As many people know, video game companies will often send out promotional copies of games to certain media outlets, so said outlets can review, preview and just generally get the word out about the games. In the case of Animal Crossing: City Folk, Nintendo decided to send out a few pre-played copies of Animal Crossing: Wild World, so the press site could try importing a character from Animal Crossing: Wild World to Animal Crossing: City Folk.
MTV Multiplayer‘s Stephen Totilo decided to explore the Animal Crossing: Wild World town before copying the data to his Wii game, and was met with a surprise. Apparently, Baabara the sheep had picked up some foul language from one of the villages she had inhabited, prior to settling in the preview copies distributed by Nintendo. Her customized greeting was the somewhat racist, “[heart] u long time!!” and her catchphrase was the objectionable word “Ñ___a,” as seen in the screenshot from MTV Multiplayer at right.
In all Animal Crossing games, players have the ability to customize their animal neighbor’s speech if they befriend them. Apparently, the person from the town where Baabara originally lived had decided that Baabara needed to be a hip-hop/rap-loving sheep, who maybe listened Fergie’s “London Bridge” a few too many times. Nintendo does have some built in censors in the game, designed to prevent phrases like this from being inserted, but Baabara’s previous human neighbor had gotten around this by using a “Ñ” instead of a “N.”
GameSpot reports that Nintendo has issued an apology for Baabara’s objectionable and racist language. It turns out that Baabara was an immigrant from another town who stealthily moved to the 14 pre-played press copies of Animal Crossing: Wild World. Nintendo is recalling all 14 DS game cards with the offensive character.
Read [MTV Multiplayer] Via [GameSpot]
What is wrong with people???