I received my Wild World Player's Guide this week, my free gift for another year of Nintendo Power. It has lots of great pictures, a hip HGTV kind of layout... but the more I paged through it, the more pissed off it made me. Because it doesn't explain much of anything about how the game actually works. As I said previously, Nintendo remains dead-set against anybody knowing anything about Animal Crossing. Even the strategy guide has to stay spoiler-free.

Now, I'm not asking for a complete watchmaker's detail. I don't expect to see every single dialogue tree or an explanation of how the game generates town visitors. But when I pick up a strategy guide, I expect certain layers of game strata to be exposed. I want some secrets revealed, some thorough discussions. And I expect it all to be correct, because that's the chief advantage to buying something official like this as opposed to dredging the internet for info. (Plus the in-theme layout and imagery.) Yes, a book like this is intended to wreck some portion of the game. Pick up a guide for an adventure game and you'll see intricate maps showing every hidden collectible, every weapon upgrade, every secret sidequest. Animal Crossing: Wild World, on the other hand, dismisses every intriguing part with a smile and a wave, glosses over details, and still expects you to roll over and thank Nintendo for the privilege of collecting Gyroids one more time. (Which the book doesn't mention as showing up only after a rain or snowfall.)

What the Player's Guide doesn't explain:

- It doesn't explain how your character's face is determined by the questions Kapp'n asks you at the very beginning of the game. Only the vaguest terms are used: "if you answered all the questions rudely, you might end up with a permanent scowl." Which is, as Teh Intarweb already figured out, not even correct. First of all, what is the "rude" response to "I've had about enough of this here rain!", when your only choices are "Me, too!" and "I like it!"? And I don't see any faces that I would classify as a permanent scowl. Your avatar's face is awfully important, because that's one thing in this game that you can't change later. Who wants to play with a face that they hate? A proper face guide should definitely have been in this stupid book.

- Same goes for Harriet's hairstyles, which is also covered in merest detail and with only a sample of photos. You can get a new hairstyle each day, so it's at least changeable if you hate it... but at the cost of 3000 bells and you'd still need to dope out the dialogue tree to hone in on something you like. Also, the guide makes no mention of how a male character can "unlock" female hairstyles, and vice versa.

- The concept of a "perfect" town is handled in one tiny paragraph, with no discussion on how to accomplish it. It would have been simple to include a list of Pelly's hints and explain how best to fulfill them.

- There's no strategy offered for catching bees.

- For all the branding Nintendo did for the first AC as a "communication game," there's very little devoted to that in ACWW. There's almost nothing said about maintaining friendships with your town's animal villagers. Nothing about how to keep them from moving out (the only way I've personally found is to go inside each animal's home and see if any of them have their stuff packed in boxes, and then talk them out of moving), nothing about how they "read" letters (if at all in this one), and nothing about how to encourage them to give you their Pictures, which are one the game's rarest item sets and just about completely unmentioned.

- The blurb on Lyle doesn't say what he charges for his insurance nor what his payout is for signing up. Small detail, but why overlook it?

- Next to no info on buying turnips. No insight into the usual range that white turnips can sell for. No number quoted for a well-watered red turnip. And they even screwed up the traditional "stalk market" pun by calling it the "stock market" instead. (And yes, they put it in quotes.)

- No full display of Wendell's patterns. I've talked about how I hate the new Wendell procedure already, but it might be easier to swallow if I saw the awesome assortment of patterns I could get from him. Nope. The only interesting detail here - and it's exactly the kind of thing that I would want from a player's guide - is that the kind of food you give him determines a sub-class of patterns that he will choose from. For example, giving him fruit will get you a retro-Nintendo pattern of some sort.

- No full list of the emotions you receive from Dr. Shrunk, and no explanation of how many you can hold at a time. The chat keyboard only has room for four emotion buttons. If I talk to Shrunk again, will I have to replace one of those four? Will he magically make another panel for my keyboard, one dedicated to all emotions? Will he simply stop offering emotions? Nobody knows, least of all the Player's Guide.

- There is no mention at all of the obnoxious furniture limit that you get inside your house. You can't fill up every available square in ACWW like you used to on the GameCube. There is an unspecified limit, and the game bitches at you if you try to drop something over that limit. It's not discussed in the book.

- Feng Shui is still as vague as ever. The various effects of "luck" in Animal Crossing remain a mystery, even though half a dozen other game features refer to your "luck" as a deciding factor. But honestly, I'll let them have that one. Feng Shui is mysterious in the real world, so I can see them obscuring it here.

- No mention of growing flower hybrids. Not even a simplistic "and if you plant different colored plants of the same type, you may find that a new flower will grow nearby in a new color!" Nothing. Just a list of all the different flower types, with a notation that they "can be bought at Nook's" or "grow in the wild."

And yet, the trading quest - a branching item hunt that involved giving specific things to specific characters, something you'd never, ever figure out on your own - is mentioned dozens of times and explained thoroughly in a flowchart.

The holidays really do suck:

Wow, what a huge disappointment. I have the AC calendar that came in Nintendo Power hanging on our fridge, so I've been grousing over this for months. I understand the need to make the holiday events consistent across the board... but Nintendo could have replaced Halloween and the Harvest Festival (Thanksgiving) and Toy Day/Jingle's Appearance (Christmas) with something comparable. And I don't mean another fake-name-but-still-obviously-Christmas deal, I mean something with genuine gameplay attached to it.

Take the Harvest Festival. You had one evening during which you had to steal silverware from the dinner table and take it to Franklin, the turkey who was hiding somewhere in town. It was fun. It was, effectively, a mini-game. You had something out-of-the-ordinary to do and you were rewarded with rare furniture that you only received if you did well.

We now have ONE holiday that replicates that. The Acorn Festival in October. The rest of the holidays are so boringly non-events that the Player's Guide can explain them all in one tri-fold poster insert...

La-Di-Day. Every second Saturday in odd-numbered months. If you talk to villagers multiple times, they'll hum a song that you can choose as the new Town Tune. WHO CARES. Not a holiday. Next!

Fishing Tourney / Bug-Off. Various Sundays throughout the year. Same deal as in the first AC. You have X hours to catch the biggest fish (or bug). At least it's something to do, I suppose. And you get a trophy and rare paper if the game randomly generates your fish/insects as being largest. Still, nothing new here. Next!

Bright Nights. Going on right now, actually. The animals' houses have lights all over them, and you can tell Tortimer whose house you like the best. Here's my favorite part: the villager you chose "might give you a gift." MIGHT?!? The word "might" shouldn't even be in a strategy guide's vocabulary. Next!

Flower Fest. Second week of April. Whoever grows the best garden gets a trophy. Does best mean largest? Does best mean most hybrid colors? Does best mean most species? Does best mean I can simply destroy every other garden in town and walk away with the prize? Who knows? Next!

Fireworks Show. Every Saturday in August. Tortimer gives out sparklers, which are amusingly distracting. And you get fireworks on the top screen. Nothing to do, and the event is duplicated on New Year's (with the addition of a countdown clock). Next!

Yay Day. Every fourth Sunday, every other month. Villagers will compliment you, and you have to respond in a dialogue choice that matches his or her personality. I guess this is kind of a mini-game, since you have to work out your villager's personality types... but you don't get anything for it, aside from "improving your friendship." Maybe this leads to a better shot a getting villager Pictures, but the Guide won't say anything that explicit. Next!

Flea Market. Every first Saturday except January and August. This is the only other holiday (Acorn Festival being the other one) that is worth looking forward to. On this day, you get to walk into the animals' houses and buy their stuff. Just click on a piece of furniture and see if they have a price in mind. That's one thing I really like about ACWW: that the villager's houses can change furnishings over time. The downside of Flea Market day is that the second you enter your house, somebody will walk in and start making offers on your furniture. Before the next Flea Market, I think I'm going to fill my house with a bunch of super cheap items and see if I can turn a profit.

Those terrible Camper and Igloo events seem to be gone, which surprised me. I would have thought those two would have benefited greatly from the DS touchscreen. Imagine a "pick a card, any card" game where you actually get to see the cards the animal is referencing! The mind reels. But no, we've got smeggin' La-Di-Day hogging the calendar.

The Animals:

The Player's Guide displays the entire animal population, which is trimmed down form the GameCube version. Some species have only two or three animals, where before they had four to six. There's only two cows, for example. The good news is that there is only one hippo, and it ain't Bitty! Ooh, I hated her. I was also excited to see that Octavian, the super-rare octopus character, has a female counterpart in ACWW.

I also like the three guys dressed up like Power Rangers: Kid Cat, Dr. Trunk, and Agent S. That would be fun to get all three of those dudes in one town.

The Catalog:

The Player's Guide mentions that sometimes Nook will have an item for a better price than Redd, but then never shows what those prices are. The back of the book lists Nook's price but not Redd's... and the Redd section rather stupidly lists the price Nook pays for Redd items. WTF.

Some of the new fish and bugs are crazy cool. Tarantulas?! There's going to come a month when tarantulas freely roam Adamsvil?

There's items missing from the guide that I've seen in animals' houses, that other players have already found, and that you can order from a catalog. Why is the Arwing a secret? Pudge has an Arwing in his house! Put those damn items in the Player's Guide! I'm sort of OK with leaving out the super-secret stuff, like the Pikmin item we all gawped at last month... but the Master Sword? I found one of those in the dump back on the GameCube.

In conclusion, what a bunch of suck. This isn't a Player's Guide, it's a pumped up Instruction Manual.

Most of this missing stuff can be found online, but I always prefer to hear it from an official source, not some Johnny Website with a big mouth. AC forums are always full of outright lies masquerading as uber-rare hidden secrets. In fact, I started one once as a joke. When the millionth person started a "What's a pitfall?" thread, I posted that they were holding it upside down. It's not an "!", I said. It's an "i". If you can collect all the letters in the word "pitfall" you'll unlock the Atari classic video game.