Well, look at this. It turns out my 1999-era wifi router, the one that runs my network, affectionately named “Slowand Broken,” is one of the routers on Nintendo’s lists of “routers that don’t work so good with Nintendo WFC.”

It has been our experience that this router typically requires specific changes to be made on the Wii console in order to have a stable connection to our online services.

This is sad. But surmountable—it simply requires a manual configuration. I mean, God forbid I upgrade to a router made within the last 10 years.

Almost bi-annually, I hunker down in a new hastily named village in Animal Crossing and spend two or so months slowly playing my way through paying off the first few renovations to my little house.

And then the novelty wears off and I put the game down.

Along comes Fall of 2008 and Animal Crossing: Lets You Can Has City for the Nintendo Wii.

Interestingly, this time, I’ve actually resumed playing the DS version (Wild World) at the same time, which, is fun, considering that there is only so many things you can do in Animal Crossing in a single play session.

The most awesome thing in the world about Animal Crossing for the WII is the ability to take a screenshot and save it as a JPG on the Wii’s SD Card; I bought a 2 GB SD card exclusively for this feature.

As for the game, it’s pretty much the same-old, same-old. The Online Component is hysterically frustrating, the fishing as overly simplistic, and there are only about six personality archetypes between all the villagers.

What makes it so much more fun this time around is that Gaia and I are playing together. She has a guy, I have a guy, and we run around our little village (embarrassingly named “The Spot”) and we go to the city and get our hair did.

Even though a combination of game-crashing wifi-bugs and the insanity of Nintendo’s “Friend Codes” system has made any kind of online meet ups impossible for me, It’s more fun when you play together. That’s thanks to Gaia.