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'Harvestella' is a Square Enix farming sim with a dark twist
The RPG is coming to Nintendo Switch and Steam on November 4th.
'Disney Dreamlight Valley' looks like Animal Crossing with Wall-E and Moana
You can go fishing with Goofy and help Anna and Elsa restore their memories.
Animal Crossing: Emotional, Spendthrifty Folk
Animal Crossing: City Folk is sticking to the formula laid down by Wild World fairly rigidly, but it's not all a rehash. Some new outlets and characters can be found in the city section next to your village, two of which have been recently showcased in daily videos at City Folk's official Japanese site. The first of these stars Dr. Shrunk, whose dubious comedic talents have finally landed him the big one: a gig at City Folk's Theater. Here, you'll be able to watch the good doctor take to the stage, 'enjoy' his stand-up routine, and hopefully learn a brand new emotion in the process -- as you do. The second video (after the break) covers the Auction House (where you'll be able to offer items for those on your Wii's friend list to bid on), which appears to be manned by a Gyroid. Perhaps they ran out of ideas for new talking animals. %Gallery-27704%
Six of our favorite Media Summit videos
You've already had the chance to examine scores of wonderful screens from new Wii games announced at the Nintendo Media Summit. This new post is dedicated to displaying thousands of more screens (squashed together to create videos) of some of the bigger titles that have been shown at the event.We settled on placing Nintendo's official Punch-Out!! trailer at the top of this post, but could have easily led with some truly fantastic Sin & Punishment 2 footage, an impressive tech demo of The Conduit, or Yuji Naka's wacky-looking Let's Tap. Instead, all of those (and more) are past the break, and need to be viewed right now. Before you go, though, one final note: if any game released this year has a funkier soundtrack than Let's Tap, we'll be gobsmacked.
Lock's Demo now available on Nintendo Channel
The DS demo section of the Nintendo Channel is usually swamped with bland Touch! Generations fare, but it now looks like Nintendo has abandoned that policy to bring us some potentially interesting games to try out. What a novel concept! Top of your "to download" list (if you haven't already bought it) should be Lock's Quest, 5th Cell's ace tower defense/real-time strategy, which reviewers have been throwing superlatives at from every direction (stay tuned for our review later this week). Spore Creatures is there also, and while it may not have attracted the same loving critical response as Lock's Quest, it still piques our curiosity, simply because it's not the Spore everybody else has been banging the drum for. There's a demo of MySims Kingdom as well, which looks adorable, and an anagrams demo for sdrsorsCwo SD. These all expire October 5th, so don't delay! %Gallery-19901%
Metareview: Spore Creatures
With all the current hype surrounding Spore, even ardent DS fanboys such as ourselves have to strain to recall Spore Creatures. It looks like a totally different game to its PC counterpart, and we quite enjoyed it when we went hands-on at GDC '08. So which is it: the sleek, refined alpha member of its species, or a sloppy afterthought of a game, heading for history's rubbish bin? We copied and pasted some other people's thoughts to find out! IGN (78%) gave the game one of its better reviews, praising its sense of fun and creativity: "Spore Creatures isn't intended as a replacement for the core PC Spore experience -- it's meant to compliment that design with a unique experience that lifts many of the core elements. And for the most part it succeeds in that task: this is a fun, involved, albeit more linear DS experience with a few quirks that get in the way, but even with those quirks it's great to experience a game on the more limited handheld with a similar sense of creativity that PC gamers will have in Spore." Eurogamer (5/10) isn't so keen, arguing the game is crippled by its linear nature: "What it doesn't offer is any sort of Free Play option where you can do your own thing. You can indulge your creative desires or you can play the game. You can't really do both at the same time in any satisfying way, which suggests that "linear action adventure" simply wasn't the right direction to take the Spore concept for its handheld outing." GameSpot's (65%) Kevin VanOrd just couldn't emotionally bond with his creations: "It's still a cute adventure across multiple planets, and it features a pared-down version of the creature creation tool that helped make the PC release such a success. It has some annoying quirks, and it won't inspire an emotional connection between you and your digital doppelganger, but Spore Creatures is still a pleasant diversion and an appealing, if ordinary, companion to its bigger brother." %Gallery-15944% This post is a part of our Metareview category, but we also like reviewing things ourselves, and making sure our voice is heard. We're conceited and self-absorbed like that.
E308: Animal Crossing: City Folk confirmed [Update 2: First screens and date!]
Katsuya Eguchi's happy face just popped up on the giant screens at Nintendo's E3 2008 press conference to tell us that -- quelle surprise! -- Animal Crossing will be heading to the Wii this year, along with WiFi connectivity and voice chat.Animal Crossing: City Folk's WiFi capabilities will allow players to exchange letters and pictures, bid on (and sell) items at a special in-game auction site, and check out the status of other players at the Happy Room Academy. There's also an option to slap a mask of your Mii on your avatar, and a bigger city area to scope around. But it's the "community microphone" feature -- known as "WiiSpeak" -- that will really grab headlines.[Update 1: First screens in our gallery below][Update 2: Nintendo reckons we can expect this in the U.S. on November 16th! (thanks, Alvin)]%Gallery-27704%
Konami devising its very own Animal Crossing
You know how you spent the best part of two years tracking down every last bug, fossil, and fish (curse you, Coelacanth) in Animal Crossing: Wild World? Yeah, well Konami wants you to do it again. All of it. <Insert evil cackle here>Tongariboushi and the 365 Days of Magic is the company's latest DS venture, and is splashed across the pages of the latest Famitsu. It's already being labeled as a "clone" of Wild World by the internet, and although our inability to read Japanese means we can't confirm just how close it is to Ninty's cuddly life sim, the screens alone seem to suggest a very similar game. It pretty much looks like Animal Crossing: Wild World 1.1.Not that we're complaining -- after all, Animal Crossing takes our socks and rocks them. It's easy to see why Konami would want to use Nintendo's title as a template. By the end of 2007, Animal Crossing: Wild World had sold over 4.5 million copies in Japan alone, while unofficial sales site VGChartz estimates worldwide sales to be close to 10 million. That's a whole lot of bells that could be sitting in Konami's account.Hit the "Source" link below for a closer look at the full scan.
Spore Creatures evolves new screens, Japanese release date
In the beginning, there was a confirmation.Shortly thereafter, a release date and gameplay details emerged from the primordial ooze a Newsweek interview, and an involuntary chemical reaction a Joystiq hands-on session soon produced screens. Then, for some time, nothing. Until this morning, that is, when we found that the screens had suddenly multiplied in number, and had inhabited our gallery!The newly developed screens were joined by boxart for the Japanese version of the game, which sort of reminded us of Pokémon Trozei!'s box, and a Japanese release date: September 11th.So goes the ongoing story of the evolution of Spore Creatures.%Gallery-15944%
