Nintendo has released a pretty interesting tool for folks playing Animal Crossing: New Horizons to showcase their islands. The Island Tour Creator allows you to make what are essentially ads for your island, whether that come in the form of a poster or a trailer. It requires you to sign in to your Nintendo account to access it, so I thought it might start pulling assets from my account. But it turns out it doesn’t, so I instead tried uploading a screenshot from New Horizons I happened to have saved to my phone. It was cropped, so the tool didn’t recognize it as a screenshot from the game.
At the outset, the entire thing feels fairly limited. I had to open it on my phone, as it doesn’t support desktop browsers and Several users have reported on Twitter not being able to use their island’s in-game name if it has a space in it.
So I re-installed New Horizons to investigate further. I haven’t played it since going on a date in the game a few months back. My island is a wasteland at this point. I have been actively neglecting the space and I’m almost certain my neighbors have abandoned it. But that’s fine. I didn’t like talking to them anyway.
Upon arriving at Jabberwock Island (yes, it’s named after what you think it is), the neighbors were still there. None of them even acknowledged my absence of several months. So I guess maybe they’re doing fine without me to do all the required manual labor. But I was right about it being wasteland. Especially compared to how elaborate some folks have made theirs in the year since New Horizons launched So now, using the limited tools I have, I’m going to attempt to sell you on an island with an unkempt, roach-filled home and nothing but orange trees to entice you…
More Animal Crossing:
- 23 Fun Animal Crossing Umbrella Designs for New Horizons
- Animal Crossing Collaborates With Build-A-Bear and I Demand to Mix & Match
- I Don’t Know Pavé From Animal Crossing, but He Seems Like Gay Culture
Well, I was going to, until I was met with the same error message a second time on screenshots I definitely just imported directly to my smartphone. Perhaps my neglecting this space has made into something Nintendo’s own algorithm’s cannot recognize? At this rate, it’s more akin to a Mad Max film than Nintendo’s island life simulator.
Back in 2008, there was a television series called Life After People where experts basically speculated what would happen to the world if humanity was no longer around to do what humanity does and push against nature to create what we know as modern civilization. And so I am left wondering if I have discovered the answer. By not touching a single weed or speaking to any neighbors in my Animal Crossing: New Horizons save file, I have let it grow into something totally unrecognizable by Nintendo’s screenshot detecting algorithm. I abandoned it. And now I’m reaping what I have sown.
Or, I don’t know, maybe Nintendo should look into what’s making this unrecognizable. Because I uploaded these images directly from my Switch to the phone I was trying to use this thing on.
