(no subject)

There are some neat new games I want to write about, but the one that's been eating my head for the last couple of nights is the 2001 PS2 title Harvest Moon: Save the Homeland which I picked up for a few bucks at CD Spins yesterday. I had heard of this game series before, and decided the price was right for a look-see. As expected, the game is pretty addicting.

Which is kind of ridiculous, given what the game is about. You're a farmer. You do farm chores. Literally: you spend about half your time running around, watering crops and milking cows. And yet you are driven to keep doing this because you can see your crops and cows and other things develop over time, and you know that the payoff is just around the corner (so you can buy better seeds and more cows, and eventually advanced equipment and farm improvements).

One unique thing this game does involves the way it forces the player to treat time as a precious resource. Your farm is apparently on a neutron star, since literally about two or three minutes of game-time seem to pass with every real-time second (though thankfully this pauses if you're in conversation or inside a building). So at the start of every game day, at 6 in the morning, you have to think ahead what you want to do, in terms of farm chores, shopping, and chasing down pieces of the various character-interaction subplots wafting around. Effectively, you can only do a little bit of extra stuff before the all the NPCs go to bed. You can choose to give yourself more adventuring-time by skimping on chores, but your crops or animals might suffer as a result. (I have had one chicken die on me, and watched a melodramatic cutscene of my character weeping at its graveside behind the barn. Um... I guess everyone is vegetarian, then.)

An overarching storyline about real-estate developers planning to pave over your town in four game-months gives you impetus to not put anything off until the next day; according to the instruction manual, completing enough of the sub-plots will bring you to a happy ending. (I bet that one of them isn't your character getting rich enough from the farm that he can afford to buy stock in the development company and watch in glee as it does its work. Oh well.) This is my first play-through, so I have no idea how reasonable this time limit is, though I find its presence very interesting. Now if you'll excuse me, I've got to get back to saving up for this doghouse.