Before leaving for Comic-Con last week, I picked up Animal Crossing: Wild World. I named my little town Avalon, and started working at Tom Nook's to pay off the debt incurred by having a house in the town. Of course true to life, as soon as you pay off the mortgage, you've got pay for the improvements being done on the house, and so forth. As a player of the old GameCube version of Animal Crossing, I know the basics for the game, and as soon as I was able to buy the axe from Nook's store, I set about a massive town improvement project.
In Animal Crossing, each town has a native species of fruit tree - in my city of Avalon, that fruit is Peach. Peach fetches a mere 100 bells (bells being the monetary unit of money of Animal Crossing). Exotic species of fruits are worth five times as much, selling for 500 bells apiece. After cultivating a couple of exotic fruit trees (apple, pear, orange and coconut), I set about chopping down all the barren trees (trees that don't drop furniture, fruit or money). Then I set about chopping down the peach trees (culling about 90% of the peach trees) to clear land for the new cash crop of exotic fruit. I then began to plant the trees in nice, neat rows. The little row of Palm trees by the beach is almost done, and I surmise that in a month or two, the town improvement project will be finished.
In Animal Crossing, you can also pick up flowers. I've secretly been stealing all my animal neighbors' flowers and transplanting them into the area I call the Avalon Botanical Gardens (which also happens to be right outside my house). The neighbors don't appear to have noticed this yet.
I'm sure that in time, I'll undergo a different project where I attempt to rid myself of the animal residents that I don't like in the town by slumifying where they live (by dumping junk and other undesireable things) and then gentrifying afterwards.
so art/games does imitate life. and, you culled the peach trees?! so sad, even in a virtual animal-run world.
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