NINTENDO 3DS GAME RECOMMENDATIONS |

[#] Animal Crossing: New Leaf (Nintendo, Nintendo 3DS, 2013)

An adorable fixation up until you find the other end of it.

At 460 hours, Animal Crossing: New Leaf is by far my most-played 3DS game. The whole of the series is the epitome of "you either get it or you don't"--it's a game of collecting furniture, decorating, running errands, and making small talk as you upgrade your house and local shops and make friends with the animal people around you. I get where people would find it supremely dull--and I do think it's a missed opportunity in the life sim department--but New Leaf has this special place in my heart that no Animal Crossing game before or after has occupied, all the island visits with friends and kangaroos doted on.

It's best to think of any Animal Crossing game as a digital pet that slots nicely into your daily routine. You're mayor of a randomly generated town filled with a mix of villagers of various species, and it's up to you to keep things tidy, chat people up, and buy things with the money you make from fishing, bug catching, selling unwanted clothes and furniture, and hunting for gems and treasure. With the real-time clock, it changes seasons (and fish and bugs) with the real world. It's gardening, in spirit and literally--you plant the fruit trees, you decorate your house exactly as you like, and you dress your mayor avatar however you want.

New Leaf takes this all to a new level compared to previous games, for the first time letting you wear the other gender's clothes and hairstyles, don headwear, change your shoes or go shoeless outright, refinish furniture items at the charity shop, and giving you mayoral powers through ordinances and the erecting of public works projects. For about a year, New Leaf will inspire you to come back often and find the Modern end table you've been hunting months for. After you've filled your museum and seen all the NPC dialogue, it starts feeling like a much more hollow experience. Everything has a shelf life, though, I suppose, and 460 hours is a pretty long one.

Recommended for... people who love doing the same thing over and over again (me).