I grew up in a bit of a farming area. I recently met a farming area that makes my childhood look like a hot wheels compared to a hot rod. The kind of farming area with tractors armed with tires considerably taller than myself towing spiked 80 foot wide gadgets that plow, till, plant, water, pat, fertilize, and sing lullabies. Swiss army knife farming equipment, eh! Ok, so my childhood doesn’t quite stack up in the farming department. It still counted, because I smelled cow manure multiple times every day driving by the dairy farms.

I even had a pet calf once. My dad won it in a raffle at my grade school one Halloween. My sister and I wanted to name it Spooky, on account of Halloween, but my dad said that might be offensive to some people. We named it Casper instead, and bottle fed it. I also had pigs once. My step-dad at the time named them Ham and Bacon, in honor of what they would one day become, and which I would one day refuse to eat because I don’t feel right about consuming meat I’m on a first name basis with.

Harvest Moon is to farming what Tetris is to over-packing the trunk of a car. You can vaguely draw a line between the two but you have to squint to see it. Not that this fact stopped me from playing it or naming my farm pets names like Daisy or Buttercup (my XPS is named Buttercup too, on account of being a heavy cow. My cats like to try to tip it when I’m sleeping). I just had to switch off any expectations of an educational experience about the challenges of the farming lifestyle, the hard times of drought, the need for strategic fertilization… When you can go mining for jewelry that nets you more than a carefully tended crop of turnips the challenge gets a bit muddy.

I never played a Harvest Moon game before the DS. I initially picked it up because I’d gone through that Animal Crossing phase where, after a while of not having played it you don’t want to start again because you just know the whole town will be full of weeds and all the neighbors will have moved away because you didn’t love them enough. Harvest Moon was sort of similar, just farming-themed, right?

Yeah, sort of. You live in a town and can perform activities to make money and add on to your house. It’s a little more structured. You can farm, mine, hire cheap labor, gamble, flirt with the girls in the town, go fishing, milk cows, and so on. It can be a little exhausting when you contemplate it, but if you can get over that hump and pick it up you’ll have a hard time running out of things that need doing.

I picked up the girl version, Harvest Moon DS Cute, the week it came out. I could be a girl! Hooray! I could flirt with boys instead of flirting with girls and feeling vaguely awkward about it. In the Japanese version, it was apparently still possible to flirt with girls under a “Best Friends” system. As an alternative to getting married you could have your best friend move in with you and eventually a stork leaves you both a baby. This is not in the US version, as the internet quickly taught me.

I only played the girl version for about 3 days before I got bored. It was less because of the inaccuracy and more because it really was EXACTLY THE SAME as the boy version I played last year, just with the main character’s sprite changed around and the ability to change clothes (groundbreaking feature!) tacked on.  On the one hand I knew this, but somehow I still hoped it would engage me more if I could just be a girl.

It’s not that it’s a bad game. I suppose farming simulators aren’t really for me. Or maybe I just don’t like any of the bachelors I can choose to marry. None of them strike me as my farm girl’s soul mate. I totally don’t want farm girl having their babies. I wanted to like it, but when I would rather stare at the floor on the train than play it I admit defeat. I’ll have to find another game. Professor Layton really spoiled me.

- jinx

it’s just a song about ping pong!