We've been avoiding the Animal Crossing Strategy Guide like Pennsylvania drivers avoid turn signals. It was our contention that an all-encompassing guide would ruin the slow, gradual experience of the game. And since playing Animal Crossing doesn't require consulting maps or complex locked door puzzles, we've managed to muddle through the intricacies of letter writing, furniture placement and item collecting without a formal guide. Sarcasm.
That said, we've found plenty of hints and tips online - I doubt we would ever have found about the daily magic money rock without help - so it's not like we're playing in a vaccuum. The various message boards and websites are like peepholes into the guide itself, allowing us to just search out exactly what we need without presenting the entirety of the game's scope in one thick document.
But what I'm finding is that the Official Guide is incomplete anyway, which is as unique among guides as Animal Crossing is unique among games. The Guide does *not* list every single obtainable item, since Nintendo hasn't fully revealed everything. (I'm referring to the rare item Universal Codes, which can yield cool stuff that, as yet, remains unattainable in the game alone. I have not used any of them myself as I'm waiting for Nintendo to publish them formally, but they do exist.) Also, rumors continue of secret NES games not mentioned in the Guide. And after nearly four months of playing the game, my onscreen Nook catalog has become so unwieldy that I could use any sort of printed furniture listing to check off and complete.
So an Animal Crossing Official Strategy Guide is right now winging it's way through the USPS to us... as part of our new subscription to Nintendo Power. Nintendo Power is a funny magazine because it very clearly needs to straddle the fence between toddler gamers and adult gamers. But they've had some great pack-ins lately (Pokemon promo cards, GameCube preview DVD, Animal Crossing promo card), so that's really all I need to justify adding NP to my monthlies.
And on the accessory front, I'm still searching for the GameCube GamePak, a sort of all-encompassing backpack designed for Cube transportation. No store in town has it in stock, although they do all have the Xbox version. If any console needed a backpack for moving, it's the oversized Xbox. Perhaps even a forklift if you're bringing enough controllers.
My quest has resulted in me paying more attention to the accessory frontlines, which I usually ignore. The video game peripheral market has some of the worst marketing of any aspect of the industry. But I think that's largely because accessories tend to spawn from the ass end of the business - your cheater boxes, your rubber-gripped gaudy colored controllers, your figural PVC memory cards - and not the self-respecting big guns. Not to mention big plastic rocking chairs.
