Animal Crossing New Leaf 3DS: Visiting the Island

I remember when I used to connect my Game Boy Advance to my Gamecube to visit the island in the original Animal Crossing game. Boy have things changed since then with the latest Animal Crossing New Leaf 3DS allowing you to visit it whenever you want from the dock in your town.  Well, at least anytime after Tortimer shows up and tells you about it (I think this happened after about a week in town).  Oh, and you need to pay 1,000 Bells per trip.  There is also so many things to do at the island now.

One thing to pay attention to when visiting the island is that you cannot take anything with you or carry anything back on you. You can pick up tools to use while on the island from the little guy (gyroid?) right outside the building. In order, to take things off the island you have to put them in the drop box as shown above.  You can pick them up in the basket on the dock back in your town. The drop box has 4 pages of 10 slots.

One of the most interesting things you can from the island is take tours. There are different kinds of tour and they seem to vary by availability. Some of the tours involve catching bugs or fish. Other tours involve finding fossils and planting flowers.  I have also noticed diving tours.  You cannot take anything on tour, but you can get tools while there and you can bring back the fruit. This makes tours a good way to collect fruit exotic to your town without having to visit other people's towns.

Above is an example of completing a garden tour. Depending on how well you perform on the tour, you will earn Bronze, Silver, or Gold Tortimer award status. You get more medals depending on how you perform. The medals can be used to buy stuff from the shop on the island.

Another new thing I learned about on the island was diving. I first learned about it from a tour, but then I enjoyed borrowing the tool and swimming around the island to catch sea creatures to send back to my town and add to the museum.

Animal Crossing New Leaf 3DS: Gulliver

Finding Gulliver and getting the world souvenir furniture items from him as always been one of my favorite aspects of Animal Crossing. Gulliver is found sleeping on the beach about once a week. You have to walk up to him and press A to wake him up.  It can take quite a few attempts to finally get him to wake up, but it is totally worth it.

Once you wake him up, Gulliver requests your help in remembering what country he was heading to. He gives you a little info and then you select the answer from the options presented on your screen.  They are all really easy in my opinion, but you can always use Google if you get stuck.

When you get it right, Gulliver promises to send you a souvenir from the country he is visiting.  For example, I got a Statue of Liberty in my mail the next day when he went to the United States and a Lantern when he went to China.

Animal Crossing New Leaf 3DS: Finding Coins and Minerals in Rocks

 

Like in previous Animal Crossing games, daily you can find one rock in your town that will give out some money when you hit it with a shovel.  Once you find it you have to keep hitting it quickly to get the most out of it, as it only spits them out for a short amount of time and if you are slow you may not even get to the money bags.

New in the Animal Crossing New Leaf 3DS game is that sometimes the rocks in your town will be destroyed and reveal a mineral when you hit it with a shovel.

Animal Crossing New Leaf 3DS: Playing Hide and Seek

After playing an hour or so a day for the last two weeks, one of the most interesting new things I discovered in Animal Crossing: New Leaf is playing hide and seek.  The game began when I chatted with one of my neighbors and he asked if I would play.  I was the seeker and I had to find three of my neighbors hidden around town in 10 minutes.  I found one easily barely behind a house's fence.  The other two were a little tougher, as they were behind trees and sometimes I could not see them, but they often enough peek out that I still found them with plenty of time to spare.  For winning, I was given a piece of furniture.

Animal Crossing New Leaf 3DS: Selecting Town Map

I have had Animal Crossing New Leaf for two days now and I have only had about five minutes to play.  So far I have noticed the starting plot has changed to be quite fresh and I see a lot of new things, although I only have gotten to the point of selecting a spot for my house and have not even completed the start up stuff.  The main thing that I found cool with the newest Animal Crossing is how it shows you a town layout and asks if that is where you are going.  If you do not like the layout, you can say no and see another layout.  This is better than the continuous restarting I know some used to do in older versions.

Nintendo Wii Screenshots: Animal Crossing City Folk

Below are some more of Animal Crossing screenshots. It includes more fish I have caught including the interesting football fish. Also, I paid off my debt and upgraded my house again and Nook's is closed today for remodeling. Yesterday there was a Flea Market event, but no one in my town had anything all that interesting for sale. The auction house thing totally stunk yesterday as there was not anything up for auction. I wonder if maybe the auction house only works if real people put there items in there (i.e. me) and the animal characters never do. Also, I got some turnips from the turnip salesman yesterday, although I think maybe I paid too much and will not be able to sell them back to Tom for profit. Click the thumbnails below to see a larger version of the screenshots.

Nintendo Wii Screenshots: Animal Crossing City Folk Day 5

Below are yesterday's screenshots I took of Animal Crossing. They include finding an elegant mushroom worth 10,000 bells, new bugs captured, and visiting Redd's for the first where I ended up getting a forged painting. Click the thumbnails below to see a larger version of the screenshots.