Why games should never be P/C

Developers are being asked to fix every dodgy detail, right down to the treatment of digital guinea pigs. But who does it actually help?

There’s been a flicker of controversy around Stardew Valley, the Life Sim / RPG farming game by Eric “ConcernedApe” Barone. It concerns a guinea pig and his treatment. One of the NPCs has a pet guinea pig who is, apparently, being kept in substandard conditions for the animal’s needs.

Not being a real guinea pig, you may wonder why this matters. “It sets a bad example,” goes the logic. “People, especially young and impressionable people, shouldn’t be given information that might lead them to harm guinea pigs.”

A consideration for the future, perhaps; next time, a developer could Google guinea pigs before drawing the cage. The question is whether or not ConcernedApe should go back and rescue the fictional guinea pig already in Stardew Valley.

The problem with altering an existing game is that it censors our reality. The reality is, ConcernedApe didn’t know that you shouldn’t put guinea pigs in exercise wheels, which means that probably quite a lot of other people don’t know that either. His mistake – and most people’s total lack of response to it – tells us something about society that we wouldn’t otherwise have learned.

View full article at this link, on Gamers.

 

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.

Exploration & Cookery Game

One thing that I find disappointing about Skyrim is how cooking serves no purpose. There’s a paltry Xbox achievement for cooking, mining and chopping wood once. The health benefits you get from cooking are nothing compared to the most inexperienced alchemy, the ingredients of which are cheaper and abundant. Besides which, pre-made potions are two a penny – much more common than cooking spits.

Then there’s the fact that you mainly find food items in towns, where you least need health items. The weight values of vegetables versus their healing properties make them not worth carrying around. Finally, if you calculate it, you notice that selling the individual food items raw fetches more gold than cooking them together. Not that any of them are worth anything like as much as any other piece of junk you can pick up out in the field.

It makes food in Skyrim a gimmick, one that you’ll get bored of quickly – just like chopping wood, which is the least time-efficient way of making money. If you never stole a single item in the whole game, you’d still make plenty of money just going out questing. If you don’t go out and quest, there’s no point playing Skyrim in the first place, which is an exploration RPG, not a life sim. In other words, cooking is pointless.