The official Animal Crossing: Wild World website has gone online, with the game itself soon to follow.

Nintendo's official website for the upcoming Animal Crossing:Wild World is alive... literally. Upon loading up the top page, visitors are greeted by the town's creature denizens each of which introduces him or herself and offers to show you around some part of the game. Tom Nook for instance will eagerly show gamers his nook (heh, sorry) of the woods, the store where he will enslave gamers with the promise of shiny new tools and items. The site itself is almost wholly navigated by speaking to the animals. Very slick work indeed.

The game, to be released first in Japan this November 23rd under the name Oideyo Doubutsu no Mori (Come Over to Animal Forest), will be the third title to utilize Nintendo's brand new WiFi Connection online service. The service, which debuted last week with Mario Kart DS in the US and Tony Hawk's American Sk8Land, will allow gamers to visit and interact with each other's towns no matter where they are in the world.

Animal Crossing: Wild World will next see a December 5th US release followed months later by a March 31, 2006 European release. Surely this must mean the European version will have all sorts of amazing exclusive additional content? Don't bet on it... more likely it is due to localisation efforts that must account for the array of languages present under the NOE umbrella.

Again, the site can be accessed here.