I picked up Animal Crossing for the DS pretty soon after getting a DS. It was pretty good, but there were just too many things going against me enjoying it. It wasn't on a shared system that was sitting around the house (read: the GameCube), so Gloria and I didn't share a village, which had been one of the fun things of the GCN version. It was just too much a rehash of the GameCube version, really, to enjoy it much more. Also, Animal Crossing is a great game to sit down and play for an hour or three, sort of zoning out and running erands or reorganizing furniture. The DS is much better for games you can play for short bursts. You can do that with Animal Crossing, but it feels weird to close the DS while in the middle of playing a game that takes place in real time.
I'm hoping that the Wii edition of Animal Crossing will do better at having both a shared local village and an easy-to-travel game world. I can imagine going into my house, using the phone to call a friend to announce that I'm going to visit, and then heading over to his village, where I can get together with as many friends as I want.
I'm not really all that hopeful, though. Nintendo's online gaming has been continually lackluster. The original Xbox had Live, which was completely fantastic, and Xbox 360 Live seems even better. Nintendo's online services seem much more like the online services that hosted games when I was in college. In 1996.
