Animal Crossing rainbow

It’s the simple pleasures in life, like the appearance of a rainbow in the Nintendo DS game Animal Crossing: Wild World. I was so excited about my first rainbow sighting that I snapped a picture of it. You don’t “get” anything when a rainbow shows up on Animal Crossing. It’s just for fun.

Animal Crossing is a fun game that can be played five minutes at a time or an hour (or more) at a time. If you already have Animal Crossing for DS or Wii, you only have a couple of weeks left of snow! Make as many “perfect” snowmen as you can to get the exclusive snowman furniture and catch those rare fish.

Wild World Guide

A few weeks ago, I started Animal Crossing: Wild World, a fantastic game for Nintendo DS that was released in 2005 (following up the original GameCube edition) and is now enjoying renewed interest thanks to the recent release of Animal Crossing: City Folk for Wii. Animal Crossing is an incredibly fun, open-ended game in which your character can fish, catch bugs, find fossils and employ other methods to earn “bells” (currency) to buy stuff and pay off the mortgage on a home that can be furnished with the items you purchase. I could go on, but you really have to play it to experience it. It’s on sale for $33.99 on Amazon right now, regularly $39.99.

Anyway, the more I got into it, the more I wanted the Official Nintendo Animal Crossing: Wild World Player’s Guide. It was offered as a bonus with Nintendo Power magazine subscriptions back in 2005, and then on a limited basis afterward. I checked ebay, where the guides go for $30 to $50. Too rich for my blood. Then I checked Amazon. Sellers were listing the guide for $43 used, all the way up to almost $200 for a new copy! Then I saw a user comment, asking why people don’t just buy it from the Nintendo.com Web site. But that was years ago; there’s no way they’d still have the original Animal Crossing DS strategy guide, right?

Well, it was a little hard navigating through the Nintendo store, but I eventually found the Animal Crossing: Wild World guide, as well as original Nintendo Power guides for New Super Mario Bros., Mario Kart and a lot more. I ordered the Wild World guide for $16.95 plus tax, free shipping. And it’s great! There are lots of great online guides to Animal Crossing, but the full-color guidebook is 160 pages of tips, illustrations, identifications and much more.

I didn’t believe it until the Animal Crossing manual was delivered today and I had it in my hot little hands. Now, your results may vary, but the lesson (for me, at least), is, don’t assume something is impossible to get from the original source unless you check that source first. Also, I suppose I could have bought up a bunch of copies and turned a profit on ebay, but I opted not to. I’d rather just share the news here.

Animal Crossing: Wild World

The Wii world is all abuzz with talk of that platform’s latest release, Animal Crossing: City Folk. But this week Nintendo DS users can get a taste of the fun simulation game with used copies of Animal Crossing: Wild World marked down to $19.99 (regularly $24.99 used and $24.99 new). The deal is good through Nov. 20. A worker at my local GameStop told me they don’t reset the used games before selling them, so you may end up with a copy in which many of the features have been “unlocked.” Or, if you’d rather start fresh, you can reset the game. GameStop is also taking reservations for Iron Chef America.