Animal Feng Shui, Cooking Mama, and Zelda .S

A few interesting items from around the web.

If you remember back when the .S were news (so to speak), you might be interested in the new 20th anniversary edition Legend of Zelda .S. This special edition has cool blue and silver instead of the warm green and red of the first Zelda edition. Should be good for showing off your favorite dungeon sprites, as soon as it's being sold somewhere (if it's being sold somewhere).

Next in the long line of Japanese DS titles that are unconventional (by US standards) is a game called Cooking Mama. Somewhere between the virtual dog, law, and surgery games, Taito found the virtual home kitchen game. It's out 23 March and is available for preorder from Lik-sang.

(Looking on Lik-sang, I saw an ad for Biohazard: Deadly Silence, a pumped-up DS remake of what's known in the US as Resident Evil. I don't think I'd heard about it; wonder if it's any good.)

Lastly, if you play Animal Crossing and, like me, find yourself getting bored after a few months (I'm just grinding fruit to pay off the 600,000 bell loan), it may be you're missing out on the subtle Feng Shui metagame. I'd read that the placement of furniture in your house could affect your luck, but I still placed things to make them look "nice" in my completely subjective opinion. I didn't realize how involving and rewarding it could be until reading Matt Webb's blog post about the Feng Shui metagame.

If you aren't familiar with Feng Shui, Wikipedia defines it:

Feng Shui or fengshui (Simplified Chinese: 风水...) is the ancient Chinese practice of placement and arrangement of space to achieve harmony with the environment that has its origins from Taoism. The practice is estimated to be more than three thousand years old."Feng Shui" literally means "wind and water" in Chinese.

While empirically it doesn't work as some hucksters claim (season one of Penn & Teller: Bullsh*t! has a good half episode about it), apparently it vastly impacts your Animal Crossing life.

Matt makes it sound like Animal Crossing is actually the game of arranging your house to best achieve your goals, selected from the entire rest of the game. That the metagame is only rudimentarily mentioned if you don't pursue it ("Did you know your decor can improve your blah blah blah? Try putting something green against your east wall!") is curious if it's really that important to your town life. Is it an important activity intentionally hidden, or did the designers not consider it vital to playing the game?

Personally, the article presents a dilemma. It seems I might have a much more engaging Animal Crossing experience by playing the Feng Shui game, but the game sounds complex enough that trying to figure it out from scratch might not be rewarding for quite a while. You can easily find AC Feng Shui guides on the web, and therein is my dilemma: I try not to use guides (or time travel) because if the game is too easy, it's less fun. Is the Feng Shui game actually hard enough that I would have more fun consulting a complete guide from the internet? (Could they have designed the Feng Shui system faithfully enough that reading about "real" Feng Shui could help?) Find out in next month's exciting episode.

Comments

[CPFace]

Well, I went to a (game-specific) Feng Shui guide for Animal Crossing on Gamecube, and not only did my house end up looking like crap after my attempts to "game the system", but I can't say I consciously noticed any particular benefit from it.

Maybe they've changed it for the DS version, but my suspicion is that it'll take a lot of experimentation with results that are difficult to measure in order to figure out what should go where in your Animal Crossing home to make more fish show up. And if you go to a guide, it gets dull mighty quick. And either way, I'm not sure how much the experience improves when you're luckier.

[Alex]

Hmm, I just tried rearranging the few items that I have and it seems to work. Before rearrangement I tried three trees and nothing dropped ... rearranged and 800 Bells + 2 items dropped from 15 trees in a row with 1 tree in between drops. I went a tried a few more trees ... frequency of dropped decreased, but I still managed to get another 500 bell and two bee stings. Not bad, for a non-scientific test.