Saturday, March 13, 2021: Update Blog

Hey! I'm just checking in for an update. It's a week before the game's 1-year anniversary (reading about JVGS Jeff's plans to celebrate the game as well, reminiscing about what he did in 2009 for City Folk's 1-year anniversary and what I did in 2011 for the 3-year anniversary!). Progress on the obstacle course has been going great, and I'm not going to share anything! However, life has been continuing, and I've snapped a few screenshots and recorded some video clips for my Moments series. I'll share a bit of the former with you here.

Avery asked me for a new catchphrase last Friday night, when I was terraforming the island while watching a 2004 Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban PC game. I think the phrase I chose speaks for itself.

Diana taught me a new Reaction! With the various Reaction set updates, I have absolutely no idea how many there were in the base game/are now - well, I suppose I'll get a Nook Miles achievement at some point. I liked how Sydney was clapping on my ability to love (like Voldemort! Did I make this joke in 2011 with my City Folk blog, since I was all obsessed with the film Deathly Hallows Part 2?).

Here's my buddy Cesar and me (now as Mario - I realize now I should've gotten a Builder Mario outfit for when I was working on the course!) watching a K.K. performance on Saturday night. It's been so great to see some familiar faces in HD!

I was also looking up some new designs (there's a "new" search function like with the Dream Suite that was so helpful!!) to add fun references to Zelda (celebrating its 35th anniversary), Pokémon (celebrating its 25th - loved the evolution of that series Direct and the new games coming!), and Final Fantasy. With Animal Crossing's 20th anniversary fast approaching, I've started work on my video celebrating it! I might actually finish it this weekend, and just set it to premiere on April 14th - mark your calendars, or go check it out right now if it's after the date!

Anyways - I just thought I'd share the Final Fantasy ones (celebrating VII and X, as well as the Black Mage NES sprite!) and some violin ones - I got a violin T-shirt I can wear! In real-life, I have a violin T-shirt from Vienna, so I suppose this works, too! I wonder if I could get some Ray Chen designs, since he live-streamed this game at some point last year I remember! But yeah, I can start messing around with custom designs since I can overwrite the slots that were used for our market and things.

Little sneak preview of my "sponsors" on the siding of my course (like in Mario Kart 64, the billboards you'd see) - but I thought it was funny you couldn't see the bug Diana was going after. I thought she was going crazy, until the bug revealed itself.

Finally, to today! The reason I decided to write this. In New Leaf, I remember noticing a possible glitch where the game would think it's raining, but it looked sunny. At first (and maybe it still is the case) I thought it returned in New Horizons and I just never encountered it until this point. But Bam and Sherb both mentioned a rainbow to me, and after a minute I found it in the sky. Whew, thinking everyone's going crazy! Hopefully it's not something wrong with the Game Cards or something! Well, it's a minor thing anyway. Maybe I've just been playing too much - the Switch's fan has been hot while I've been building the course (in Handheld Mode exclusively for now, like with my Mario Maker 2 Super World).

Anyways, you can see a sneak peek of the map too in the corner. It's not a maze, so having that there is fine. Maybe for the video I'll set the UI so the map is always on... I'm putting a timer as well - really "game"-ifying Animal Crossing! Like a big open-world game or something big in gaming. :)

Anywho, I will retreat back into work on finishing things up! Getting some ideas from online, like the brick block tunnels... Lots of coins everywhere as well! The plan is to have my big livestream party on the 20th, and after release a 1-player video of me going through the course, potentially with annotations - similarly to my Super Mario Advance: Factory Subspace gameplay video I did alongside my livestream of it last summer. The livestream of the race in multiplayer will of course be akin to my short City Folk obstacle course gameplay video. Hope you're looking forward to it, as well as my Animal Crossing 20th Anniversary celebration a couple weeks after! It's a wonderful time to be an Animal Crossing fan - and Mario, with the Mario items! Game on - and never stop Crossing! :)

March 16, 2021 quick update: I read an article on fairly sizable update to the game Nintendo's doing for its 1-year anniversary (just like Pocket Camp when I started playing that in 2018 for a brief time) - it's coming JUST as I finished my obstacle course! Oh well - what's coming is good stuff anyway, that I'll be excited to play around with amidst tearing down the course after this Saturday. Hope you're looking forward to the event!