Review: Animal Crossing and Electroplankton

When is a game not a game? Because it's software designed to run on the Nintendo DS, Electroplankton and Animal Crossing: Wild World are packaged and sold as traditional games. Despite that, they don't have many of the elements we normally associate with games; Electroplankton has no measure of progress, and Animal Crossing is more Sims than SimCity. Neither of them have a win condition. While they may not be your normal Friday night rental, both of them are potent tools for having fun. Read on for my impressions of these distinctly different titles.

• Title: Animal Crossing: Wild World
• Developer/Publisher: Nintendo
• System:DS

Most games present you with clear goals, give you the means to complete your objectives, and set you loose. In good games these short-term achievable mileposts are accomplished in entertaining ways. What separates game activities from real life tasks is the entertainment value; If being a file clerk had a snappy tune and involved matching colourful patterns, it would probably be a more enjoyable position. Animal Crossing blurs the line between entertainment and some of the boring parts of real life. Through your little virtual avatar you work for a living, maintain social contacts, and live without save points if you screw something up. How does a game where you have to pay off a mortgage end up being fun?

Every player who starts a game of Animal Crossing is actually creating a miniature world. By answering some simple questions on a cab ride into town, you establish your identity and your little avatar's personality. Dropped into the town in front of the establishment of one Tom Nook, you're immersed into a reality that exists just for you. If you asked me to describe to you what you 'do' in Animal Crossing the answer would be something like this: "The player works to get out of debt to real estate tycoon (and raccoon) Tom Nook by performing odd jobs for the town's citizenry." Jobs include fossil hunting, bug catching, and fishing; All of them are accomplished through simple mini-games.

That's what you do, but that simple description belies the reason you'll want to play Animal Crossing. The mortgage hanging over your head is a very kind one. No one will break your kneecaps if you don't spend your every minute working towards a debt-free life. As such, you're free to explore the world you've created. Complete with a 24-hour clock that matches day and night cycles to the real world, Animal Crossing is a place you'll want to visit for a number of reasons.

In my town (Madison), the humorous animal citizenry were a huge draw. Besides the owl running the museum, Polly the Postmaster, and anti-RIAA music-dog K.K. Slider, my neighbors included a big jovial bear, a scatterbrained kitty, and a surly penguin. Each of them had very different personalities, with their own tastes and hobbies. The penguin liked to go bug collecting at night, for example, while the kitty was always camped out by my house with a fishing pole. Even while you consciously understand these are just figments of your handheld console's imagination, you can't help to connect with their goofy avatars. I honestly found myself wanting to make sure they were cared for. We'd send letters back and forth, often giving each other little presents that would help us personalize our homes.

The customization element in Animal Crossing is another draw. You can design T-shirts for your little avatar to wear, collect furniture and ornamental pieces to spruce up your home, and make deals with Tom Nook to expand your floorspace once you''re completely out of room. Shops only sell a given selection of items every day, and so you'll find yourself coming back to the game for short sessions every day. A typical play session will see you hopping on to check Nook's for a piece of furniture, running a quick fossil digging sweep for Blathers the museum owl, and returning some correspondence to a well-wishing neighbor.

Therein lies the fun. Instead of boxing you in with quests or time tests, Nintendo gives you the chance to live in a fully realized place. The longer you're in a town, the bigger impact you'll make. Fossil turn-ins will improve the museum, chores done for neighbors lead to civic improvements; Play long enough and you'll see some friendly faces move on to other towns and new animal-folks move in to take their place. Via an online component you can even visit the towns of friends, meeting their animal buddies and checking out what they've done for their community. Overall the online element is underwhelming, though. The joy of this game lies in being a member of a tiny, cute, furry community.

Animal Crossing is not for everyone. Even folks who played the original title on the Gamecube may not appreciate the re-envisioned Crossing; the collectable NES games are missing here, for example. If you can get past the seemingly absurd nature of the game, you'll find a kind of calm warmth can be had from participating in this goofy little neighborhood simulation. The portability of the DS makes interacting with your town during a spare twenty minutes an ideal way to play. That bus trip or waiting room interval is just long enough to make a few bells, file a mortgage payment, and send a dirty letter to your next-door neighbor. I loved it. It has everything that the usual gaming experience doesn't offer. Animal Crossing is all about community as a reflection, and in the commitment you make to some tiny animal buddies you may just find out something new about yourself.

• Title: Electroplankton
• Developer/Publisher: Nintendo
• System:DS

Where Animal Crossing pushes the boundaries of what can be considered a game, Electroplankton leaps them easily. You're left wondering where exactly you've found yourself. Consisting entirely of interfaces you can use to manipulate musical elements, Electroplankton is as much a game as a guitar or a keyboard. The fact that it happens to be on the Nintendo DS means that a lot of gamers are going to end up encountering it at some point, poking at the swimming plankton in amusement and confusion.

This unique offering from Nintendo is a new way to experience music. There are several different types of music-making tools, referred to as plankton. Each plankton is a type of tiny 'living' creature that makes sounds as it moves about the world. The sounds are greatly varied in nature, and travel the gamut from remarkable recreations of instrument noises to digitized version of sounds that the players makes into the DS microphone. Making music is a matter of manipulating the plankton in new and different ways. The Hanenbow creatures are probably my favorite. They're launched from a small leaf-tube at a plant. The plant itself can be in various shapes, and each of the leaves on the plant can be oriented in 360 degrees of movement. When a Hanenbow plankton strikes a leaf, the chord is not unlike a harp being plucked. When it strikes a leaf, it ricochets off of the surface and (if other leaves are oriented to catch it) can continue to sound notes as it bounces from surface to surface. By orienting leaves appropriately beautiful melodies can be created. The Electroplankton site (flash) has flash movies of the Hanenbow and other planktons, and can give you a better idea of what the experience is like.

Some plankton are more one-trick ponies, but most of them have enough variability that you'll enjoy seeing what sort of musical experience you can get out of them. Playing with the plankton is an oddly soothing experience, as you watch the little guys moving about the DS screen while your musical arrangement echoes from the tiny system. There's something very Zen about the act of composing via plankton, a simple quiet that you don't get with more typical games like Mario Kart or Kirby.

The actual experience of play is something that should be experienced at least once. Younger people, who many never have been able to create their own music before, will be awed by the power the simple tools offer. Older players will appreciate the quality of design and the calm the experience exudes. Frustratingly, that moment of peace will not last forever. As sublime a design as Electroplankton offers, the lack of practicality it shows is infuriating. When you wish to return to real life, plankton-less, you'll be disappointed by an inability to save your compositions. There are no goals, no unlockables, nothing to goad a buyer into playing more of the game. It's absolutely nothing like a game at all, and in the United States that tactic is going to lead to lackluster sales. Without the power to save your work, working with Electroplankton is an entirely transitory act.

For me, my time with Electroplankton was introspective and enjoyable. I enjoyed the opportunity to make music, to experience something on a gaming system that wasn't reward-driven or fast-paced. In truth, I hope we see more experiences like Electroplankton in the future. Burnout is a wonderful game series, but gaming for the quiet moments is a worthwhile endeavor as well. That said, this is not a title I'd want to take on the bus and will not be something I'll be glued to months from now. As therapy or Zen-inducing music experience, Electroplankton is without equal. As a game, the title just goes beyond what I'm looking for in a software purchase.

Animal Crossing has always been like that

[WillAffleckUW]

there is no goal, other than what you provide.

Sometimes, I've gone on a tree-chopping crusade across villages, sometimes I've been a master gardener building a wide variety of fruit trees (and the ever elusive strawberry tree, or cherry tree with its blossoms), sometimes I've been a t-shirt collector, sometimes I've been out for gold making gold trees by burying sacks of 10,000 bells at a time.

Other times I've been a music collector.

Sometimes I've wanted lots of neighbors, so I've planted flowers and weeded everything to look nice - other times I've been a recluse, so I've put pitfall traps in front of my animal neighbors houses and laughed as they fell into them, and planted trees so they can't get out, while destroying all the flowers.

It's like the real world, except noone ever dies, they just move away and leave you to wallow in your pit of despair.

There's a word for this sort of thing...

[santiago]

It's called a toy, as opposed to a game. While Animal Crossing seems like a very open-ended game, Electroplankton is definitely a toy. It's a neat thing that has certain properties and lets you do stuff, and you can play around with it to see what's possible and what isn't. Given the historical popularity of physical toys, it doesn't seem that surprising that virtual ones are gaining ground.

Re:Atari?

[Vo0k]

Level 50 of River Raid could be considered the last: the game doesn't change after that, the level of difficulty remains. H.E.R.O. has about 16 levels, from which last 4 run in a loop. Boulder Dash, AFAIR shows some congrats, then dumps you back to level 1. Blue Max plays a nice mellody, then loops you seamlessly back into the same route. IIRC, Moon Patrol has 3 worlds with 3rd looped around. Behind Jaggi Lines never ends. Montezuma has that last room where you multiply your items, but then you can go all the way back (to the beginning of darkrooms where the ladders seem broken) and kill everything that moves with multiplied swords, and then you're left in the empty world. Frogger just grows in difficulty towards impossiblity...

Personally I dislike games where you have no winning condition whatsoever... but they were quite common in the past.
Actually, unset frag limit, unset time limit and start deathmatch in any FPS, and you don't have a win condition either.

Saving music

[Tringard]

I thought I found the link on Slashdot, but perhaps not. A Nintendo rep recently explained [nintendo.com] a way to save your compositions to your PC (bit of a hack, but seems to work).

From the link:
For a very simplistic way of saving your compositions to your computer, get a male-male 1/8" audio cable ($3-$4 at your local electronics store). Plug one end into the DS headphone jack and the other into your PC's mic input. Then use a program such as Sound Recorder to capture the audio. Or research sound capture on the Intrynet using a search engine.

Re:not true...

[TheRealMindChild]

And actually, you can do it in 5 minutes.

There are 3 (or 4) pits with phone peices in it. Get them. Then you run back to the screen where you started. Somewhere on that screen, while moving around, you will see a pizza pie thing appear at the top of the screen. Pushing your button activates this. All it is a counter to count down to when the ship will arrive. Run left one screen. Look for a little icon to appear at the top of the screen that looks like a helicopter landing pad. Just stand there. A ship comes and the game is done. The funny thing is, you cant figure ANY of this out without reading the instructions. For the longest time, I thought I was simply missing an elusive piece of phone. I just needed to go get the countdown pizza and wait for the ship.

Electroplankton a game and an artwork

[mattr]

Caveat, the author is a friend of mine. Toshio Iwai is a well known digital media artist who has done a number of works in which you compose music in one way or another, often using some kind of objects you can manipulate. Sometimes as simiple as a bouncy bal, other times you are herding a fleet of lights bouncing musically through a matrix like sound fireworks. So some of the things in the game are evolutions of some of his works. For example the donut spinners.. in recent years he has worked with displays projected from above onto a white table or in this case a white turntable.. you spin the turntable with your hand and something like a donut in the game appears. These displays are neat because you can make virtual controls sensed from above or below, giving an interesting non-crt tactile feel. Anyway, I also wanted to save things I made but it seems this may have been an artistic decision.. or possibly a technical limitation. One thing you may like to know is that at the Electroplankton launch in La Foret hall in Harajuku, Tokyo, the president of Nintendo came and gave a talk with Iwai and said the DS was made to a musical and interactive specifications so that it could play Electroplankton. There is also a wikipedia article [wikipedia.org] about it. Incidentally a FAQ [gamefaqs.com] at gamefaqs says it is not a game because "Electroplankton has no measurable objective; you can't 'complete', 'finish', 'win' or 'succeed' at playing it." However I got a massive amount of enjoyment out of it and electroplankton is the necessary and sufficient reason I'd have for buying a DS, I think this definition of game and need to fit into even one's idea of what will sell is unneccessary. For example I went to XBOX Live! which is a large bar lounge Microsoft set up in Omotesando, Tokyo (near La Foret) and tried a couple games for the XBOX in particular one where you direct armies to fight each other and you have magical berserker powers. Without instructions I found it initially interesting but so hard to win, so shallow, and so painful on the fingers that after 30 games or so I just gave up and never want to look at the place again. For me anyway Electroplankton beats that "showcase game" hands down.. a different audience perhaps. I'd rather thank Nintendo for doing it and hope it sells enough for them to make more like it! P.S. also it beats hands down the Fly Pen I got my nephews for Christmas, by about 100x. It would be worth it to figure out how to hook up an amp to it and record to a pc.. heck worth buying a DS for them too I think. And better for their brains than yet another Harry Potter adventure though they love those too.