn't even get gba games. that too went to wii u for some reason.

3DS can't consistently emulate SNES or GBA at 100% performance.
GBA in particular can only get vaguely acceptable performance on 3DS hardware when running natively, not emulated. New 3DS might be a little better, but there's no way Nintendo would bother doing any VC work that has to be N3DS-exclusive.

Vita is more than capable of handling both SNES and GBA. Nintendo's next handheld system should be too.

[ME##]

it's rather damning of nintendo


the psp could play ps1 games yet nintendo's last handheld can't play games from a console that was new when i was being conceived

[TooB]

Gba games seemed to work for 3ds for people with that ambassador program. unless there were reports of them not running great i didn't hear about

[bluaki]

Gba games seemed to work for 3ds for people with that ambassador program. unless there were reports of them not running great i didn't hear about

Those games aren't emulated, they're run natively. In Nintendo's eyes, that's unacceptable for a paid VC release since you can't access the manual during gameplay, save states can't work, and the 3DS can't do any background work like streetpass while the game is open. In addition to those problems, the games still suffer from some slowdowns and bugs, but at least it's not enough to make them unplayable.

[TooB]

Ok i see