Don’t Run While Holding Those Balloons!
The much anticipated Summer Update 2 comes to Animal Crossing New Horizons today, or rather, last night around midnight. Pesky updates, coming in the middle of the night. I guess that might be appropriate, in a way, because the Summer Update 2 brings the fireworks shows back to the series!
Hosted every Sunday, in both Northern and Southern Hemisphere (be sure to bring a jacket, my snow-bound Southern friends), the fireworks event is one of the prettier Animal Crossing events. Isabelle, Redd, and your villagers will all hang out around the square, to watch the fireworks burst over the top of Resident Services. Redd will be taking some shore leave from his risky art business to host a raffle, where the player can buy tickets that allow you to earn Fireworks Show exclusive items. According to the trailer, we can confirm that there will be a few types of bopper lighted headbands, some sparklers, noisemakers, fans, and balloons, all presumably in various colors. Players also have the ability of submitting a custom design pattern as a firework to explode in the sky as well, so have fun!
With the return of the balloons comes the return of “tripping”, a feature of the Luck system in New Leaf. Now, it seems, tripping can be activated by running while holding a balloon, causing the balloon to float away, or by wearing the infamous King Tut mask.
The next big part of the update is the return of Luna’s Dream Suite! Kind of! In New Leaf, players could visit Luna’s magical dream suite, and visit other people’s towns in a dream. They could not physically affect the town (such as picking up items or digging holes), but it made horror or pop culture towns very popular. It was a way in New Leaf to show off your town without having to be online 24/7.
The Dream Suite returns…. In your own bedroom! Go to sleep on any bed inside your house, and Luna will visit you in your dreams, asking if you would like to input a player’s dream code, or upload your island with a code of your own. It was very smart of Nintendo to add this feature as just simply “sleeping on a bed”. I for one know that there is no more space on my island currently to build a new facility, and also that building facilities generally takes a few in-game days, which would have delayed the ability to upload Dream Suites for most players until Sunday or Monday. Doing it this way means people can now come to your island (and not ruin it) immediately!
Finally, the last big part of the update is the ability to backup your island to Nintendo’s servers on a regular basis. This has been a highly requested feature, as previously if your switch was damaged or lost, all of your island and character data would simply be… Gone. Forever. Now, at least, players will be able to contact Nintendo regarding your case, and retrieve their islands on a new system. It’s not perfect, but it’s certainly better than everything being gone!
And that’s it for now! Nintendo’s next big update is scheduled for “Fall”, and we can assume it will be around October sometime, as the Fall release artwork shows Jack, the Halloween Animal Crossing character. There’s many hoping that this might also come with the return of Brewster’s cafe, or the vegetable farming, both of which have been leaked, but only time will tell.
See you for the next big gaming news!
