I'm sad to report that my Wii has been sitting and gathering dust for the last couple months, especially with the arrival of the Ps3, and some review titles for the 360. Recently I decided to pull out Animal Crossing again to give it another whirl, put some cash into a new house, that sort of thing.

Upon entering the town, I found it overrun with weeds. Garbage and dropped objects littered the landscape, and people's homes. Everyone I talked to was incredibly upset, reminding me that I hadn't visited/played in over two months. Tom Nook was upset that I wasn't repaying him for his recent renovation work he'd done.

I realized with this that I hate a game that penalizes the player for not playing the game often enough. I know it may work on some people, but on me it doesn't encourage me to play more, it encourages me to play less. I don't want to have to run around town cleaning up shop and blow off 1.5-2 hours just to restore the status quo before I start playing again. It hardly makes sense that everything goes to hell when I leave anyway... plenty of creatures live in that town besides me, and I'm the only one responsible for its well being?

It's disappointing that a decently-made game like this one pulls a tactic like this. The only time it doesn't matter is when it's played consistantly, and I guess for real fans of the game that isn't really a problem. But for someone like me that may have to put the game down for a couple months at a time for school, work, or other games in between, it's too much of a penalty to punish me for every single hour of gametime I didn't spend playing this.