We City Folk: Boy 7 Inking - WIP 1
- GenreChowderStudios
- Aug 1, 2017
- 3 min read
Fun fact: this face was the first face I ever picked in an Animal Crossing game. Despite my history with this face, however, it's always struck (stricken?) me as weird that while the heavy-lidded girl just looks like she has her eyes half shut, the boy looks like he has eye shadow. It's not uncommon for sleepy or lazy characters to have wildly differently colored eyelids. At least I don't think it is; I'm thinking of Patrick Star... I've always sort of figured that was the reason, but still, it looks a bit odd.
He (not Boy 7, my first Animal Crossing character) was in Animal Crossing: Population Growing!, and his name was "fonho" (yes, written like a common noun). His town was called Mt. Snowy. For whatever reason, I was unfamiliar with military time, which is how the GameCube Animal Crossing tracked its time. So when I first set the time (I wouldn't figure out how to shift the time until many months later), I made it nighttime in-game during the real-life daytime, I would have to play in the middle of the night to be able to see the town at day.
Even though it was so long ago, I still have so many memories of this strange but lovable game. The first villagers to call Mt. Snowy home were Buck, Static, Cheri, T-Bone, and Ellie. Of course, other villagers would come and go, but Huggy, Wolfgang, Pierce, and Friga would move in and become staples of the town. Our starting fruit was apples, but coconuts would wash up from the island, which I would eventually be able to visit. In the GameCube version, flowers never died, so I planted a legion of them on the cliff by the waterfall. It was a pleasant little garden until someone would inevitably put their homestead right bloody on top of it, MITZI.
I remember the first time I saw it rain in the game. I'd just left the museum, and then suddenly, there was rain. As someone who has always loved simulation games, I felt amazed, at peace, somehow. Speaking of the museum, I still remember what the loudspeaker says when you step on the cockroach: "Your attention please, museum patron. That cockroach was donated by fonho and is a valuable specimen. Please take care not to step on it." I may be off a word here or a punctuation mark there, but it's almost word-for-word what I've written above.
A year or so after I created the town, that big power outage in the early-ish 2000s happened. Mt. Snowy's save file was on a small grey memory, so when I put a grey memory card into the GameCube and found absolutely no save file, my heart sunk a thousand leagues at the prospect of losing all that progress. But then I soon realized that the memory card was a BIG grey memory card. Mt. Snowy was safe and sound. After wiping the slapdash remake of Mt. Snowy, I made a new town that was the "sister town" of Mt. Snowy: Mt. Sunny. Its native fruit was the orange, and, in the head-canon of my brother and me, the town was in the future.
I've gone on to play Animal Crossing: Wild World, City Folk, and even New Leaf as of now, but I think the original is my favorite. The soundtrack was more lively and varied, the acre system made it easier to care for the town, and there was a calmness and a simplicity to it. Plus, you could ask villagers for favors directly. Still no clue as to why that was phased out later on...
It's strange to think that Mt. Snowy, Mt. Sunny, and Anytown, a town made later on, still exist. I never deleted them. They're still on the memory cards. I don't have a TV or GameCube/Wii hooked up as of now, so I can't check on them. I wonder how they're doing.
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