ShadJV

@fatleon5 Pikmin is a real time strategy game that... well, it’s fairly unique even within its genre - there’s not much to compare it with. Most RTS games are war games and the mechanics of Pikmin are fairly innovative.

Like most RTS games, you lead essentially an army (in this case, Pikmin) and fight enemies in real time, using strategy to defeat them rather than any sort of level up or upgrade system. Your abilities are mostly defined from the start, and you do not get stronger. You Hopefully learn to work more strategic as the game goes on. That’s where the similarities end. In Pikmin, you play as a little alien who is completely helpless and you command your Pikmin army with your whistle. You can have them split into groups, flank enemies, or even throw them onto enemies. They can build bridges and complete various tasks. They are individually VERY weak, and pretty much every other living thing is above them on the food chain. Everything is determined to eat, crush, burn, drown, electrocute, or poison your Pikmin, and they will do so with ease. With proper positioning and well aimed throws, you can overcome the predators, and your Pikmin will happily carry the corpse to their nest to make more seeds. Each game has things you need to collect (such as ship parts or treasures), usually with an end goal. Time is often an issue - by the end of each in game day, you must return all your Pikmin to their ship or they will be left behind and die. In the first game, you even had a limit of 30 days to beat the game, or else you get a game over. They’re not the easiest games but they’re very fun. Simple yet deep.

One last note: Pikmin come in multiple colors that define their abilities. Red are fireproof and slightly stronger than average. Blue can breathe in water. Yellow can be thrown higher, carry explosives (in the first game), and are electric proof (in later games). Purple are heavier but stronger. White are poisonous when consumed. And so on. You have to continually collect enemy corpses to replenish your troops.

I’ve been tempted to go back and replay Pikmin 3 and actually finish it this time while I have extra time. If it’s getting a rerelease, could they please announce so soon before I dig out my Wii U?

Heck, just release the whole trilogy in one big HD package.

At this point I’m baffled why DKC isn’t on there, let alone the trilogy. I just want to play DKC on the go. Never thought I’d have to beg for that game on an official SNES service...

@Heavyarms55 honestly I’d just need some quality weeping angel horror sections and I’d be ecstatic. If they could work in the vashta nerada, all the better.

I’ve thought about it and I actually don’t want remakes of the first two Sonic Adventures. I’d love ports for the Switch, but the bad graphics and audio are such memes at this point that I’d rather have them with all the warts. If they’re investing in more than straight ports, I’d rather they do Sonic Adventure 2... then port the first two to Switch anyways.

After all, at the end of the day I like like hearing “Ha, you’re not even good enough to b-“ “I’ll make you eat those words!”

Ubisoft, you doing okay???

Eh. Not gonna double dip, not even glad I single dipped. It wasn’t horrible but it was so bland that it wasn’t worth the money. The game quickly goes from fun and novel to tedious, and then from tedious to frustratingly hard (but still tedious, not even challenging in a good way). I would not recommend this but I mean, if others like it then to each their own. Just... think twice before purchasing this, especially on a limited gaming budget.

@Wazeddie22 @muscpt yeah it’d be great if it was set days, but I’ve seen no pattern. He just comes whenever. I do have three arts now though. Art collecting is gonna be slow!

@rjejr yeah, my undergrad was ridiculously expensive too, so much so that I’d rather not get into numbers. Grad school was comparatively cheap. Wish the state schools were free to me when I was a student, though I was still set on the private college at the time. Good luck to him though!

And yeah, it’s a great escapism, this game hit at such an opportune time. No wonder Nintendo is raking it in.

@muscpt @Wazeddie22 I think it’s purely random. He visited me three times so far and it’s been... 8 days since the update?

I had a similar guide for New Leaf. It was useful simply because it essentially had a giant checklist for all the items which really helped with filling the catalog. I never worried about buying duplicate items.

@rjejr also congrats to your son, it’s hard picking a college, it’s a huge decision! But that’s a big milestone!

@rjejr oh congrats, that’s a good haul of bells! You’ll have that basement in no time!

And I agree fully on it being silly the basement is last, but perhaps that’s why it’s so expensive. It used to be a pretty early upgrade and much cheaper. Guess it costs a lot to install a basement into a fully built two story house!

@rjejr I think Octane meant you upgrade the main room before you can get the basement (as in it’s one one the first upgrades) and they wanted the basement and nothing else. Gaining the basement does not make the main room bigger, that one is done expanding before you get a second room.

Was gonna make fun of this, but that orientation was adorable and creative. As long as people are having fun with this game, who cares how they play it?

This change confused the HECK out of me. How? Because I keep a spreadsheet of my catalog. Ridiculous, I know, but it keeps me from buying duplicate items just to catalog them and my memory sucks. I often update it in batches though (when I have my laptop near me), making a note of the items when I get them so I can just update it later - I like to, for ease, add what colors I have access to as well as whether they can be ordered from the catalog (so I don’t give away something I can’t replace).

So the day before the update, a villager gave me a “switch”. I chuckled, fairly certain it wasn’t a Nintendo Switch but not entirely sure if it was a light switch or some other sort of switch. Either way, I didn’t even look at it, just jotted down the name and threw it into storage. The night after the update, I was updating the list and had my catalog open. I scrolled to S and didn’t see Switch. Proceed to me going back and forth between my spreadsheet, the game catalog, and my house storage, trying to figure out what was going on. I was sure I remembered getting the item (after all, I chuckled at the name), but it was like it didn’t exist. Finally, after going at this for awhile and trying to piece together my sanity, I found I had a Light Switch in my storage and catalog that wasn’t in my spreadsheet. Proceed to me thinking I REALLY went crazy because surely I hadn’t associated “light switch” with “Nintendo Switch”. That would’ve been a bigger stretch. But sure enough, the game said “light switch” and my memory just said “switch” and was I just losing it over a game? Was it some sort of bug?

And honestly this article is a relief to my sanity. I now realize it changed on my in that time I went to catalog it. I wasn’t insane. The game didn’t bug. This quarantine is making my mind a puddle of mush but at least I can rest knowing it isn’t THAT far gone yet.

@Branovices you might have too many flowers and trees. Tarantula spawns are mostly based inversely off other big spawns. If there’s lots of things that spawn bugs in an area (trees, flowers, rocks, heck even water), tarantulas were very rarely spawn. Try reducing the amount of flora in a concentrated area. You’ll likely see more tarantulas around there.

That being said, I welcome the nerf. Some parts of my town were getting way too many tarantulas for awhile (though it was worse in March). I was getting annoyed when they’d interrupt my tasks and attack me...

@USWITCH64 heads up, the Nooks Mile islands can only have one type of fruit other than coconuts and your native fruit. This is to encourage online play, I imagine. So that’s why you haven’t found any of the other 3 fruit.

@FlameRunnerFast plus at that point you may as well just time travel, takes less time. I find the amount you can make with a few friends is more than adequate though. No point in trying to game the system.

@FlameRunnerFast why bother? It’s easy enough to get more bells than you need with a few friends.

@Ooccoo_Jr 100,001 bells

@arpaktiko last week ruined me. I turned 1 million bells into 4.5 million bells with turnips. I forgot this stuff can backfire hard. At this rate I should consider eating them instead of coconuts or my native fruit, as they’re worth much less...

And yet turnips are at an all time low on Eventide. Seriously, I have three thousand turnips I need to unload and they haven’t even been above the price I payed this week.

@duffmmann close but you got it backwards. It indeed is going off Final Fantasy numbering. Bravely Second, however, was the direct sequel. Bravely Default 2 is unrelated. Think of Bravely Default as FFX, Bravely Second as FFX-2, and Bravely Default 2 as FFXII. Entirely different game worlds, as far as we know, and no returning characters.

@Dezzy I praise BD a lot, but people who haven’t played it are rather baffled when I say the first 20% was amazing, and the last 5% was amazing, and the rest of it was tedious. I think it had some mind blowing plot twists... but it was at the expensive of a lot of tedium, and I have friends that never beat it because they got so bored.

And the worst part is somewhere around the third or fourth cycle, the characters even all start being like, “Why are we still doing this?” And you still have to keep going a couple times to get the best ending. And that’s just frustrating because it starts to not even make sense anymore, the characters themselves question why they’re doing things exactly the same, and you’re just expected to keep going. Three cycles would’ve been plenty for the sake of the story (and still would’ve been tedious). Maybe even two. It was something like five cycles, and that was just unnecessary and got in the way of the storytelling.

I’ll still praise it. The story was overall excellent and the mechanics were solid. But no one wants to play the same events several times just to see the ending. Please don’t do that for this sequel.

@Lalivero yeah, stacking multiple events at the same time was poor planning.

@Lalivero yeah, I don’t know what the spawn rate of the bunny day balloons was before the update, but I do know the regular balloons still had the same chance of spawning every five minutes, could be manipulated the same ways as after the update, and their spawns weren’t replaced with bunny day spawns. With the amount of balloons I was seeing before the update, I wouldn’t be surprised if they spawned every 2 minutes, which would be nearly three quarters of the balloons, so it was indeed overwhelming and hard to spot the regular balloons unless you waited on the island edge to watch them spawn in. After the update, they had the same odds as regular balloons: they could spawn every 5 minutes, independent of regular balloons, meaning every 5 minutes either one bunny day balloon, one regular balloon, one of each, or neither would spawn. The bunny day balloons also moved faster which made them not appear to spawn at the same time unless you, once again, were watching the spawn point. For the record, the balloon spawn time is when the clock’s minute ends in a 4 or a 9 (but they spawn off screen so you often don’t see them until it’s a 5 or a 0). Trust me, I had this down to a science, which is the only way I got nearly all the recipes... and honestly, it SHOULDN’T be that way. Casual players should be able to get all the recipes, this series is built for casual players. The bunny day event got annoying but the cherry blossom event independently had issues. Players who time traveled before the bunny day update had the same spawn rates. I was hoping they were going to have some sort of way to make it up to players because the event was poorly planned, but it looks like they won’t. A shame, because the blossom set looks way nicer than the bunny day set.

@Lalivero the bunny day balloons didn’t lower the spawn rate of regularly balloons, though, which have a chance of spawning every 5 minutes (and there’s ways to guarantee the spawn). Those balloons were additionally. The only thing the bunny day balloons did there was add additional balloon spawns which might be overwhelming if you don’t just wait on the side of the island where balloons spawn and watch for them every 5 minutes.

I got all but one cherry blossom recipe (and had a friend craft that missing item for me), but it took a lot of farming. Dozens of hours... they really should’ve raised the spawn rate for cherry blossom recipes. Recipes mostly spawn in green balloons (so already that’s 25% of balloons on average, or roughly 3 an hour - a balloon is never guaranteed to spawn every 5 minutes but has probably about a 50/50 chance to spawn, which depends on what you are doing right before the spawn time, so make that 1-2 an hour) and not all recipes from regular balloons were cherry blossom either, so realistically you may get only one every two or three hours (assuming you’re doing nothing but focusing on every balloon spawning). Then add in the fact that you can get duplicates (which I got several of) and the result is, once you get around half the recipes, you can go a good 4-6 hours and not get a new cherry blossom recipe. Those rates are insane to begin with. I probably spent 20-30 hours farming balloons to get 13 out of 14 recipes, and I was popping a solid colored balloon almost every 5 minutes during that.

But I will say this event made the fishing tourney worse - even knowing only medium sized shadows could be eggs, avoiding those shadows just made it take longer.

@rjejr oh wow, I didn’t even know you could create the additional level, the help files in game imply the limit was two stories up. I wonder if that’s completely unintentional?

Yeah, the cherry blossom event is only a ten day thing, it’s always been that way. Bunny Day is new to the series and unfortunately they wanted it to end on Easter so it sorta screwed over the blossom event. They used to give you a calendar for this stuff so you knew when the events were but now it’s just all online.

Losing your interest in the game already?

@nessisonett best joke, you win!

@rjejr Also I noticed you talked about the flower petals for “spring”, that’s actually an event that’s only April 1st through April 10th, the flower petals and their recipes will be gone after today. The event was mostly overshadowed by Bunny Day.

@Kidfunkadelic83 you need 8 villagers to reach two stars. It doesn’t matter how much stuff you have, you can’t reach 8 stars until you have 8 villagers. Talk to Isabelle to see what else you might need, she always tells you.

@rjejr you can build two stories up but it can’t be one straight wall, you have to have a ledge between the stories. You can climb onto any layer you build, there’s no “top layer” that you can’t climb or put stuff on, you can go into any grassy surface you build. Anything can be as narrow as one “block. To turn a corner into a curve, “dig” at it once with the tool (do it again to remove the curve entirely). You can go as close to flowers as you want but need to leave one space around trees. There’s a pretty thorough guide in game so make sure to read all of that.

@Heavyarms55 also like... it’s baby Pokemon... and ditto for some reason? Don’t get me wrong, ditto raids are great (though I no longer need them thanks to Pokebank and being able to transfer my max IV Ditto I’ve had since gen 5), it just seems a bit of a strange raid...

@rjejr beautiful. Here’s where the game really begins, enjoy reshaping your island as you see fit!

@Mountain_Man yeah all the villagers say that and they’ve said it before the Bunny Day update. I think it’s just a general thing they say as there’s always upcoming events.

@rjejr it’s just be adding a wing upstairs. The museum in this game only has bugs, fish, and fossils. EVERY museum in the series before this has had bugs, fish, fossils, and art. The museum we currently have has less wings than the museums in all the previous games, including the first one.

@rjejr true. I miss my family (and my dog even more so), but my roommate and I actually somehow interact even less now that we’re both home constantly. I suppose it keeps either of us from irritating each other though. I thankfully still have work though, even if it’s working from home. 😅 hopefully things will be back to normal before we know it...

@rjejr oh enjoy that weather and stay safe!

@rjejr yeah, tarantula island is super rare but it spawns a lot of tarantulas (or scorpions depending on the time of year) and, if you’re lucky enough to find it, it’s very lucrative. There’s also exploits to make artificial tarantula islands due to how the code handles their spawning, but it’s time consuming.

Ohhh, Atlas moths, yeah I’ve caught plenty of those, they’re worth a few thousand bells so they’re a good catch, you gotta move slow at night.

No worries, there’s no wrong ways to play Animal Crossing as long as you’re enjoying it, but most players do want terraforming as soon as they can and it’s easier than paying off the house. Play how you enjoy!

People who never worked with code will think Nintendo is lazy or inept for failing to fix one line of code and leaving the “broken” smoke in the game. But yeah, when you have hundreds of millions of lines of code, even with a decent debugger sometimes finding the one broken line is like searching for a needle in a haystack. It may seem simple if you know what’s broken (the smoke), but that’s never necessarily true and I can see it being enough of a headache that after so many hours of the programmers trying to fix that bug, the guys in charge probably sighed in frustration and said, “whatever, at this point we could do a lot more with this wasted time and nobody will probably really notice right now anyways”.

Still, I’m sure some programmer somewhere is reading that Tweet and beating themselves up over how obvious the broken line was in retrospect. (Or maybe not, sometimes it takes mental gymnastics to figure out where the broken line is hiding.)

@rjejr I haven’t seen any orange things in trees, I wonder what you’re seeing. Is it something that comes out when you shake them or is it from a distance?

I have arachnophobia and went to tarantula island. It’s... not fun. Profitable (I made over 300k bells) but not fun.

My two cents on slopes and bridges is only build the one extra until you have KK over, since you might wanna heavily change your island’s landscape and they’re not cheap (and can’t be moved). Once you hit the KK milestone, the game really opens up and then you can decide your biggest priorities, whether it’s upgrading your house or reshaping the island. I’m spending some time farming bells from turnips and, if I’m lucky, will pay off the rest of my house loans this week so I can focus on the island (I invest 4 million in turnips so fingers crossed - I have a lot of friends with the game so I’m counting on someone to come through for me).

And as for villagers, you can’t really actively evict anyone but yeah, occasionally they’ll ask if they should move and you’ll get to decide if you want them around. It’s mostly a matter of taste - you’ll likely never get back anyone who leaves (there’s over 400 of the little buggers) so don’t cycle them for the sake of cycling them, do it based on who you want on your island. You’re essentially the king.

@Heavyarms55 that I do not know, I assumed it did but that’s a good point. I have no Amiibos to test it with, sorry.

@JayJ you’ve had better luck than I, then. If I planted 30k for all of those, I would’ve essentially lost 210k.

@Heavyarms55 if you talk to any time travelers and data miners, no, hitting them doesn’t do anything. I have a friend who have tried that over quite a few months of in game time with one of their starting townies. Bug net and reporting. They still won’t go. Reporting to Isabelle simply resets their clothes and/or catchphrase (it’s to get rid of something offensive another player may have done). Nets put them in a bad mood but that doesn’t affect whether they leave. There’s no actual way to boot them off or increase their odds of leaving, just a way to increase their odds of staying: interaction. Interaction of any kind makes them more likely to stay. By not interacting, you simply are not raising those odds. Time travelers have tried all kinds of tricks to get rid of townies, but ultimately there’s nothing surefire. Though you could get an Amiibo and force them out that way.

@Heavyarms55 hitting townies with nets doesn’t actually get them to leave. It’s more effective to refuse to interact entirely (though still doesn’t guarantee them leaving).

@rjejr maintaining a 5 star rating for a certain number of days gets you a DIY for a fairly useless tool. 😂 but for completion it is a goal.

Otherwise yeah. Better to prioritize town development over your house until you get KK. Then you get a lot of freedom.

@JayJ it’s ironically a bigger gamble. I tried planting 11k every day for 10 days to see if what my town’s pattern was... only one of those trees gave me 11k bags, the other 9 were 10k bags. A 10% chance of payoff isn’t worth it, I’ll stick to 10k every day now.

Hopefully I have good luck in my Discord group because this seems like a huge hassle. Have to wait your turn after hundred of other players and most players are charging hundreds of thousands of bells for each visitor. I get that they want compensation but honestly you make more money selling out your town than from turnips. 400 visitors at 200k each is 80 million. Heck, maybe it’s worth it to sell access though... 😂

@rjejr I just got the cheapest slope I could to hurry along the “plot”, as it’ll be irrelevant once I start terraforming (you can’t move bridges or slopes so you have to demolish them and pay for new ones if you wanna change their locations).

Gulliver shows up a lot, I think I’ve rescued him like 6 times now since launch? Maybe more.

And you don’t need to upgrade your house to get KK, all that matters is town progression. You should have enough villagers for that, so you just gotta get to a 3 star rating with Isabelle, which requires (as mentioned) another bridge or a slope, along with enough outdoor furniture, flowers, and trees (she’ll tell you what you need when you have the town rated). Personally stuff like your house is irrelevant. I haven’t even gotten my basement yet but I had his concert yesterday.

Edit: also no problem, I’m in a community of AC fans so we’ve traded a lot of info by now haha