Welcome to VC Weekly, N-Europe’s guide to the wonderful world of Nintendo’s download service. Written by Sam C Gittins.

Quite a quiet edition as we have one solitary title which could quite easily be skipped if you've played any other iterations in the now reasonably long-running series of simulations. Anyway enough from me and on with the game!
 
Available for download this week we have...   

Animal Crossing: Wild World  

While the world of Animal Crossing has been around for a while now, it's arguable that it's a series which gets better with each iteration so it's difficult to know quite where to place Animal Crossing: Wild World in the modern day, especially if you have played it before or if you own later editions of it such as the excellent Animal Crossing: New Leaf on the 3DS which eclipses all other releases. If you've never played an Animal Crossing title before then all you need to know is that once you've been asked a few questions after loading up the game you'll have an avatar villager created for you in the town which you get to name, then it turns out that you need a place to live but it's OK as the friendly Raccoon Tycoon known as Tom Nook turns up offering to build you a house for free! Well sort of, you have to pay him back with an extortianate amount of Bells - the AC currency - which you can only earn by engaging in various tasks within the game world which is filled with animal inhabitants who you can choose to interact with or not at your own discretion while trying to build upon your own little virtual existence with meaningless - but fun! - material - yet not real - objects; welcome to Animal Crossing!

Well, at least you're guaranteed snow in Winter here.

It would be more accurate to describe the series are more of a simulation as opposed to a game by definition as you mostly just wander around the game world - which rotates on an axis in this version - doing as you please, this could involve talking to every animal inhabitant and areeing to run errands for them such as delivering items or you might just choose to shake every tree to see what falls out, watch out if it's a bee hive though! Activites you can choose to partake in which have a completionist element to them include digging for fossils, catching bugs or just fishing for fish, you can then take these to Blathers the Owl in the town museum where you'll witness your collection grow but don't take the bugs out of the containers as the curator isn't terribly fond of them; there are lots of different varieties of fruit trees which you can choose to grow as well as there are certain fruits which are native to your town but I believe you can acquire others sometimes if I recall correctly, of course you used to be able to trade fruits and items wirelessly on the original DS software but this isn't possible in this Wii U VC release.

Of course everything else works just as it did originally, designing your own clothing is still a cinch with the touch-screen editor which you can use when you visit the Able sisters clothing shop plus it's useful to have that interaction with the touch screen for your inventory as well but then this will be nothing new to anyone who owns the 3DS title. Being that this game is supposed to run off the internal clock reloading save states becomes interesting because the time would be instantly set to the current time, as far as I'm aware though all timed in-game events still seem to function as normal though there was always going to be some sort of trade-off when re-releasing titles such as this but if you want to ensure everything works correctly it might be best to just play the original DS game; for those who just want a nostalgic trip down memory lane though you might want to get this just to be able to play it on the big screen or to share screenshots to miiverse.

Buy a house and fill it stuff! That's the Animal Crossing dream!

The visuals are fine for the original hardware though obviously today they look somewhat dated, on a big screen all of the flaws are magnified but the charm still manages to shine through, I must admit though that I prefer the look of the original Gamecube version more and would have much preferred to have seen that version make an appearance so whenever you are ready Nintendo, GC games would be a fantastic addition plus I'm still waiting to fill up that folder I made on my Wii U especially for them; don't make me delete it! All of the audio holds up reasonably well but it's all mostly forgettable, just relaxing background music mostly which changes on the hour at least, the best part of the design is the random sound effects and the babbling of the villagers though this might not be to everyone's tastes.

You could do much worse than purchasing this version of Animal Crossing but I suppose the point is that you could easily do better if you have a 3DS or indeed any other Nintendo console from the Gamecube onwards, but if the Wii U is your only Nintendo machine then I can see why you would be tempted to buy this as it's the only proper entry in the series available on the console at this point in time, it might even end up being the only one but time will tell. It's still entertaining to this very day but really for those who have experienced it before then I can just see it being downloaded, played for a few hours and then forgotten about in favour of other titles which are proper games by definition rather than a mere simulation but if you just can't get enough of the series then don't delay and download today.   

Verdict : Animal Crossing Wild World has an awkward charm to it but hasn't aged considerably well.

That's it for another installment of VC Weekly which will return again soon. So until then, enjoy the rest of the week and Game On!