Archives for September 2005

Last month’s rental was Harvest Moon: Another Wonderful Life. I figured this would be a cute, simple game I could play with the buttonDaughter. It has everything she likes – farm animals, adorable puppies, and cute little girls. Unfortunately watching Daddy cultivate the garden wasn’t very exciting. She had a lot of fun naming our animals but that was about it. You know the game is going to be bad when a two-year old’s favorite part was naming the animals. She got bored after a couple minutes. Daddy got bored about fifteen minutes later.

I don’t like games like The Sims. If my digital counterpart can’t manage to feed himself then he deserves to go hungry. I don’t like babysitter sims. I lost interest in The Sims after about a half hour. I got tired of waking my sim up at 5 in the morning just to make sure he was ready to catch his ride to work at 8. If he overslept, he didn’t get breakfast. Then he’d be hungry and complain all day. I also got tired of making him do his business on the porcelain throne. I don’t know why it took my stupid sim 45 minutes to take a crap and a bath. If I sent him to work without making a bathroom run he’d either crap his pants or stink from not bathing. Half the time I’d mismanage the time and he’d be in the tub when his ride to work arrived. There was no “jump out of the bath and run out to tell your ride to wait a minute” button. So he’d miss work. Then he’d mope around the house all day because he didn’t have anything to do. I told him if he’d stop taking 40 minute baths he’d actually make it to work on time. He didn’t listen. He’d just drop half his lunch on the floor and let it sit until it gathered maggots. He angered me so I quit playing. I did the humane thing and just deleted the save file. I didn’t build walls around him and watch him die. Sometimes I wish I had. That would have been a lot more fun. So yeah, I don’t really like Sims-type games.

Back to Harvest Moon. After naming my pets and getting through the intro tutorial, I set about the business of farm work. I went and bought some seeds and proceeded to plant them in the wrong type of soil. They wilted and died in the period of three days. Then, my little character started making this wierd “gurr” sound. It took me two days to realize she was hungry. I couldn’t buy her food because I wasted all my money on seeds and fertilizer. I couldn’t drink the milk I got from my cow because I needed to sell it for money to buy more seeds because the ones I planted earlier had already died. The seeds that did take root grew too slow to rely on them. I wanted to eat my little puppy but I couldn’t find the button to do that. My chicken coop was empty and no one around town seemed to care that I was wandering aimlessly as my stomach growled. Not my idea of fun. I shut the game off and never looked back. There was never a moment when I thought, “this isn’t a bad game.” It was boring. I didn’t have time to cultivate each and every little square in my garden, then plant a seed in each and every square in my garden, and then water each and every frickin’ square in my garden. That’s just not my idea of fun. So I quit. I didn’t want to play a babysitter sim.

I already have a real one. And this one comes complete with trips to the potty and stinky diapers.