Animal Crossing: the new Wii communications platform?

In Nintendo's E3 keynote this morning, the official announcement of Animal Crossing: City Folk brought with it some unexpected functionality that the Wii had been lacking up to now: voice chat and native SMS/e-mail interactivity.

Animal Crossing: City Folk is the third in Nintendo's series of nonviolent, task-oriented, real-time games set in a fictitious village populated by anthropomorphic animals. Nintendo expects to release it before the end of 2008.

While the announcement of this game was expected among fans, what was not expected was the inclusion of WiiSpeak in the game, an ambient microphone peripheral meant to encourage live group chatting in Wi-Fi gameplay.

Wii VoIP has been speculated upon since the system's release, and this is an indirect fulfillment of that capability.

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.