—WARNING!—

The following post contains gratuitous smart phone game stories and images.

You have been warned.

So, for reasons that may baffle other minds as much as my own, I have become addicted to Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp. (Thankfully not to the point of actually giving in to their constant pestering to spend real money to buy in-game currency. I am not about to fall for that.)

For those who don’t know, it’s this cute little game from Nintendo (the smart phone dumb-down of a much more in-depth game from various of Nintendo’s consoles (the first one to come to the US was on the Gamecube (which I loved to pieces) but it actually started on the N64 in Japan) in which you’re this lone human living in a town/campground/whatever filled with talking, anthropomorphic animals who expect you to run a lot of fetch quests for them. (Well, it’s more complicated than that, esp. in the console versions, but that covers the basics. Sort of.) In the Pocket Camp version, you have a “friendship level” with each animal, and when that hits certain levels, different things open up, like what requests they can make when they’re staying at your personal campground, etc. At one particular level (15 with most animals, but 10 with some of the early ones), they’ll ask you to make a certain item and add it to your campground. (It doesn’t have to stay there, of course; you just have to talk to them while it’s there, and then you’re free to remove it again.) This particular item cannot be crafted until the animal has asked you for it, so it’s a necessity to get all the animals to that point if you want to complete your catalog. (Of course, without spending copious amounts of real money, you can’t actually complete the whole catalog, because too many items can only be obtained with “Leaf Tickets” which are slowly earned normally, and can be more quickly obtained with an in-app purchase. So, total catalog completion is impossible, but I want to get everything that doesn’t require Leaf Tickets. At least they have the decency to split the catalog into normal and “special” categories, and you can complete the normal one without spending money. Of course, I wouldn’t begrudge spending money once, like to unlock a new character who would sell me Leaf Tickets for the other in-game currency, Bells, which are super-easy to obtain. (I have, in point of fact, told Nintendo this through the game’s suggestions/complaints menu, but of course they haven’t acted on it. Maybe after playership drops through the floor following the release of the new Switch game, then they’ll do it. Or maybe they’ll just shut the game down. Who knows.))

Aaaaaaanyway, you get a tiny thumbnail of each item to unlock before you actually unlock it, so I knew the well-dressed hippo was going to ask me to have a replica of Michelangelo’s David crafted for him. And I was expecting, you know, a cheesily polygoned fig leaf at a certain spot on the cheesily polygoned statue….

I was wrong! Not a fig leaf in sight!

Needless to say, my childish mind was very excited by that.

(I love that second one. My character looks like she’s looking right at it!) The game, y’see, has an in-game “photo” ability, and while you’re in photo mode, if you tap on your character, s/he will pose for the photo in some weird way or other. Which is very annoying if you’re just in the process of trying to turn the camera and your finger happens to graze her enough to trigger it. Or if she starts doing this freaky thing where she’s bending forward with her mouth hanging open and swinging her fists down near her knees that I think is supposed to be dancing but really doesn’t look like it. I don’t know what it looks like, but I hate it, and she does it way too often. (And I don’t even like to take pictures of her, usually, keep in mind. She just likes to do that thing whenever my finger goes anywhere near her as I’m trying to manipulate the camera.)

Of course, I wasn’t going to leave him just sitting outside in the weather (not that there is any) where all the animals could ignore him all day long.

So I kicked all the animals out of my cabin and made a widdle shrine to the lack of fig leaf. 😛

It looks cool at night with the lights off, too.

There’s not currently a female equivalent, but I did what I could with the upper story of my camper.

Yeah, I know how to take screenshot photos on the phone, but not screenshot videos. So…a bit of a choppy animation, but at least you get the gist of it. (That pool “rug” actually makes splashing noises when you walk on it, btw. Very fun.)

In closing, please enjoy(?) an image of my character wearing all pastel rainbow gear and standing in her pastel Pride garden. (Which is for whatever reason upside down. Um…I should replant that…*cough*)

Because I apparently have nothing better to do with my life.

(OMG, what is wrong with me?)

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On the other hand, at least this gave me a good idea for the fanfic I’m writing right now; the characters needed to go to a gay bar, and I wasn’t sure what to call it or what it should look like, but then this happened and I was like “yes, I will make the name involve fig leaves and have the decor be all classical male nude statues.” Which is probably stupid and possibly offensive, but at least it’s distinctive. Or at least it lets me keep on going past that scene.