Finally, after a wait of over a year the game rumoured to be more addictive than nicotene and alcohol has been released in the UK. For those not familiar with the title, it has been at the top of the list of Gamecube fan‘s ‘must-haves‘ for quite some time, to such an extent that many even imported the game from Australia and America. Anyway, we’ve finally got our hands on a copy and I can tell you that already my partner (who rarely plays games) and I have regular squabbles about playing it next. Why? Well, read on...

To begin with, you play the part of a mysterious stranger on a train. You're accosted by a strange talking cat called Rover, who finds out you're moving to a new town for reasons not discussed, but have nowhere to stay. Rover quickly gets on his mobile to a friend and wannabe estate agent Tom Nook. It just so happens he has four properties to sell, so when the train pulls in you're taken under the wing of this guy, given work and a place to call your own, although it's little more than a shed to start with. At the same time he encourages you to get out and about, meet the townsfolk and get the lie of the land. Up to four players can occupy one of these wannabe houses each, although none can play at the same time.

Now, the great thing about this town is you get to name it and when you step off the train a completely new and unique town is created. Each town has a post office, shop, museum, tailors, police station, lighthouse, wishing well, beach and river, but if a friend owns a copy of this game he'll have a completely different layout from you. The river will wind differently, the hills will be in different places and he'll have a different stretch of beach. Also each town comes with very different characters and different things within the landscape. For example, my town grows only cherry trees but another town I created has peach trees.

You discover all this as you wander around the landscape but you also realise something else - the game plays completely in real time. By that I don't just mean that the hours and seconds last as long in the game as they do in real life but the game also reads the time and date from your Gamecube and matches not just the amount of daylight available but also the season! This means if you're playing in April there will be fresh blooms on the trees and a lovely green to the grass but if you're playing in November the whole town has a very autumnal feel. Play between December and March and you could be snowed in. There are also loads of special events sprinkled liberally throughout the calendar year including fireworks on New Years Eve, special festive visits from wannabe Santas, spooky goings on at Halloween, and so on.

However, besides all these interesting things to look at, there still has to be a hook to keep you coming back for more, and that is paying off the money you owe Tom Nook for setting you up in a house. That, and decorating your new property. First of all you have to earn Animal Crossing money, Bells. These can be obtained via a number of means, such as collecting fruit, fishing, selling unwanted items you come across, and a whole manner of other ways. The stuff you gather can be sold at Tom’s shop, which also has a variety of useful tools you can collect. In fact, if you don’t buy a spade, net, fishing rod and axe you’re probably going to find the game rather tricky! Tom is always there to greet you as you walk in the door, offering to show you around or take items from you. He can also do a couple of other things, not least of which is give you a secret code for when you want to pass an item you have found to a friend in another town. Once you hand over the item, it’s gone for good - you’re then prompted for the name and town of the person you’d like to send it to. Once you have the password you can email it to whoever requested it. A great place to start trading in this way is on www.animalcrossingcommunity.com, where you’ll fins loads of eager beavers waiting to trade unwanted items.

In fact, there is such an incredible variety of items that you can customise your house to look exactly how you like! You'll soon find the house filling up though, so getting it expanded via Tom Nook's building prowess is essential but also costly. I'm almost at the height of modifications, starting from little more than a shed and now I have a two-storey luxury pad complete with basement to store furniture I want to trade or use at a later date. To give you an idea of what you can do with the furniture, I've decked out the room downstairs to look like a schoolroom. This is complete with blackboard, book-filled shelves and even the obligatory classroom hamster running around in his wheel at the back. Upstairs I'm going for a playroom look, with brightly coloured, plastic furniture, with a jigsaw effect wallpaper and a cool choo-choo train carpet. My partner has the best looking room though - it's a lovely oriental style with paper walls, a cracking embossed dragon carpet, completed with a Chinese wooden tiger toy and bonsai tree that would be the envy of the biggest B&Q in the UK. This is half the fun of the game - finding items you want for your rooms, trading the ones you don't and trying to come up with a pad that is the envy of all your loved ones. The residents association score your house regularly and Feng Shui even comes into it; get certain objects in the right place and you'll become luckier with cash and the things you find scattered around your town.

Besides Tom Nook's store, there are a whole bunch of other animal folk willing to help you in your quest. You start with about five animals in town but the more you beautify the place by planting trees and flowers and pulling weeds the more other animals will come to stay. We've got about 14 in our town right now so we must be keeping it pretty spick and span. These animals come in a variety of shapes and forms -eagles, donkeys, anteaters, gorillas, pigs and a whole host of other fauna. Each has a particular character and uses certain words unique to them. Buzz is a bad tempered old eagle but get on him on a good day and he'll be your best pal. Cupcake is a flirty bear who thinks she is the bees knees and is constantly banging on about how wonderful she is. We've also got a sporty pig, a young mother kangaroo and a sly old wolf called Fang. However, there are over 200 different characters that could come and stay and you will find some of your best chums moving on in a while to be replaced by newcomers who are always keen on a meet and greet. When talking to them you can have a friendly chat, where they may give you hints and tips about finding stuff, give you a heads up on upcoming events, want to play a game or even give you bits of furniture out of the goodness of their hearts. Also, they'll ask you to do tasks for them, which is usually running over to another animal and collecting an item or fetching them something nice to eat. Usually they'll give you something nice but quite often they just give you stationery, particularly if you haven't written them a letter in a while.

Talking to animals isn't all you can do though. As you run around town you will notice odd patches of ground. Dig about with a shovel and you could find a fossil. You've got to post this to the Faraway Museum for them to identify but when it comes back you can run it down to Blathers, the owl curator of your local museum and if it isn't in the museum already Blathers will thank you for it, discuss it in a scholarly fashion and then display it for you. Between my partner and I we've got complete skeletons of three different dinosaurs, a woolly mammoth and some dinosaur tracks. Any items the museum has already can be sold to Tom Nook for large sums of money. The T Rex skull had us laughing all the way to the bank, shortly before we came back to Tom's to spend it on a must have item of furniture. Anyway, besides fossils, there is also an art gallery, a room especially for insects you catch and even a huge aquarium, all of which demand donations.

Another establishment worth visiting is the local tailor. Here, for a small fee, you can design your own clothes or take home a design you've made already. You're given a grid, palette and some basic painting tools but you can make some really stylish numbers quite quickly. These can also be turned into an umbrella for when it rains or even a decal to go on the front door of your house. Once you're happy with your design the Able Sisters, a pair of animals who run the shop, will let you display it on their clothes rack and umbrella stands. If any of the animals that swing by like your design they'll end up wearing it. So far I've had a bear dressed up in a Batman outfit, a duck dressed up as Spiderman and even a pig running around in a caricature of my partner, which I had originally intended as a design for her front door!

To be quite honest, I could harp on and on about the gameplay, as there is so much to do and see in this game. You can catch a variety of fish in the river, you can ask the wishing well how to improve the town and you can even make your own fruit orchard. There are also special visitors every now and again, such as a crazy fox selling black market furniture, a starving walrus who gives you wallpaper for fish and a spooky cat fortune teller, whose fortunes actually come true! At the end of the day, such a seemingly simple concept has had loads of thought and planning ploughed into it, which is reflected in the astonishing addiction. We've played it every single day since we've got it without exception, something none of my other games can boast.

The thought and seeming simplicity applies equally well to the graphics. First impressions of the visuals are that the designers could have spent a bit more time making them less crude looking. Your character is fairly basic, being a big round head with a little hat on a triangular body running around with weeny legs wobbling along underneath, on ground which is depicted by simple shapes, colours and textures. The trees have a little variety but all look roughly hewn in a cutesy manner, and the colours and cuts of the buildings are dramatic and eye catching, but a little blocky for what you would expect from a next-generation console. However, as you get more involved in the gameplay you suddenly realise that if the graphics had been more polished there would be much, much less variety. This is demonstrated by the number of fish and insects you can catch, and the scope of the animal characters and movements, to the fabulous works of art you can create with the thousand-fold furniture and decorative items you can purchase. It’s also a game of absolutely beautiful animations and surprises. The fish you catch flip in your hand and try to wriggle free, the furniture you use surprise you by being manipulated in a variety of ways, and regardless of the layout and look of your room you just must get the cute little hamster in his cage, running madly on his wheel.

Similar thought has gone into the sound, which at first seems very repetitive. It isn’t - far from it! Again, as you are drawn in and mesmerised by the game you notice each animal has a distinctive sound, the background tunes change depending on the time of day and the town hall clock strikes the hour on the hour. You can even change the chimes by posting your own musical notes on a board by the Post Office. So far I’ve had the intro to Johnny B Goode, Beethoven’s 5th, and Darth Vader’s Imperial March marking the hour in deep tolling chimes. Again, it’s a game of all the little things, from the squeaking of a wheel turned by a mad hamster, the flipping of fish in your ands to the thunk of fruit falling on the floor and the sleepy awakenings of an owl curator who’d rather you visited in the night. If you do play by night the music gets quite eerie, which really sets the scene for your first encounter with the town ghost a few weeks into the game.

Overall the game has been designed with a sense of childlike wonder. As you move from animal to animal, trade items online, or just explore your town and it’s boundaries you’ll be amazed by the sheer scope and versatility of this title. The best thing is, while kids will love the bright and colourful characters and graphics, adults will love the subtle nuances of collecting, decorating, Feng Shui, natural history lessons and sheer delight of pleasures as simple as catching a huge bass in the nearby river. The game revives a sense of child-like wonder and has you coming back begging for more. Goodness knows why this hasn’t been released in Europe until now, but finally us lucky UK gamers have a chance to get our hands on this title. Now the whole world can experience the joys of talking to crazy animals and getting just the right kind of wallpaper to set off your collection of carp and bonsai trees.

Reviewed by Dave Wynn for AceGamez (All Rights Reserved).