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The game I played the most hours on in my childhood was not the Crash Bandicoot series, nor was it the Spyro, or the Pokemon franchises. That trophy goes to a little series called Harvest Moon. The premise of the series is simple; your grandfather, or some elderly friend/relation, has died and left you a farm, where you spent many happy memories but is now rundown. Your job is to renovate the farm and make it start earning a tidy profit, equipped with only the most basic tools and a small amount of money. Over time, you plant crops, raise animals, fish, mine, cook, scour the surrounding countryside for valuable nature, interact with the local town, marry one of the local girls (while fighting off rivals), upgrade your small little house into a veritable mansion, attend the local festivals and win the admiration of the Harvest Goddess and Sprites, who will thank you for your gifts by helping you out on the farm. That's a pretty exhaustive list, yet it doesn't capture the enjoyment that you get playing this game.
The best game of the series for me was the one on the Game Boy Advance, Harvest Moon: Friends of Mineral Town. I remember a 4 hour plane trip to Italy that got stopped by innumerable delays, not to mention tempestuous weather, and I was blithely unaware, sowing, watering, and harvesting my turnip crops, trying to get them in the shipping basket before the 5am deadline when everything would be taken away and you would be given your earnings. No amount of shooting aliens in face in Halo could compare to the grit with which I would press 'B', making my farmer sprint across the field and lob the last turnip into the basket before the deadline with a throw Rory Delap would be proud of. Nurturing the farm and seeing it turn into an economic powerhouse gave me a joy that,at 13 life, few things could equal (Girls did not yet exist).
However girls featured most prominently in the game. My target was the nurse Elli. However I was being thwarted by my rival, 'The Doctor' who had the advantage of having the entire working day to force himself upon her. However, I found that by giving milk daily to her, her affection soon became the level required to marry her. My advice for would-be suitors in real life is NOT to give your love a pint of semi-skimmed every day unless she has a serious dairy addiction, but it worked for me! However, before I could tie the knot, I had to enlarge my farm and buy the double bed. It's an unusual set of rules; I for one, would not welcome a law in real life that said before you could get hitched you had to go through Grand Designs; however in the game she succumbed to my obvious charms.
It is very hard to pinpoint what makes Harvest Moon so addictive. You are effectively performing drudgery that you would shy from in real life but here the drudgery is fun. Finally earning enough cash to install a mayonnaise machine into your chicken coop is a huge milestone, a day of joy. The graphics are cute and twee; and when your animals do eventually die you feel a sense of loss. The immense amount of secrets within the game, such as getting all the recipies all the minerals underground will take a good deal of time and it does have immense replay value. It's probably around for about a fiver on eBay - I can say nothing more than buy it.
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