Yes, all I have been doing of late is playing Animal Crossing: City Folk. As soon as I get home, I check in on my little village, speak to the neighbors, pull weeds, and check the shops for new items.

Pandtown is a beautiful place to live, and you can bet your golden watering can that in a few months I’ll be gridding this sucker out to make it as perfect as possible.

For now, though, I’m concentrating on collecting – I’m working on fossils, fish, furniture sets (though I don’t have a favorite yet), hats, glasses and umbrellas. I found a very useful spreadsheet that was created for Wild World and am using Google Docs to tick off items, adding in City Folk inventory as I go along.

Perplex City pal Andrea Phillips wrote a very good article comparing village maintenance in Harvest Moon to grinding in World of Warcraft, and I thought it rang very true for my Animal Crossing experience as well. The grind is all there is, and it is so deeply satisfying to know that if you put in the time, you will get the rewards.

STOP THE PRESSES, PEOPLE! Animal Crossing: City Folk is out on Sunday!

I am so excited about this it requires the use of caps AND multiple exclamation points!!

Look out fossils…HERE I COME.

p.s. I have just discovered an official contest which asks players to dress their pets as AC characters. Whichever Nintendo employee thought this up deserves an award of their own: “Most Awesome.”

I always thought Bill Compton being into technology was a nice little quirk (he was into computers in the Sookie Stackhouse novels, and in one of the pre-air promotional videos, he asks the cameraman about the HD camera he’s using), and this scene from last Sunday’s episode was great. I was like, “Of COURSE Bill has a Wii.”

Super Mario Galaxy is the only game that could make me want to throttle a penguin.

Two weeks ago, Guardian Games blogger Greg Howson revealed that casual games rule the UK charts: “Forget GTA, Metal Gear Solid 3 and the rest of the recent “hardcore” titles – Brain Training, Wii Play and the rest are outselling the lot.”

While according to the comments it’s unclear if this is due to staggered summer releases, over-hyped and inaccurate charts, or sticker shock, there are some truly insightful (and charmingly British) messages:

Commenter EvilBean reminds us to “Look beyond the weekly top ten chart. . . Has anyone mentioned WoW? You know, that MMO that found a huge market no one knew about. I think the same could apply with casual games. Is it silly to suggest that the Wii has hit a previously untapped market? Everyone here must know someone who never owned a console/gaming PC and now plays Wii. They are outside the demographic that visits this blog thing.”

User 5ynic proposes that the audience is the same, but are now finding themselves with more responsibilities and fewer time for playing games:

“As gamers grow up, I reckon some of the old hardcore are switching to casual games for at least some of their downtime, especially if their circle of friends includes non-gamers who visit…. Personally, I look for titles I can play with a bub on my knee, and/or in the 10-20 chunks of free time between work, housework, washing, drying & changing nappies, weeding the garden, cooking dinner for 3, doing the shopping, making babyfood and sleeping… And that’s more likely to be MarioKart WFC set to “Friends” than MGS4.
How my 22-year-old self would tut and shake his workshy, studenty, dreddlocked, grass-addled head if he could see me now.”

Howson promises to post a future entry about “hardcore gamers turned casual by time restraints,” positing that game choices might be affected by more by lack of variety than by lack of time. I have to disagree, though.

While I’m definitely within the demographic that visits “this blog thing,” I also fulfill both requirements for their new game-consuming audience – first, having no interest in first person shooters, and second, having basically no free time. My gaming experience over the past few weeks has been limited to reading forums and playing a little bit of Phantom Hourglass every night before bed.

Conveniently, I woke up this morning to an email alerting me that a Wii Fit bundle was in stock at Circuit City, and would I like to buy one? Hell yeah, I grumbled sleepily, entering my credit card info before turning over and snoozing a bit more.

I got the confirmation email about thirty minutes before the site and trackers listed it as Out of Stock again, so hopefully that means I have dibs on a unit in a warehouse somewhere, and it wasn’t some sneaky trick to force me into paying for a back-ordered set.

Come to me, Wii Fit! You are mine!

It’s easy to feel down after reading the daily news headlines, but the story, “
Nursing home grannies take up Wii Boxing” is definitely a happymaker.

Some small gaming adventures this week, including the new WiiWare offering, Gyrostarr, but there’s not much one can say about steering a plane along a winding channel, except that it is fun and worth the seven bucks.

My upper arms are about as strong as wet spaghetti.

I do exercise, but it’s all cardio-based or involves jogging (not that I’m great at that either, but I am improving). I’m so feeble that every time I see a movie character dangle from a ledge or branch from the tips of their fingers, I cringe, knowing that I would have already fallen screaming to my death, like the Nazi lady at the end of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade who keeps reaching for the Grail.

I’d like to step up to the little white square and get (Wii) Fit. Apparently, so does everyone else in the country (or at least the 11.7 million Wii owners in the US, as of this posting), because it’s sold out everywhere. Using Wii Alerts has so far yielded zip, as despite successfully purchasing a unit from Target online as soon as the text message arrived, the delivery date was later changed to some time in August.

I’m about to enter the phase of calling stores and obsessively tracking their shipment arrivals, which now that I think about it is kind of a game in and of itself. It’s on, Toys”R”Us, and I’m playing to win.