Dear Nintendo,

Back at this year's E3, I was worried that you'd lost your way, citing Animal Crossing of all games to be for the "core gamer" crowd—seemingly to cover for your complete lack of first (or even second) party titles to fill in the gaping hole that was your holiday release schedule.

While I may no longer be part of your target demographic, I'd like to think of myself as possessing a mix of "hardcore gamer" and "casual" values. I enjoy a wide variety of games and have been a fan of Animal Crossing since its inception on the GameCube.

I gave you the benefit of the doubt with Wild World, and way back before you had even released any pictures of the Wii version, I was delighted to imagine all the wonderful possibilities that could have been added to this furry-version of The Sims.

We need to have a talk.

Going with a long-standing (okay, since I got married) Behrens family tradition, we opened a Christmas gift early last night, and started up Animal Crossing: City Folk. The intent was to smooth over a stressful day with the idyllic setting of Animal Crossing's fabled woodlands. Alas... it was not to be.

Moving in was, to say the least, excruciatingly painful. I don't think it's exaggerating to say that it was the worst first hour-odd with a game we've ever had in our household. It was simple enough to get our characters brought in from our copies of Animal Crossing: Wild World, but then it became clear that someone at Nintendo hated us as each one of us—my wife, myself, and my daughter—found ourselves running errands for freakin' Tom Nook yet again as if we were complete and utter newbies. Mixing in the fact that we were each tying up the TV and Wii while it was being done sailed the insult right past injury—and handing us starter homes with their 4x4 grids moved it into a serious case of assault.

So why am I doing this to myself, my family, you ask? Well, despite being the same software, we'll play it a little differently this time around. My nieces and nephews may end up with the game down the road, something we didn't have last time. My young daughter seems to be immune to the pain I mentioned above. And, you know, it is something we can play together in a way we haven't done with the series ever, living together in the same town. And maybe I might enjoy not being obsessive for once, just chillin' and letting the kid fill the museum while I just garden or something.

For now, though, that atrocity of an opening has soured me so much that I am more than content to leave the thing to my daughter for several days. No matter how many little touches they may have added, there was no better way to reinforce that this was the same game with a new coat of paint than the way it treated us right at the outset.

And it makes me sad.

I'm a dude who would get lost in my Animal Crossing village. I'd just wander around... enjoying the music, fishing aimlessly. Surely, the conditions surrounding each previous release contributed to my enjoyment. I was in the midst of college when the GameCube version came out, and could afford to pack hours away into it. Wild World, being portable, was easy to insert into a busier post-college life. A bevy of refinements and additions sure didn't hurt, either.


When I was done with Wild World, though... I was done. It definitely added some neat things over the GameCube version, but I'd played through what was essentially the same game twice now. As a series designed around plodding progression and month-after-month playing, starting from scratch twice is pretty much my limit. I would occasionally muse, along with everyone else, over what a third Animal Crossing title would have to do to recapture my interest.

The zombie apocalypse is coming. Surely, we all know this and plainly accept it as fact. The real problem is that we just don't know when it's coming. So, until that day comes, we have Left4Dead to tide us over. Read on for my impressions of the demo.

We added Tales of Symphonia: Dawn of the New World (also known in GameStop's e-mail flyer as Tales of Etc.) to our Wii library the other night. My wife sort of surprised me by insisting she wanted to play alongside me; we haven't really been doing that with Big Games since the kids starting eating up our lives. But, I digress.

Going in, there was quite the wave of negativity to contend with. Import impressions were iffy, to be charitable. IGN's review—while, well, IGN's and thus expected to be unreliable in some regard—was pretty rough. GameTrailers put out a pretty good-sounding review that suddenly (and I do mean out-of-the-blue) ended in a litany of complaint. I obsessed over whether it still made sense to buy the game.


I'm not so certain that the ragging was deserved. The game is a little rough, there's no doubt about that; but it's been fun thus far. It's got a solid battle system without any obligatory waggle (though you can map a few extra special attacks to shakes, if you want), and the monster party members are more interesting than I thought they'd be. I'm going to miss it this weekend as I put it back on the shelf while my wife's out of town.

If you were on the fence like me, wanting to play this game, but afraid of the negativity, let me assuage your fears. I'm not exactly a series vet—I've only played Symphonia and Phantasia besides—but I think it's a rather enjoyable title. I definitely don't expect to get to the end thinking I've been bilked out of $40.

Remember Disaster: Day of Crisis? If you haven't heard, Nintendo of America president Reggie Fils-Aime isn't really all that keen on bringing it here. He cited "laughable" audio and doesn't think it's worth $50, as he told IGN. He's going to watch the European numbers and see if it's worth a release.

Now, I'm not entirely sure I'd put Disaster itself very high up on my own list of games to play, but the attitude is quite worrying. It seems to me typical of a worrying trend that becomes apparent when I compare Nintendo of America's release calendar to that of the mother company in Japan. NOA's calendar is populated with the big guns like the Wii titles and anything involving Mario Reggie can get published, of course; but it's utterly missing some of the more interesting—but probably not sales-sensation—material like Skip's Captain Rainbow or Monolith's Soma Bringer.

Nintendo of America wasn't always like this. In the times before its wild success with Wii, the Nintendo-published release calendar had a wide variety of titles, including the aforementioned Skip's own Chibi-Robo and the beautiful bomb Baten Kaitos Origins. They didn't exactly fire up the charts, and some were rough around the edges, but they made GameCube feel a lot more lively than the stale Wii. Now we're lucky to get something that doesn't have a popular mascot that NOA thinks will sell plastered on the front... and sometimes, it seems those mascots are all those titles have going for them.

It makes me sort of wish Nintendo would go back to feeling threatened again, frankly. A touch of desperation, perhaps, rather than having the easy money that rolls into their coffers to lean on. Happily, third parties—not exactly having Nintendo's wild success to bask in—are supplying quite a wide variety of software, but they can't touch the stuff that's got locked up in Japan. But here, now, Reggie apparently doesn't feel the need to supplement his lineup. He doesn't have to; his numbers don't demand it. And that's a shame.

"Tower defense." I can't think of a genre name that sounds more boring, frankly. I somewhat shamefully must confess that's part of why I've avoided the genre until now. But then, a little game called Ninjatown popped up on my radar. Populated by cute and humorous little ninjas and assorted et ceteras from the Shawnimals universe, it immediately clicked with the part of my brain that can't resist that sort of thing. I had to find out more, even if it meant defending towers.

A couple weeks back, the joy I got playing Soul Bubbles, coupled with the pain I felt when thinking of how it was performing as a Toys 'R Us exclusive, inspired me to run a little contest of my own. No PR agency supplied me with the prize; instead, I went down to the store and picked up another copy with the plan to give it away so that someone else might be able to experience the joy. And so I decided to ask people to share with us what the sweetest game they ever played was that also tanked at retail.

That contest ended this past Monday. It didn't draw as many entries as I'd hoped, but that's okay. I think you'll enjoy reading these essays just the same. Alongside some of the better works, I got this delightful work of prose: "Psychonauts. Great game. Majesco failed to sell it. The End."

To the writer: I've decided that your entry qualifies you for a special prize. You are to go down to the store, buy a copy of Soul Bubbles, and send it to our site manager, Cory Faller. Cory has been telling me throughout the course of this contest that I should just disqualify everyone and send him the prize instead, so I figure this is a perfect way to tie up that loose end.

Real efforts follow.

If you're a regular visitor to the site, you'll know that I'm a little obsessed with the Rune Factory series. I took a chance on the original Rune Factory quite some time ago, despite having no history with Harvest Moon, and found myself captivated by the game. Something about blending the farm-management gameplay of Harvest Moon with the trappings of an action RPG just clicked, and I found myself not just playing the main game, but also working down several of the game's optional paths to creating über-vegetables or forging all sorts of weapons, pursing the kinds of things I rarely pursue these days—it became an obsession.

Rune Factory 2 promises to be all that only bigger and better, and when the opportunity presented itself to ask questions of Natsume's Graham Markay, who knows quite a bit about the new title, I jumped—needless to say. This interview is geared toward people who are wondering what's new in the sequel; newbies might want to read my series love piece first.

I have a peculiar habit which may play into how I feel about Wii Music. I'm a big fan of lengthy progressive rock concept pieces that last the duration of my commute home from the office. Whether the music is rockin' or just groovin', I love to engage in the admittedly traffic-hazardous pastime of drumming my fingers on the steering wheel with an occasional palm slap for emphasis, inventing my own complementary rhythms as I navigate the freeways.


Wii Music feels a lot like doing that. Instead of buying into the age-old rhythm and music genre design of "press buttons/play imaginary instrument when cued to make music" (which, just to be clear, is still a totally viable and worthy way to make a game, just... different), it taps into the deep-down joy of playing with music, rather than the challenge of merely executing a song competently.