Animal Crossing Player Base

Article by VR Scout,

Players feel scorned after a new update drops support for older devices.

Nintendo has introduced a new update to Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp, a mobile spinoff to the companies beloved social simulator, adding two new augmented reality modes that bring the Animal Crossing world to life in the real world.

Nintendo Switch - Animal Crossing: New Horizons - The #1 source for video game models on the internet! But Animal Crossing's economy is not restricted at all — players can exchange currency ('bells') or barter with furniture, but it's all a free-form exchange with no oversight by Nintendo.

Animal Crossing Player Base Game

Available now as a free update on iOS and Android devices, AR Camera mode lets you select in-game characters and furniture and place them throughout your real-world environment. You can even snap a photo alongside your digital companions and share your adorable selfies with friends. The second mode, AR Cabin, lets you customize your own AR cabin with various props, furniture, and characters and view your virtual home from a variety of angles.

While these new AR features may come as a pleasant surprise to those playing on current gen smartphone devices, this most recent update has also raised the games minimum system requirements, leaving many older gen devices in the dust. According to an official support document, Pocket Camp's minimum requirements have shifted from iOS 9 to iOS 11; the ideal operating system being iOS 13 and above. Android users will require a 64-bit device with at least 1.5GB of RAM running Android 5.

'Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp cannot be downloaded or played on devices that are no longer supported,' states Nintendo in the support document. 'In certain cases, some devices may not be supported even when they meet the conditions listed.'

The latter comment is in reference to players with 64-bit devices running 32-bit operating systems.

Animal Crossing Player Age

Suffice it to say these most recent changes have left a good portion of the Pocket Camp playerbase vocally upset. As pointed out by The Verge, Pocket Camp'sofficial Twitter account is currently experiencing a wave of negative comments in response to the update, with many players upset about losing access to paid content.

How do you feel about the most recent update? Is Nintendo shooting itself in the foot abandoning older devices? Or is this a simple case of technological evolution?

Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp is available free (in-game purchases) on compatible iOS and Android devices. Bluestacks latest version pc.

Image Credit: Nintendo

Animal Crossing: New Horizons' big winter update was the cause of much celebration in November, as the new hair options meant that some Black fans could more fully depict themselves in-game. But what was meant to be an inclusive addition to the life simulator has turned contentious, especially as non-Black fans have started to appropriate and whitewash the hair options.

The issue came to a head when an Animal Crossing player on social media made the mistake of calling the new puffs 'space buns,' a cutesy moniker used to describe hair styles popularized by stars like Ariana Grande. While that post may be the most-discussed instance of the controversy, discussions about whether or not non-Black players could don the new hairstyles — or if they were exclusively Black hairstyles at all — started promptly after Nintendo revealed they existed in the first place. Now that the hair is widely available, the conversation has largely focused on what the new options truly are, and what fans should call it.

This apparent confusion over the hairstyles has prompted some fans to explain that while the puffs may look like buns, if you zoom in, you'll note that the new dos are textured differently than the standard options. Some went even further, noting that Animal Crossing has actually already depicted something like space buns in games like Pocket Camp, and they do not look like the new puffs in New Horizons.

for anyone who needs to know the difference between afro puffs and space buns, on and off the game pic.twitter.com/euKoNwowgV

Animal Crossing Player Base Game

Available now as a free update on iOS and Android devices, AR Camera mode lets you select in-game characters and furniture and place them throughout your real-world environment. You can even snap a photo alongside your digital companions and share your adorable selfies with friends. The second mode, AR Cabin, lets you customize your own AR cabin with various props, furniture, and characters and view your virtual home from a variety of angles.

While these new AR features may come as a pleasant surprise to those playing on current gen smartphone devices, this most recent update has also raised the games minimum system requirements, leaving many older gen devices in the dust. According to an official support document, Pocket Camp's minimum requirements have shifted from iOS 9 to iOS 11; the ideal operating system being iOS 13 and above. Android users will require a 64-bit device with at least 1.5GB of RAM running Android 5.

'Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp cannot be downloaded or played on devices that are no longer supported,' states Nintendo in the support document. 'In certain cases, some devices may not be supported even when they meet the conditions listed.'

The latter comment is in reference to players with 64-bit devices running 32-bit operating systems.

Animal Crossing Player Age

Suffice it to say these most recent changes have left a good portion of the Pocket Camp playerbase vocally upset. As pointed out by The Verge, Pocket Camp'sofficial Twitter account is currently experiencing a wave of negative comments in response to the update, with many players upset about losing access to paid content.

How do you feel about the most recent update? Is Nintendo shooting itself in the foot abandoning older devices? Or is this a simple case of technological evolution?

Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp is available free (in-game purchases) on compatible iOS and Android devices. Bluestacks latest version pc.

Image Credit: Nintendo

Animal Crossing: New Horizons' big winter update was the cause of much celebration in November, as the new hair options meant that some Black fans could more fully depict themselves in-game. But what was meant to be an inclusive addition to the life simulator has turned contentious, especially as non-Black fans have started to appropriate and whitewash the hair options.

The issue came to a head when an Animal Crossing player on social media made the mistake of calling the new puffs 'space buns,' a cutesy moniker used to describe hair styles popularized by stars like Ariana Grande. While that post may be the most-discussed instance of the controversy, discussions about whether or not non-Black players could don the new hairstyles — or if they were exclusively Black hairstyles at all — started promptly after Nintendo revealed they existed in the first place. Now that the hair is widely available, the conversation has largely focused on what the new options truly are, and what fans should call it.

This apparent confusion over the hairstyles has prompted some fans to explain that while the puffs may look like buns, if you zoom in, you'll note that the new dos are textured differently than the standard options. Some went even further, noting that Animal Crossing has actually already depicted something like space buns in games like Pocket Camp, and they do not look like the new puffs in New Horizons.

for anyone who needs to know the difference between afro puffs and space buns, on and off the game pic.twitter.com/euKoNwowgV

Racists calling the afro puffs space buns in animal crossing like we don't already have space buns that look like totally different textured hair pic.twitter.com/AoNSRW8RnT

LISTEN UP!! If the Afro buns Nintendo recently added to ACNH were space buns they would NOT be textured. They would look like the bun on the left. This isn't 'gatekeeping' a hairstyle. It's as simple as, WHITE PEOPLE DON'T HAVE TEXTURED HAIR. They are not the same. pic.twitter.com/fCkvrCSjq8

Part of what makes this a tired issue for some Black fans is that the series has taken a long time to acknowledge this segment of its user base. New Horizons as a whole is better than earlier iterations, which forced players who wanted to have a darker skin in-game to sun tan their characters for hours, if not wear masks, just to depict themselves in-game.

As critic Funké Joseph stated in Gamespot in June, 'My villager can be me now, and I love that, but it took so damn long. It's hard for me to even praise Nintendo for including it now when I, and so many others, needed it years ago. The bar for representation feels so dishearteningly low that companies are praised for including content that should have been there from [the] start; that we celebrate having our hair in a game as a ‘win,' or having a black character that isn't a stereotype as something innovative.'

Animal Crossing Player Base Layout

Speaking to Polygon over Twitter regarding the space buns controversy, Joseph added, 'It's obviously a black hairstyle, something that people pushed hard to get in and the obvious trolls will say things like ‘space buns xP' in a seemingly quirky way, but they know what they're doing, who they're erasing.'

On social media, reactionaries have taken this opportunity to buckle down on the issue, often posting pictures of white characters wearing the afro puffs as if in defiance. Opinions on that phenomenon differ; some Black players have proclaimed they have no issue whatsoever and don't care what other fans wear in-game. The players Polygon spoke to for this story acknowledged that they can't necessarily control what others will do. The potential problem is that, by calling them space buns, fans are erasing the context of a hard-won and long-overdue inclusion to the game.

'At least call them afro puffs if you must wear them,' says Animal Crossing fan Morgan, who has been enjoying the new update.

'So these people appropriated a hairstyle and renamed it so they could pretend it's not a black style,' she continued in a Twitter message. Morgan told Polygon that since writing a tweet where she asked people to stop calling them space buns, she's gotten harassed by users who point out that she has pronouns in her bio, among other things. This, in turn, has led Morgan to believe that it's not really about Animal Crossing at all — some of the people arguing about the puffs may not even be players, but rather folks who bristle at the mere idea of racial inclusivity wherever it might appear.

This is just the latest battleground for observers who may not have any stakes in the larger Animal Crossing community. To wit, one moderator of the largest Animal Crossing community on the internet told Polygon that, in their forums, fans largely spoke of the issue respectfully, even if they disagreed with one another. Rather than becoming a firehose of harassment, discussions on the puffs faded away pretty quickly.

Animal Crossing Base Model

'I don't like to give attention to users like that, though,' Joseph said of the space bun brigade. 'I'm just happy these hairstyles are here for all my fam!!'