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If you have a Game Boy Advance and a link cable, even more options will be available. The game makes good use of the GBA as a peripheral: You can use it as a portable version of the pattern design tool that you find in the pattern shop, and it unlocks an island that you can visit (by hitching a ride with a turtle that talks like a pirate and sings sea chanteys during the trip), where you can find different insects and fish than you'd find on the mainland. And, most interestingly, you can use your Game Boy Advance to play old Nintendo Entertainment System games that you find in Animal Crossing. There are a rumored 20 available, and you can obtain them both from the game and also through the use of yet another peripheral, the e-Card Reader, a scanning device released on the same day as Animal Crossing. The e-Card Reader scans special cards that can unlock not only NES games, but additional music and cloth patterns as well. Those who don't have all this extra hardware can still trade with others. You can visit other people's towns by putting their memory card in the other memory card slot and going to the train station, or you can trade items by getting a code for the item from the store manager and exchanging the code with others.
You'll like interacting with the different characters of Animal Crossing.
Animal Crossing was originally released in Japan under the name Animal Forest Plus as a sequel to the Nintendo 64 game Animal Forest. It too was intended to be a Nintendo 64 game, but as development went on and the GameCube neared release, Nintendo decided to switch platforms. Thus, the plethora of art content that allows Animal Crossing to show you something new every day is mostly targeted toward being shown on an N64. This turns out to not be a problem, for the most part. The cutesy art style certainly doesn't require a game to have the level of graphics a GameCube can output. The one area that suffers and should have gotten more attention is the characters' faces. The textures on the faces are low resolution, and what's worse, the camera is fixed in such a way that you are never far enough away where you can't notice at least some blurring due to texture filtering. Since there are more than 100 different characters in Animal Crossing, redoing all the art for the GameCube would have been impractical, but it is still quite a jarring effect, especially since you spend a lot of time zoomed in on conversations with animals.
If you have a Game Boy Advance and a link cable, even more options will be available.
Music pieces are catchy but short, again likely due to the platform switch. The music matches the lighthearted feel of the game well, and transitions fit together nicely, but you might find it gets a little repetitive after a while, not only because of the shortness of the songs, but also because the game never makes any sort of radical style switch like the switch between the aboveground and underground themes in a Mario game. Even at night, it's all just variations of upbeat, mellow jazz. This is easy enough to ignore thanks to the great use of sound effects in the game. There is usually quite a bit of activity going on in your vicinity, and everything generates distinctive and positional sounds that mix together to draw you into the environment. This is especially useful for finding insects, because they're often hidden in the bushes. Each type of insect even has a unique sound, and hearing an unfamiliar buzz or chirp can be an exciting event.
Animal Crossing's saccharine look and feel combined with the easy sandbox-style activities are an insurmountable obstacle for those who thrive exclusively on twitch games. At its heart, Animal Crossing is very much a game for a family or someone looking for a change of pace, and for that audience it provides an enjoyable, relaxing experience with a long life span.
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"Stupid background music! It pissed me off so much, turned off the GC and didn't use it for a week!"
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