Transport and fast travel

When I’m walking around IRL, I often think how great it would be if you could skitch, jump on a horse, a bike, a motorbike, a moped, a scooter, a skateboard, rollerblades, ice skates, a passing dragon, a helicopter, a power boat, a kayak, on top of a car, the back of a moving bus / train, climb up a building, jump between buildings, hang-glide or parachute off a building, take a lift instantly to the top of a building, sprint infinitely, run on water, teleport anywhere in the world, or otherwise sprout wings and fly. All of these things are available to you in one video game or another. But no video game contains them all.

OK, so it would be odd to have rollerskates in the same game as dragons, and some of these transport options do overlap – you don’t need to be able to skitch and jump on the back of a bus. All you need basically is:

1) A way to travel long distances more or less instantly

2) A way to travel short distances quite quickly

3) A way to travel a scenic route at a decent pace

4) An autopilot travel option that follows the logic and satisfies the impatience of a human player

5) A way to spontaneously generate or easily access all of these options.

Why die in the sandbox?

I live in a house with two older people who don’t play video games. People who don’t play video games often wonder why people who do play video games get so wound up by them. In part, it’s because the engine is inconsistent in achieving what it’s supposed to, compared to real life; think what it would be like if for some reason you go to climb a wall, and you somehow accidentally spring-board off of it straight into the adjacent lake. It should be funny, but you’re having a hard time seeing the joke because, for no reason, you didn’t achieve what you wanted and you got wet.

Doesn’t that sound pointless and annoying? Well, that’s what happens when you die in video games. Non-gaming peoples usually suggest not playing games at all “if they make you so upset”. My response is to say that they’re not likely to become the utopia of fantastical hysteria they’ve been long promising to be if no one plays them and takes to the internet in fury over insensitive game design. When you’re scuba diving in your living room and it feels for all the world like you’re on a real life coral reef, you’ll thank us. And so will the environment.

How to enjoy Harvest Moon

It sounds strange to advise people on how best to enjoy a video game. After all, they are made for enjoyment. The problem is, life sims like Harvest Moon are formulaic, and attract people with a meticulous nature, who get too attached to doing as much as possible, as well as possible, as fast as possible.

Especially as Harvest Moon games generally work at about x10 speed – so ten minutes real time is ten hours game time. This makes you run around like a headless chicken trying to finish everything until the day ends, and you get to start all over again.

A bit of hurrying is fine, because the challenge of that game is basically your ability to Win At Life, which is why life sims have a draw on people with an obsessive streak; real life doesn’t operate so predictably, so life sims give you an escape from unpredictability. But in order to stop my fellow obsessives from falling down the rabbit hole of frustration at one’s inability to Do All The Things, here is a list of things to avoid doing – against the game’s own advice.

Harvest Moon: Friends of Mineral Town – Stamina and Fatigue items

Harvest Moon: Friends of Mineral Town is a classic Harvest Moon on the GBA and one of the best in the franchise. Its complexity makes for a number of challenges certainly not found in A Wonderful Life on the Gamecube, for example. In this walkthrough, I explain stamina and fatigue, and list the values of stamina and fatigue replenishing items.