Animal Crossing: Wild World

Animal Crossing: Wild World is a life simulation game for the Nintendo DS, set in a town where humans live among animals. It is a follow-up to the 2001 (North America 2002) title Animal Crossing for the Nintendo GameCube and Dōbutsu no Mori (animal forest) for Nintendo 64 (short lived. japan only.) During development, the working title was "Animal Crossing DS".

The important features of the first Animal Crossing game return in this one, but with improvements. Activities in town include buying and selling items, fishing, and several others, especially becoming friends with the animals. The game occurs in real time, with the real calendar, and time progresses even when the game is turned off.

Online play
Wild World is the second Nintendo title that uses the Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection. (The first one was Mario Kart DS.) This lets players use wireless access points to connect to the Internet and visit other players' towns, anywhere in the world. A player can visit a town on a friend's nearby Nintendo DS by using DS-to-DS wireless without the Internet. Either way, towns can hold up to four players at once. If a player drops a bottle-message in the sea, then it will wirelessly float to another town's beach.

A gate protects each town against unwanted visitors; to visit another town or invite someone, the player living there must open the gate. When the player opens the gate to visitors from the Internet, the visitors must know the correct Friend Code.

Release
Wild World was released in Japan on November 23rd, 2005. It was released in North America on December 5th, 2005, in time for the December holidays. Players in Europe had to wait until March 31st, 2006 for the European release.

Gameplay
Following the release of the popular Nintendo Gamecube original, you start out as a human in a town with no money, but you might be able to gain some by shaking trees (don't worry, bees won't come out when you're in your job) or sell clothes and accessories to the Able Sisters. You mortgage a small house from the local shopkeeper, the tanuki (or raccon in the English version) Tom Nook. It is a good idea to pay off your loan, because then you can then upgrade to a bigger house.

Most players will want a bigger house, because decorating your house in your way, with furniture and other items, is one of the main features of this game. You can collect fruit, fish, insects, paintings, fossils, furniture, and other items. There are over 550 different pieces of furniture in this game! Once you have some furniture, taking it to your house is easy; the furniture becomes a leaf that fits in your pocket. You can also customize yourself by buying clothes or drawing your own patterns.

Outside your house, you can befriend the animal neighbors. Those animals are much more interactive in this game than they were in the GameCube game. Imagine overhearing two animals to talk to each other, or inviting an animal to your house; both are possible in this game! The animals can still ask you to do errands for them, but there is no longer an explicit menu item to request them, and they no longer require you to find a missing item from a long chain of animals.

Outdoors, you can customize your town by planting trees and growing flowers. At the museum, you can donate certain items to the collections. At the tailor's, you can buy clothes or draw your own patterns. This way, you can customize your town.

And if animals are not enough, you can invite three human friends to your town using the Nintendo WiFi connection. Show them how you like to chill in your pad!

New additions

 * Using Nintendo's Wi-fi connection, visit friends online!
 * New tools (Slingshot, Golden Watering Can)
 * New holidays (Yay Day, La-Di day...)
 * More customizable than the original, with the ability to change hat, facial accessories and hair style!
 * Design your own patterns and use them in more places than you could in the GameCube version. Use them as wallpaper, carpets, clothes, hats, and even place designs on the floor!
 * Meet new characters, like Celeste, the observatory owl, Brewster the barman, and Harriet the salon hair stylist! Old favorites like Tom Nook, K.K. Slider and Kapp'n do return.
 * You can see the sky. Draw constellations, and they will appear at night!
 * The museum holds larger collections, and now also has an observatory and a cafe to hang out in!
 * Animal villagers sometimes give you their portrait, so you can remember them even after they move out of town.
 * Animal villagers are much more interactive. They will chase you to talk to you, challenge you to fishing or bug-catching matches, come to your house for a chat, and even tend to their own gardens!
 * At 8pm each Saturday, go to the cafe to hear K.K. Slider play! All your favorite tunes from the original return plus some new ones!
 * Use either the control pad or the touch screen to control your character! The stylus and the touch screen make it much easier to manage items and type letters.
 * Put a letter in a bottle, and it might wash up on a random person's shore!

Changes

 * Blathers can now identify fossils himself.
 * Some characters from the GameCube version have been erased.
 * Some items and collectibles do not appear.
 * Some buildings have went. The police station and post office building have been removed from each town, but the town gate and town hall replaces them. The wishing well is gone. The town dump is gone, but the recycle bin at the town hall replaces it.
 * The acre system is gone. The world now scrolls continuously, without sudden camera changes at acre boundaries. The world appears cylindrical; objects in the distance curve away so that you can see the sky instead of just having a top-down view.
 * The old password system for shipping items between towns is gone. You can now carry items through the Wi-Fi Connection.
 * Tom Nook sells only one house, not four houses, but up to four human players can live in that house.
 * The journal feature, where you could write a public or private journal each month, is gone.
 * Container furniture such as wardrobes and dressers work differently. Each player has a storage area that holds 90 items, and they can use any dresser to access it. This feature replaces the basements of the GameCube game. (In the GameCube game, dressers each held 3 items.)
 * Certain holidays from the GameCube version have been taken out, such as Animal Crossing versions of Christmas and Halloween.