Animal Crossing: City Folk adds VoIP & SMS

According to BetaNews, in Nintendo's E3 keynote this morning came not only the official announcement of Animal Crossing: City Folk for the Wii, but also something unexpected - VoIP functionality (voice chat) and native SMS/e-mail interactivity.

Animal Crossing: City Folk is the third in the Nintendo Animal Crossing series - a life simulator game. Sounds like Second Life to me. This follows-up the lauch of Animal Crossing in 2001 and Animal Crossing: Wild World in 2005. You assume a anthropomorphic character (resembling both human and animal) and in the open-ended life simulation game you live in a village but there is little preset plot or mandatory tasks.

Called WiiSpeak BetaNews explains that it's "an ambient microphone peripheral meant to encourage live group chatting in Wi-Fi gameplay."

Lastly, BetaNews states:

Also, though only mentioned briefly, the feature in previous versions of Animal Crossing that allowed users to send each other letters in-game, has been expanded to include sending letters outside the game. Communications can be sent to the Wii Message Board, e-mail accounts, and even cell phones via SMS.

I wonder if this is using the new Logitech wireless keyboard for the Wii (also launched today) to text/email messages outside the game? That's pretty cool - connecting your virtual simulated life communications with your real life communications. Before you know it that line will be so blurred you won't know the difference.