Live in a town filled with talking animals. Pick fruit and sell it to a raccoon. Fish, catch bugs, plant and water flowers. Buy furniture. Send letters. Visit other players’ towns. Watch fireworks. Go shopping. Design clothes. Listen to a guitar-playing dog. Watch colours change as the seasons go by.

Animal Crossing is a game that survives on length rather than depth. You play it over a period of time, rather like a game of skill, although there’s next-to no skill involved. You improve by mastering emotions – sadness! Surprise! – and paying off your mortgage. I think it’s fair to say Animal Crossing perhaps isn’t the most exciting game in the world.

Playing it with friends is even better, and what really lifts this above the Gamecube version. Although the trading sadly doesn’t extend to animals, you can swap patterns, villagers, phrases, constellations, furniture… quite a lot, really.

Animal Crossing is almost impossible to review because it either appeals to you or it doesn’t. I’ve tried at great length to talk two of my best friends into appreciating it, but it’s not a game that can be taught; only learnt.

In short: A parallel, beautiful world of wonder and charm.

Absolutely one of the best-written games EVER. It’s a cross between a courtroom drama and a police investigation game, with you piecing together evidence and then cross-examining witnesses until you find out what really happened. It starts out easy but gets hard very quickly, but the feeling of intelligence when you get something right is hard to beat.

Only the fifth and final chapter truly uses the DS’s capabilities, as the first four are actually from an existing GameBoy Advance game, but they’re all so intricate and involving it’s hard to care if you just use the stylus to tap on questions or evidence.

It’s such a hard game to sell because there’s not much else like it. Someone sold it to me as like being able to be a character in a really great book, which is a good way of looking at it because the characters and dialogue are amazing.

In short: Clever cases, funny dialogue, great experience.