Happy 1-year anniversary to my jailbroken 3DS! Just 366 days ago, she was just wasting away on a shelf in my closet while I was ambivalent to the point of apathy. But now, we're breaking new ground and turning over new leaves. Apart from just being able to play 3DS games out of my datahoard for the first time, I was also able to reconnect with the Game Boy Color and Game Boy Advance for the first time since grade school. Oh, I'd been playing VBA-M on Windows since 2009, but it just wasn't able to recapture the joy I would get from taking my GBC out of my backpack at Burger King and playing Game & Watch Gallery 2 while I waited for mum and gran to stop talking after lunch on the weekend. I take my 3DS everywhere, so whenever I decide to take a gaming break, I can. It's a little clunky with a laptop.
I started playing Animal Crossing: New Leaf for the first time a couple days ago. I talk about the esoterics of it on this page, but more generally, it's had an immediate effect on my life outside just gameplay. First, since the game's clock is synchronised to the 3DS's Date/Time settings, some NPCs will actually set appointments with you. Angus wanted me to come over to his house sometime after 11:00, so I said 12:05. In order to remember to keep this appointment, I created a whole new alarm on my Clock app, as though it were time to take my oestradiol or time to make dinner or something. I remember people on tumblr back in the day talking about how they would set appointments in the game to co-incide with their breaks or whatever at work. I also remembered someone saying how they played pretty religiously for the better part of a year, stopped playing, never got back to it, and when they returned to their town 4 years later, it was abandoned and desolate. I don't think I could take that. Not on my HRT regimen. To build Westfold up to be a bustling town on the coast and then leave for a while and return to a ghost town because everyone felt I had abandoned them... Well, we'll probably find out at some point.
Anyway, the second thing is its immediate impact on my music-writing ability. Music in Animal Crossing tends not be very long, but it's expressive of the time during which it plays. It's sort of a subversion of expectations when someone says "dynamic score". You hear that and you think of instruments being added or taken away from a single looping song every time you meet a condition. Animal Crossing's dynamism comes from the time of day, the time of year, and the weather conditions, as well as the part of town in which it plays. The game does have at least one Real Life Fast Travel-style additive score, in the Museum; but everything else is dependent on the hour of the day. After playing for the first time, I had great fun writing little looping New Leaf-type jingles in Soundcanvas VA. Nothing I'd want to release, of course, but it's amazing how immediate an effect this game had. The last time a game affected my musicianship so immediately, it was The Sims and I was just learning the piano.
A few weeks ago while I was out for a stroll, I was thinking about the effect on culture that Breaking Bad had, and one of the examples I came up with intersected New Leaf. There was a scene where Walter White was making coffee in the meth still and commented, "this is delicious, why the hell are we makin' meth?". And so someone on tumblr makes a Breaking Bad-themed coffeeshop lookin' place in New Leaf, complete with dressing their character like Walter White. I also thought of a tweet to #overlyhonestmethods, where OP could always tell there was a new episode scheduled, because someone in their lab always dressed up like Bryan Cranston. Well, Breaking Bad is REAL over, Better Call Saul is too, and Bryan Cranston had his voice stolen to make an AI TTS. Fortunately, New Leaf is still here. New Leaf will always be here, as long as we have jailbroken 3DSes in our backpacks. Or New Horizons, I guess, if you're one of those people with a modchipped Nintendo Switch.