Are you ready for your new life? Good. Welcome to the wonderful world of Animal Crossing: City Folk. Step on the bus, hide your surprise at the insane frog driving in front of you and prepare yourself for the relaxing and fun journey ahead.

Probably one of the most enjoyable second life simulators to have graced home consoles, Animal Crossing: City Folk starts you off in unremarkable style on the aforementioned bus. This serves as the games warm-up and character creation mode. You will answer questions about your name, gender and destination among other things, all with commentary from Kapp'n the frog and his quirky sea-based sense of humour.

Stepping off the bus for your first day in the new town you will be approached by the raccoon shopkeeper and all-round shady guy, Tom Nook. Nook offers you the chance to buy a luxurious (note: dilapidated) little house in the town. Biting his arm off, you agree, only to realise that you have absolutely no money with you and no feasible way of earning any.

Luckily, Nook comes to the rescue. After exacting a modest beating on your wearied hide you are given the chance to work off a miniscule fraction of your debt to the small-time crook. This again takes the form of a tutorial as Nook sends you on errands to meet the quirky little inhabitants of you rainbow-coloured village. After these pleasant little tasks, you are let loose on your new home and the unsuspecting denizens therein.

There is absolutely no point to Animal Crossing whatsoever: the game runs in real-time taken from the Wii's internal clock. It is a clever device that forces you to think about when you play, as certain days on the calendar are of special interest. Events such as Fishing Tourneys happen on a semi-regular basis, but Christmas or whatever you want to call it happens on the 25th of December every year. Similarly there is Mother's Day, Mayor's Day and a whole host of other fictional and real-world holidays that occur but once a year on their appropriate day. It is a fantastic idea and works really well in practice: some days demand your undivided attention to join in the celebrations with your villagers. Other days can be just spent getting your fishing gear on or catching bugs. Sometimes it's just nice to wander aimlessly and chatter with the crazy animal friends living there.

The inhabitants of your town are some of the wackiest, most unusual AI creations ever known. Some of them are early birds and get up at the crack of dawn to have a vigorous early morning constitutional, some will stay in bed past 10am, others will never leave their beds due to sickness. It is your job as the town's only sane resident to do the little jobs they need doing, cheering them up, getting them medicine when they need it or just enriching their lives with your fulfilling presence.

Animal Crossing rewards patience and attention, and if you can devote neither then you should doubtless avoid the game. The more effort you put in, the more enjoyable the experience will be. You can decorate your initially quite small house with a variety of furniture and themes, which will be judged by the Happy Room Academy based on your tastes. There is a great museum run by a kooky old owl and his sister where you can display the fossils, bugs, fish and paintings that you find and purchase.

Those of a creative turn of mind can design their own clothing patterns and display them to the villagers – those who like your style will start wearing your fabulous creations. A note: no-one likes Nebulons' style. You can even write letters and send presents to your villagers who will reply with missives and gifts of their own. A particular favourite trick is to send someone you hate a big pile of rubbish and see if you can get something valuable in exchange.

The shop, run by Nook, gets bigger the more you spend in there on things like furniture and flowers. While the selection to begin with is quite unremarkable, as time progresses he gets in a nice variety of things to enhance your lifestyle. And anything you have bought in the past and sold can be ordered again at a moment's notice.

The City is a new area to the game, and a place where you can see an awful lot of bustle, but thankfully not too much hustle. Unless of course you go and see Redd. After your initial encounter with Tom Nook, it's hard to believe there could be a more shady character than that fat raccoon, but the game will surprise you with its own seedier version of Del Boy who tries to hawk off any old tripe at massively inflated prices. There's a beauty salon in the city, along with a theatre and auction house to keep you busy. It's a shame that only one item can be auctioned at a time, but it's a nice feature nevertheless.

The online portion of the game is fun, and like most of the N-Europe staff on a Saturday night, completely lagless [lol - Ed]. With a friend code in hand you can visit your friend's village, peruse his shop catalogue and poach some of his friends for your town. It's a shame you cannot visit the city, and perhaps engage in a versus match of some sort in an arcade as it would add a nice extra dimension to proceedings, but on the whole it works pleasingly well. The Wii Speak peripheral makes things a lot easier when it comes to communicating with people visiting your village, it's a real upgrade on text chat. The microphone works well and the output quality is as good as your TV or speaker system.

So far we have avoided mentioning the word "sequel" but we have to say something about that now. Animal Crossing: City Folk is the third game in the franchise, and it really is an incredibly lazy sequel to the first two games. The DS version made a good jump from the GameCube and added a lot of the new staple features to the franchise. However, besides the city (which still contains stuff found in previous instalments anyway), this game really does not do much new. Even the motion controls feel tacked-on. It is a contemptible exercise in laziness from Nintendo, and they deserve a good, hard, smack in the teeth for it.

However, the core of the game is still excellent, fun, original and quirky, and this game should be judged on its individual merits. New players should get their village on as soon as possible: veterans should ask themselves if the limited new features warrant the purchase. For us, we can hardly wait to get bogged down in yet another mortgage on our ramshackle first home and go fishing for that always-elusive whopper every Sunday.