Harvest Moon: Back To Nature
 

Just picked this up for my Playstation. Freakin' love this game it's like what Animal Crossing should be. I'm going to plant turnips in the shape of mega-man on my field.

Fuck YES this game was awesome. I still go back and play it every now and then, though I'll admit that my interest has never lasted me beyond the second spring, because Winter is just SOOOOOO BORING and by the time Spring comes along again I feel like starting from scratch all over again.

MAJOR NERD QUESTION: Will it be in the shape of a 1up, the standing sprite, shooting sprite, or maybe multiple 'Mans?

Def. the shooting sprite.

Also, does anyone know how long the game goes? Like do I get married, mak babby and that's it or do I get to keep farming?

Wasn't this the one with the HUGE gamebreaking bug that stopped you from ever getting married? Or was that another one? Can't remember, all the Harvest Moon's have terrible bugs.

But yeah Back To Nature's pretty damned fun but like Julford I never got far in it.

You get to keep farming after the end.

Though, I think if after the first three years (The official end) if you have a shitty farm they take it away.

Yeah, this was the last Harvest Moon I played in earnest, in part because I learned what shovelware meant and in part because I never thought they improved much on the N64/PSX version and that's a bad thing.

Has anyone tried Rune Factory Frontier? I'm a big fan of Harvest Moon games but the Wii main titles are pretty shit apparentely- I've heard Rune Factory is better?

I haven't tried anything after one of the first PS2 abominations, sadly. I'm tempted to get Friends of Mineral Town for the DS, since it's a remake of Back to Nature, but since I still have my Back to Nature disk and I'm sure they removed the ability to copy your file and trade your cows over to yourself, I imagine I can't cheat my way to having a full house and married by the end of Winter 1.

Winter 1 is REALLY boring.

I enjoyed Harvest Moon 64, A Wonderful Life, and a few of the PS titles

I want to play RFF but I haven't got around to getting it, but I really like Rune Factory on the DS

RFF is pretty good but is stymied by the Runeys mechanic. Basically they're little organisms that have their own food chain and which help your farm become more efficient. Unfortunately, managing them is the most tedious shit ever and the game doesn't give you any help besides giving you the food chain itself, and a map so you can see which Runeys are where. It would be fine if you could just ignore it, but if you want certain kinds of food or plants to not take forever to grow you have to start managing them correctly since having a good balance of runeys speeds up the growth of your farm's produce I think. There are guides to doing it well on the internet though.

The other RF games lack this mechanic and are decent in themselves. The first one does have a fairly major bug though iirc.

I wouldn't call it a bug so much as an Oversight

One of the caves you can only enter during the winter, when the water around it freezes. If you dick around too long, and don't come out of the cave until spring starts, you are stuck if you don't have enough Rune to use the teleport to home Magic.

But that isn't a bug, that's bad planning on the user's part...or is there some actual bug I am missing?

I'm pretty sure it liked to randomly delete your saves if you left it untouched for a while. But aside from that, it was kind of badly balanced, not that it matters much. Once you got access to decent ores and a good hammer you could earn all your money mining things and ignoring your farm forever, since ores sold for a lot more than farm produce, even early game.