Category Archives: Harvest Moon

Bachelors



My love of Harvest Moon is well-documented, and thus it’s with great pleasure that I present this incredible gift given to me by artist Tanuki-nyo, featuring my favorite bachelors from the game (left to right: Vaughn, Cliff, Trent and Gray). Much, much appreciated!

I always pick the emo ones.

Shooter Shooter Shooter Shooter

Sometimes I get triple-A fatigue and I feel just a little tapped out. I find myself a little niche where the only gaming of note I do is on my DS. I can dump hundreds of hours into a Harvest Moon or Pokemon game and never look back — in fact, I’m not even HeartGold or SoulSilver-ing yet because I’m just focusing on Harvest Moon: Sunshine Islands. Yep, that’s about it!

These phases lend themselves to being light on blogging — at times like that, I’m glad I have my Twitter to toss quick thoughts and links out to you guys. Of course, I’m also busy as usual at Gamasutra. You know I love indie games that try to push or change the medium; I spent time with Jason Rohrer’s Sleep is Death, my writing on which you might have read at Kotaku, so just a little bit later, I caught up with the fascinating, loquacious and giant-brained Eskil Steenberg at Gamasutra to talk about his work on the impressionist-art MMO (though he resists the word “MMO”) LOVE.
We talk about how he suddenly decided to develop his own self-contained game engine and persistent multiplayer world without any significant design experience (truly, truly impressive), and why LOVE is, in his view, completely different than other games, most of which don’t interest him much.
I went to see Crysis 2 unveiled in New York City late last week, and I talked to Crytek boss Cevat Yerli about why, in a world where crappy-looking Facebook games can pull millions of users in just a few weeks (as venture capitalists are I think over-fond of pointing out), AAA graphics still matter. Last night on Jimmy Fallon (Kotaku has video), Cliff Bleszinski answered “graphics” first of all when asked what makes a blockbuster — because they “pull people in” initially, he qualified. Yerli and Bleszinski both work for companies with perhaps the largest footprints in the high-end development engine biz, so certainly they have an interest in that point of view.
Oh yeah, Bleszinski was premiering Gears 3‘s trailer, by the way. It has a lot of ashes and dust in it, kind of like Crysis 2‘s trailer. Ashes are so in for 2011! Seriously, it looks cool, though, and as Cliff says, it has female soldiers for the first time. He says that’s thanks to fan feedback.
Most of my time yesterday, however, was spent covering the latest and greatest in the Activision-versus-Infinity Ward drama, which you know I have been following in some depth for some time. As I’m sure you’ve heard by now, exiled IW bosses Jason West and Vince Zampella now have their own studio in Respawn Entertainment, and surprise-surprise, they have EA’s backing. Wedbush’s Michael Pachter told me this is the ‘ultimate screw-you’ to Activision.
I would guess the ‘ultimate screw-you’ to Activision will happen when employees of not only Infinity Ward, but of certain other studios under its umbrella who are sick of being crunched to obscene, five-years-ago levels try to get out and send their resumes to what’s likely to be a more comfortable situation. At Respawn, I would assume they put lights in the cubicles all the time, not just when the press is visiting.
But anyway, after writing about them for weeks on weeks now, it was neat to finally talk to Zampella, West and EA (read my interview!), even if just on the studio kickoff. Most people assume the two are going to lead some kind of Modern Warfare killer on EA’s behalf, although they aren’t yet willing to confirm anything whatsoever about their project. Theoretically, they could be making anything, although I’m not exactly expecting a cartoon platformer.
It’ll be interesting to see how their product is positioned — after all, anything that competes with Modern Warfare is going to compete with Battlefield, too. As Pachter said to me yesterday, the vertex of the market that would make the most sense for the pair is the future/sci-fi-ish genre, where their only major rival would be a little franchise called Halo (and maybe Killzone or something).
Shooter, shooter, shooter, shooter. Graphics, graphics, graphics, graphics. Bummer that the industry’s top talent keeps making the same kind of games. Or maybe I’m not the market. If you’re into this kinda thing, you must be going out of your head with this bounty of exciting news.
Now I return to Harvest Moon, where I will plant and pluck turnips over and over and over and over and over.

The Good Ending


How’s your PlayStation 3 this morning? Mine is afflicted with the same problem that a lot of others seem to have. I hope it’s fixed soon, because I want to play Heavy Rain.


At the same time, is it so terrible that I feel glad to have a reprieve from AAA gaming, a tidy excuse not to move on immediately from the exhausting emotional wringer that is BioShock 2‘s Rapture? Speaking of which, here is my review of BioShock 2, which I think encompasses the things I think are stronger than the original versus weaker.
I think probably the biggest open issue I have with BioShock 2 is that harvesting Little Sisters feels so irrational that the option to do so seems excessively heavy-handed — as if it existed to support the game’s messages about choice, rather than to contribute to the gameplay. The sheer variety of options BioShock 2 gives you to take out your enemies makes it wholly unnecessary to feel so desperate for ADAM that you harvest Little Sisters.
So does the fact that, as a player, you feel more familiar with Rapture now. It doesn’t lose any of its compelling qualities, and its advanced state of decay actually makes it more breathtaking in places (my favorite moments of the game were due entirely to certain arrangements of its scenery). But you don’t have that sense of being lost, of being desperate, that you had as Jack in the first game. Not only do you know your way around now, so to speak, but you’re wearing a Big Daddy suit.
The effect of being a Big Daddy is twofold: You feel more powerful (and the other Big Daddies feel wonderfully lonesome and tragic, not so scary). But beyond that, you feel more of an attachment to the girls. Big Daddies and Little Sisters were introduced to us via inseparable imagery, and now we’re expected to conceive of killing one — especially within the context of a narrative that asks us to risk everything to get one “back”?
This obviously is not a deal-breaker for me, not by a long shot. Even if the option to do the irrational simply exists as a way for the player to experiment with the game’s philosophical framework, rather than to feel immersive and genuine, I’m glad it’s there. I’m not sure I’d mind if “Harvest or Rescue” were part of the BioShock framework for future sequels.
Which brings me to something else I’ve just written! I promised I’d explore the idea of sequelizing games that don’t “need” sequels in the context of BioShock 2, and I’ve done so over at Gamasutra. Check it out!
Finally, I really believe that whether a “flaw” is a deal-breaker for you or not depends on what your motivation is for playing video games. My latest Kotaku feature investigates how different kind of games scratch different itches, and how a certain weakness in one type of game might not be as big a problem in another.
Meanwhile, while I wait for Sony to fix whatever this PS3 problem is, I’ve been playing Harvest Moon: Sunshine Islands on DS for hours and hours and hours. It’s like crack to me. Bonus Material: My original Aberrant Gamer column on gender identity and Harvest Moon marriage.
I feel like I’m not even done talking about BioShock 2 yet. It never fails to amaze me how we as audiences demand increasingly complex and sustaining experiences, and yet every game we get, we bang through as fast as possible so we can get to discussing the next one. Sucks.