I recently got my hands on the Animal Crossing sticker book that was released earlier this year. This post covers my impressions and thoughts about the book.
The Stickers
Of course, the main attraction here is the stickers…and there are a lot of them. Over 800, in fact. There generally seems to be one sticker of each New Leaf villager, including the RV villagers that were featured on cards from the Welcome Amiibo update. I should note that I didn’t check for every specific villager, but it’s likely that they’re all included. Except, of course, villagers from other game series that were unlocked with Amiibo figures. So there are no stickers of W. Link, Epona, Viché, Cece, Ganon, or Inkwell, for example.
This is one of 16 pages full of stickers.
Aside from the villagers, there are also stickers of fish, bugs, flowers, fruit, balloons, music notes, stars, tools, PWPs (public works projects), seashells, Nook’s leaf icons, trees, furniture, and NPCs (non-playable characters such as Isabelle and Tom Nook).
Not An Album
One thing that should be pointed out: This is a sticker book, not a sticker album. The pages are not glossy, and you will probably not have much success if you try to move a sticker after you’ve already placed it in the book.
Activities
The book itself is basically an activity book for children. You’ll find some word searches, mazes, connect the dots, and pages where you’re asked to unscramble words or count the objects on a page.
The more interesting parts of the book are the ones that encourage creativity. One page shows a town tree and lots of green, open space. You’re asked to use stickers to add trees, a fountain, flowers, and more to improve the look of your town. Another page asks you to design a fun scene for each season (with backdrops of winter, spring, summer, and autumn).
Design your town.
Some other pages ask you to design the layout of your house, or even make a pattern to use as wallpaper. Another page shows comic strip style scenes with various characters and an empty speech bubble. You’re asked to write in the bubbles to complete the comic strip.
An Appealing Book
While some of the activities are clearly designed for very young children, other activities will appeal to all ages. And of course, everyone loves stickers! If it sounds good, you can buy the sticker book at Amazon. I bought one to give as a gift and another one for myself. 😀
If you have any questions about the book, just leave a comment below.
On Friday (July 26th), three classic Doom games (the original Doom, Doom II, and Doom 3) had surprise releases on current consoles, including Nintendo Switch. In the U.S., the Switch versions are priced at $4.99, $4.99, and $9.99, respectively. As a big fan of the classic Doom games, I was quite excited about the news.
That excitement evaporated quickly when I heard that the first two games required online logins to bethesda.net. Definitely not what I was expecting for a port of a 25-year-old offline game on a portable/console hybrid system. While some users on Twitter reported that you could get around the login requirements (after the initial sign-up) by switching to airplane mode, the whole thing left a sour taste in my mouth.
The backlash led Bethesda to change their tune, and they announced that the game will be patched so that the online login will be optional.
Update on our new classic DOOM releases:
The BethesdaNet login requirement was included for the Slayers Club, to reward members for playing the classic DOOM games.
The login should be optional, and we are working on changing the requirement to optional now.
Since a fix is in the works, I went ahead and bought the first game late last night. The original Doom is one of my favorite games of all-time. I first played it on the Atari Jaguar, and again later on the PlayStation.
I had some fun replaying the first few levels, although I had some trouble remembering how to access many of the secret areas. But that just means I have to thoroughly explore the levels, all over again. Fine by me. 🙂
But even after just a short time with the game, I could tell that this was not a great port…even aside from the online login requirement. My biggest complaint is that the controls are not customizable. There are three control layouts, depending on which controller you’re using, but you can’t customize them.
Both the Jaguar and PlayStation versions (from the 1990s) allowed you to customize the controls, so why can’t a 2019 version on much more powerful hardware do the same? You have to use the analog stick to strafe, and I prefer using the shoulder buttons for that. And I can’t seem to find a way to zoom in and out on the map.
As some Twitter users have pointed out, the music plays a bit slower and doesn’t always sound right. I also encountered some minor sound effect glitches, and the game once froze up after returning the Switch from sleep mode.
This clearly isn’t a perfect Doom port, but of course, the game is still lots of fun to play. And at just $4.99 U.S., it’s a great deal. You just might want to wait for the patch to come if you don’t want to have to create, and log into, a new Bethesda.net account. I don’t know if that patch will have any other improvements or not. But despite the flaws, I am definitely enjoying Doom so far.
Note: The game has split-screen local gameplay, which sounds like a great addition. However, I have not tried that out yet.
It’s been a week since Nintendo revealed Animal Crossing: New Horizons for Nintendo Switch. Since then, additional details about the game have come out in various articles and interviews. In this entry, I’m going to share my thoughts on some of the more interesting details.
When you first start out, two (“or so”) villagers will accompany you on the plane to the island. The “or so” indicates that the number may change by the time the game is finished, but that does sound low. I hope it’s not indicative of a low villager total in New Horizons.
But the more interesting part is that they will check with you before deciding on a place for their home. So if it’s in a bad spot, you can choose where they will live! I’m actually surprised they’re going to give us this much control, but I’m glad to see this happening. No more houses landing on our paths or in other bad spots.
I won’t miss this.
Also, villagers will start out living in a tent, just like you do. And they’ll have to pay off their own debt to Tom Nook before they can upgrade to a house. That will be very cool to see your island build up from scratch. It reminds me of building Tarrey Town in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (but with even more control, of course).
New Horizons will have new skin tones and new hairstyles, and you’ll be able to swap between character features “at any time.” This certainly makes things more convenient. I can think of at least one possible down side, though: It would make it easy to impersonate others during online play. That could cause problems if someone swaps their appearance to look like someone else and then steals an item, tramples flowers, or otherwise causes harm to your island.
The hair options in Happy Home Designer. New Horizons will have a larger selection.
Nintendo confirmed to IGN that you will be limited to one island per Switch system. If you make multiple accounts on your Switch, each account will have a house on the same island. On 3DS, players could simply buy another copy of the game to make a second (or third, fourth, etc.) town. But Switch saves data to the system itself, not the cartridge. So even buying another copy of the game would not help.
Many players enjoy having multiple towns, and I think Nintendo is going to lose out on some game sales by doing it this way. I’m hoping that they reconsider and provide an alternate way of making extra towns. One idea I have is to sell some DLC that allows a second save file on your Switch.
Even though I’m generally not a big fan of paid DLC, I think this makes sense. Creating a second town is something players would normally pay for anyway (by buying another game cart, or another memory card back in the GameCube days). And not providing an option for multiple towns would alienate many of the series’ biggest fans. So let’s hope they change course on this issue.
Nintendo has confirmed that Animal Crossing: New Horizons will not be compatible with cloud saves to backup towns. This is not surprising news, but it’s disappointing nonetheless. They say it’s to prevent cheating; for example, players could save a bunch of money or valuable items to the cloud, drop those items off in a friend’s town, restore their saved town, and then pick up their original items to duplicate items or money.
While I can understand that perspective, it doesn’t seem fair to penalize those of us who don’t cheat. If our data gets corrupted and our towns get erased, there will be no way to recover. And Animal Crossing towns are something that many players put years into. It’s so much more important to a game like this, than it would be to save your progress in a Mario game, for example. I don’t think Nintendo appreciates how important our towns are to us Animal Crossing fans.
It would be nice if Nintendo could reach some sort of compromise. For example, what if a cloud save only saved things like the town layout, villagers, town/shop upgrades, and town history…but not money or furniture/items. We would still have to replace all of our stuff, but our towns would still be intact. That would be preferable to having to start out all over with a new town. And it would make things very difficult for those who wanted to use cloud backups as a way to cheat.
A surprising revelation was that Animal Crossing: New Horizons will save your game automatically! This is quite a departure from how the game has operated since the beginning. I know a lot of players won’t be happy about this, although I don’t personally have a problem with it. Basically, the only times I saw Resetti were after a power outage or dead battery.
This change also puts Resetti out of a job. I imagine they’ll find a new job for him in the game, though. Or maybe he could at least reprise his role that he had in the GameCube game…as the Groundhog Day groundhog mole.
No Direct Connection Between New Horizons and Pocket Camp
When Pocket Camp was announced, Nintendo stated that it would connect to a core Animal Crossing game, though they didn’t elaborate. Some thought that meant it would connect to New Leaf, but that never happened. So the only other choice would be the upcoming Switch game. However, Nintendo has backtracked and said they won’t connect directly.
And that is perfectly fine by me. The GameCube version of Animal Crossing had several features that could only be unlocked by connecting a Game Boy Advance using a special link cable.
Some of those features made perfect sense and were helpful to players who already owned both systems (like taking the pattern design tool with you, or downloading an NES game to the GBA).
But the main attraction was the tropical island. And it made no logical sense to prevent players without a GBA from visiting the island; the game already has a fully functional version of the island that you can play on GameCube. So it seemed like a blatant money-grab to require the purchase of another system to access something that’s already in the game.
So I’m glad New Horizons won’t be doing anything similar (even though Pocket Camp is a free download, it still requires a reasonably current smartphone or tablet). And linking systems up can be a cumbersome process that likely wouldn’t be worth the effort anyway. Just put those features into the game by default, please.
Other Stuff
Other details have come out, including confirmation that Isabelle will return in New Horizons. And sharp-eyed viewers have noticed many details from the trailer itself, like the fact that players can wear backpacks and players’ pupils are no longer fixed in place. 😀
A week after the reveal, I think I’m most excited about the outdoor furniture and path-making tool. Nintendo is clearly giving us more power to customize our towns the way we want them. Those tools will allow us to create truly unique towns.
As someone who has visited hundreds of dream towns in Animal Crossing: New Leaf, I’ve learned how rare truly unique towns are. Lots of towns are beautiful, with lots of flowers and public works projects (PWPs). But after a while, you end up seeing similar towns all the time (as nice as they may be). That shouldn’t be a problem in New Horizons (hopefully), and that will make the Dream Suite (if there is one), even more enjoyable to use.
Is there a certain feature of New Horizons that you’re dying to try out? Leave a comment below!
Update: Voice Chat Requires App?
Just one other thing I want to mention. That first IGN link says that voice chat will “likely be done through the Nintendo Switch Online app.” That sounds like a bad idea, unless they can make the chat play back through the game, so that everyone can hear what’s going on.
Animal Crossing is a social game; much of online play is communication. This isn’t Mario Kart, where you have a race to compete in, and hearing others isn’t crucial. In Animal Crossing, if someone says on voice chat “let’s play tag in the museum,” and only some of the players can hear him/her, that is going to cause confusion and exclude those without the app.
Wii had a separate mic accessory (called Wii Speak) that was used in Animal Crossing: City Folk. The good thing about it was that even those without the mic could still hear the others and keep up with what was going on. Let’s hope New Horizons doesn’t take a step backwards in terms of communication, and provides a way to include everyone.
