Let me give you two truths about Animal Crossing: Wild World.

1.) If it involves tools, it sucks.

2.) If it involves a holiday, it sucks.

The Flower Fest involves both, so it doubly sucks. I planted a million flowers around my mansion, organized by species so as to promote natural hybriding. I used my Golden Watering Can every day.

I lost to Queenie, who had eight flowers, no hybrids, and considered moving out of the village mid-week. So no Flower Trophy for me. And when's the next time I can get a Flower Trophy? At next year's Flower Fest. And what did the game teach me about growing a better garden? Absolutely nothing.

And bonus: Tortimer stood outside the town hall all bloody week. This means you get NO wandering visitors. No Saharah. No Shrunk. No Gracie (although I still haven't figured out what her game is). Not even Joan will show up on Sunday mornings if Tortimer is outside counting his toes and horf-horf-horfing. The only visitor exempt from this rule is Redd. Somehow Redd trumps everyone. Other than him, here's an entire week where you can't score rare items or buy turnips.

And to make matters worse, I managed to trigger the freaking Katie/Kaitlyn sequence both the week before and the week after. So I had to go through almost three solid weeks of having no special villagers. How does Nintendo expect you to get anything accomplished in this game. Things already happen at a glacial pace... and then they toss in ways to make it go even slower. The presence of Tortimer, Redd, Joan, K.K., Lyle and Katie/Kaitlyn should not preclude any of the other travellers from showing up.

And seriously, the usage of tools in Animal Crossing totally sucks. They take up precious inventory slots, so you're never going to carry all six of them at once and they get in the way of your fruit harvesting and furniture moving. And they're a pain in the ass to get to if you need one in a hurry.

You see a balloon in the sky, but by the time you equip your slingshot and give chase, it's floated out-of-bounds. You shake a spider out of a tree, but one missed swipe with the net and it disappears forever. You see a fish in the river, but as soon as you cast your fishing line, it drifts away from your reach. Tools suck.

Tools should be a separate inventory screen, instantly selectable... either you rotate through all of them by cycling with a shoulder button, or you map them one at a time, Pokemon-Select style. Having to jump to the inventory window and click-drag icons around is old-school terrible.

But today I am able to definitively answer one Player's Guide whitewash issue: emotions. You are capped at four emotions. Fin. If Dr. Shrunk shows up after you have four, he demands you replace one of the old ones. So far, I've seen him six times. My current emotional plate has joy (flowers radiate from head), thinking (a "..." word balloon), anger (stamp foot and erupt negative energy) and desperation (nervous tiptoeing and sweat pouring from head).