As we mentioned this morning, Animal Crossing Pocket Camp is now available on the Australian App Store (and Google Play). If you're willing to jump through a few hoops to get an Australian iTunes account, you can very easily download the game and start playing right now. There's one tiny caveat: The extent of Nintendo region locking this soft launch is limited to making sure your Nintendo account country is Australia. This is super-simple to change, you just log into My Nintendo, edit your profile, and you'll be ready to rock. (It seems like once you're set up you can switch it back to the USA without issue too.) After those few minor speed bumps I was on my way in Animal Crossing Pocket Camp, which has turned out to be a surprisingly competent miniature version of Animal Crossing with seemingly minor (and largely expected) freemium trimmings attached to it. After a quick character creation process where you select things like your gender, hair, eyes, and similar things the game teaches you how to move around and interact with the world. It's all done through a super-simple tap to move mechanic, and like most tap to move games, you can also just keep your finger on the screen in the direction you want to move to continue heading that way. Interacting with the game world to talk to other characters, fish, shake fruit from trees, and everything else is as simple as just tapping on the thing you want to do.
One design choice that I'm sure will be needlessly controversial is th...