Nintendo's next big sequel gives you permission to get intricately stupid

Nintendo's wacky life sim is a poster's paradise Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream doesn’t just take me on a vacation to a sunny island; it’s a portal to another time entirely. Back in 2001, my friends and I didn’t have ChatGPT. We had SmarterChild. A sad sack of an automated chatbot that lived inside AOL Instant Messenger, SmarterChild spent its virtual life getting tormented by kids like me. It was programmed to help users learn how their messaging platform worked, but more often than not, its job was to tell potty-mouthed kids to stop with all the foul language. For my friends, SmarterChild wasn’t a tool, but a web game. What was the most heinous thing you could get away with saying to it? Could you provoke it into clapping back? The goal wasn’t to hold a sensible conversation with an intelligent AI; it was to stretch the limitations of a vulnerable machine as far as you could. Nintendo’s delightfully strange new life sim reaches for that same appeal. A sequel to a 2013 Nintendo 3DS cult classic, Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream puts players in charge of an island getaway inhabited by Miis. There’s no final endgame to watching pint-sized recreations of celebrities squeak to one a