That little guy with the pirate beard is my avatar on Animal Crossing. I’ve been playing since mid-2020 when my oldest daughter and her husband gave me a Switch Lite as a gift. It’s one of a very few games I’ve downloaded and owned as a pure digital asset. I usually prefer to have the physical cart I can plug into the Switch.

Over the many hours I’ve played the game I’ve amassed many in-game Chotchkies and in-game valuables such as bells (I have over 11 million). One of the valuables are do-it-yourself (DIY) recipes for many items. One of those DIY recipes enables the creation of the satellite you see hovering in the photo above (and yes, you do have a camera to take in-game photos which are selfies of your avatar and their immediate environment). I even have rockets, but they aren’t Falcon 9s, and I can’t send my satellites into an orbit over my island. The bigger issue is that while the satellite will hover, you can’t walk underneath it. That makes putting up many of these over my island a non-starter. I know that you can put items that hover and that your avatar can walk under, as I ‘bought’ a number of Mario blocks that did just that. To make the satellite behave like a Mario block would require a software change, which I doubt we’ll ever see.

The game is still fun, and every once in a while the opportunity presents itself to capture a bit of silly fun. As in this direct screen capture off the Switch while in this particular cut screen. The emotion on my avatar’s face says it all.

I go through spurts of game play on Animal Crossing. The last started back at the last major update in November. I’ve seen enough of the new work, so it’s time to put it aside and put those few daily hours I spend on this to better use.