The Last Year of Animal Crossing

I was just looking through Hunter S’s video on the holiday glitches of Gamecube Animal Crossing (11 minutes). By “holiday,” it means the winter holiday, and the various weird things that are possible during this season, like using snowballs to get pushed out of bounds into the ocean, getting a dummy item due to a data error when playing games with villages camping in igloos, and others.

I think the most interesting thing however has to do with GC’s Animal Crossing limits. Although the system clock extends out to 2099, the calendar of the game itself only supports dates up to 2030! When the date rolls on at midnight, December 31st 2030, the game will advance to 2031, apparently as normal, but on saving and reloading the year will become 2030 again.

The video was made two years ago in 2024. It’s now 2026, so you only have about four-and-a-half years to play Gamecube Animal Crossing in the intended way. All the AC games have date limits like this. The Switch version, New Horizons, is said to be able to even open save files from 2061 and later, so that’s one edge the Gamecube version has over it.

The Switch Has A Web Browser You Can’t Use

It’s true. It’s meant for things like WiFi login pages and displaying online manuals, but it doesn’t have a field for entering URLs yourself.

Seems unfair to me, but I suppose they thought everyone has a smartphone these days. (Until recently, I didn’t!) And I understand the web browser was a persistent security hole for the Wii-U. So while they include a web browser in the Switch for those reasons, it’s locked-off from the users. It’s still a security risk, mind you.

Now, a weird thing about the Switch is it’s multitasking system. The OS reserves a large portion of its memory for an “applet.” This is one of a number of system programs intended to provide a number of services to the user and running game software. Each of the round button options on the Home menu starts up an applet. The eShop is an applet. The system keyboard is an applet. And the web browser is an applet.

One thing about the applets is only one can run at a time! Games can actually run in the background while the Home menu and an applet are open, but if a game calls upon the system keyboard to enter text, then you go to the Home menu and open something else, the keyboard will stop. When you return to the game, it’ll have to be restarted.

It’s all explained in James-Money’s 13 minute video, Understanding the Nintendo Switch Browser: