|
Thursday:
Put Lobo in the Hole(s)
“This game is fruity as hell!” my friend had said on Wednesday night, when he caught me playing Animal Crossing.
I tried to explain to him how clever it was that, in the game, the sun was setting, just as the sun was setting in real life. I tried to explain to him how clever it was that I had to pay off the loan on my house, that I do this by collecting seashells and talking to the neighbors. I tried to tell him I was writing a feature about it for InsertCredit.com, and he just shook his head. Maybe it was my “kitschy clock.” Maybe it was my “coconut palm.” Maybe it was the fact that I was a little cartoon character running around in an “MVP” shirt to the tune of Charlie Brown piano jazz. I blame it on the pelican post-office workers.
At any rate, I turned the game on at a little after two on Thursday morning. At around eight, I’d paid Tom Nook the last of the loan, and he was quick to ask me if I wanted a bigger house. Hell yes I wanted a bigger house. He told me to wait until morning. So I decided to wait until morning.
After this late hour, there’s not much going on at all in Naptown. I’ve got my computer on my lap, and I’m jacked into an IRC channel as I wait for someone important to email me. I have a bowl of Fruity Pebbles on the coffee table, and they’re getting irreparably soggy. Curly just called me a “Never-ending source of energy, nyoink.” He doesn’t seem to notice that he, too, is up. Biskit says, “You must be crazy, dawg.” Lobo says, “I got your letter -- I didn’t understand a word, ah-rooo.”
Nintendo has presented us the solution to an age-old mystery in a pastel and whimsical fashion: if animals could talk, they wouldn’t have anything important to say.
My friend, the one who had called the game “fruity as hell” -- he’s a Grand Theft Auto III guy. He considers gaming “innovation” to be the ability to veer off the charted course and shoot an old woman in the face with a shotgun. He doesn’t get Animal Crossing.
“Can’t you, like, kill anybody?”
“Nope.”
He scoffed at this. “Then how the hell are you supposed to win?”
I really couldn’t come up with an answer to that. This is the same guy who asks me, whenever we go out to bars, “Why don’t you have a drink?” I never come up with a clear answer -- I’m more content to play darts. I play darts like a son-of-a-bitch. There’s ninja blood in me, I swear.
Once the darts are out of my hands, I come up with a way to reply to this guy. By then, it’s always too late. He likes to do that -- present an issue to me while I’m preoccupied; when I don’t answer, he can claim he “won.”
When I don’t drink, it’s because I’m “stupid.”
Animal Crossing, in the same way, is also “stupid.”
I mean “fruity as hell.”
Now, though, as I’m staring at Lobo -- my favorite of the few citizens of this nappy little town -- I have a way to answer him:
“Have you ever killed anybody? Like, in real life?”
His answer would be: “No.” (At least, so I’m guessing. I don’t exactly know everything about this guy.)
I would then say, “Well, how do you expect to win?”
Damn, I’m clever.
Animal Crossing, then, is kind of like a second life. When you’re out of the house in real life, you’re asleep at home in Animal Crossing. When you’re playing, you’re naturally at home in real life and out of the house in the game.
I’m all for this type of innovation in games. I like when one neighbor asks me my birthday, and then tells me she’ll send me a present. I like this game a lot better than I like Seaman, which was nothing more than a party trick rendered into code.
Seaman never gave me a shirt with a skull on it. My neighbor Hazel, who is, for all intents and purposes, a cartoon squirrel, did. All I had to do was get her “picture book” (pictures of what? . . . Nuts? Big nuts?) from Mallary. Why she suddenly wanted that picture book back at three in the morning, I don’t know. Why she had that skull-printed shirt on her, I don’t know that, either. Where she was keeping it -- in her bushy tail? -- I don’t know, either. I will wear this skull shirt forever. Unless I find something cooler, of course.
Which is not bloody likely.
So, where was I? This game is better than Seaman, yes.
And where am I now?
I’m in Lobo’s yard. He just called me a “psycho” again. And I . . . dug seven holes, and pushed him toward them. Just as he tried to escape, I dug a hole, sealing him in a square of eight holes. He’s stuck in there. He’s standing still. Look at the poor bastard! Why did I do that?
I go into his house. There, by his bongos, is my traffic cone. I go back outside. He’s standing in the center of those eight holes. I stand by his house, and watch him.
Why did I do that to him? That’s cruel as all hell.
I shake my head, dig three holes, stand in the center of them, dig a fourth hole, and am trapped. I turn off my Wavebird, hold the stick up, and then turn it back on. Billy is marching down, against the hole at his feet. He can’t escape. Lobo, too, starts marching. He’s marching vainly to the left: the computer controlling his movements, too, has miscalibrated its Wavebird. Either that, or he wants to go home.
I look back to my IRC. Someone’s just entered the channel. I don’t know who it is.
“Tim, are you still playing Animal Crossing?” they ask me.
Who is this person, and who told them I was playing Animal Crossing? I don’t know. I don’t answer.
[Next: Day 3; Tangy Learns a New Word]
|
