Pooh Pooh on Clu Clu Land
When people that don’t really likeAnimal Crossingtalk about what they want in a newAnimal Crossing, they often call back to the GameCube title’s inclusion of playable NES games (Legend of Zelda,Super Mario Bros.,Punch-Out!!, andClu Clu Land Dto name a few). Though this was the first and last time that a localizedAnimal Crossingtitle would feature in-game NES emulation, many still claim that this was the best thing about the series.
According to aninterviewwithAnimal Crossingproducer Katsuya Eguchi, these disgruntled “fans” won’t become gruntled anytime soon. “Please consider it’s not happening ever again. At the time (ofAnimal Crossingon the GameCube), we didn’t have a Virtual Console system. We thought that playing games inside of a game is kind of funny, and we wanted to do it. But now there’s a Virtual Console where you can play classic games, so we don’t think we will be doing that in future titles.”
Fair enough. However, there is more that could be done to appease those looking for retro flavor in a newAnimal Crossingadventure. A nice compromise would be to include some special 8-bitAnimal Crossing-themed games in the next entry in the series. In the GameCube title, Tortimer might give you a fake NES game calledSuper Tortimeron April 1st. What ifSuper Tortimerwere playable? A little 10-minute-long platformer starring a turtle mayor, and maybe a few other fake-but-fun low-fi NES-on-Animal Crossingmini-games (a rhythm game with Totokeke, aTapper-type game with Brewster, and a puzzle game about peeling your face off with Tangy immediately come to mind) could be more than enough to satiate the hunger of those who’d rather play a videogame inside the videogame they just bought instead of playing theactualvideogame.
