Harvest Moon: Colobocle Station (Nintendo DS) Preview

The Harvest Moon series may look calm. It may look relaxing. It may look like the ideal game to wash away the stresses and strains of modern living and encapsulate you in the unique charms of simple manual labour. Anyone who has played the game will confirm that that is utter bollocks. Harvest Moon is possibly the most stressful game ever created. All these sheep, chickens, cows, horses (well, horse), wife and even little bambino's all depend on you. If you muck up then.... God knows what'll happen. And to make matters worse, a tragedy has befallen Forget Me Not Valley in the DS version.

The Harvest Goddess has turned to stone. "So what?" I hear you cry; well without the Goddess you won't be able to marry any of the fine females in the valley. So no goddess, no wedding and (seeing as there is no sex before marriage in Harvest Moon) no rumpy pumpy... ergo no children and nobody to run the farm when you are infirm/dead/murdered by child for lumping them with this work. So, this time you won't just be running the farm... you'll be saving the day!

The game is not that different from previous handheld iterations of Harvest Moon. You have inherited a farm and you have to run it whilst simultaneously wooing the ladies of the village in the hopes of getting hitches. Running the farm is only very slightly different. The same chores are present, feed the animals, milk the cows, collect the eggs, clear the field and so on and so forth. The change is that some chores can be done via the lovely bottom screen. Things like petting animals; shearing sheep, milking cows, cleaning horses and one or two other animal chores can be done with the flick of a wrist.

This game seems to be more inclined to refining the previous versions instead of innovating. Along with the touch screen stuff you can also now order goods via telephone to save trips into town, you can even hire the Harvest Sprites you save for work via the phone. There is also a teleport stone to zip you around town with ease, which seems quite lazy but there has been calls for something like that. There is also the addition of a casino to while away the hours that you are not working on the farm. A nice idea, but going by experience there won't be much time that you won't be working on the farm...

Graphics are just like the GBA version, with large GC version esque 3d visuals being shown for the touch screen sections. This is quite suitable as the game itself is quite the mix of the GBA and GC versions of Harvest Moon. The character list is taken from the most "popular" characters from each game and even the town itself is a mish mash of both games. It would've been nice to have a new town... new characters but I guess we'll have to make do with the new story.

We mentioned the plot earlier, the Harvest Goddess getting stoned...well made into stone. To fix this you have to befriend all sixty Harvest Sprites dotted around town. This sounds like a lovely diversion to the main game...well not really. You see this actually puts a timer on the revered "endless" gameplay. Once you nab all the sprites it's game over. Best take that into consideration before you race around trying to find all of them, wouldn't be nice to find an unexpected end to the game just as your farm is getting up to speed.

So Harvest Moon DS is looking as expected, the usual experience with a few extras and limited touch screen stuff. This is all well and fine but it hardly sets the gaming world alight and the entire Harvest Moon series is beginning to feel a bit stale with every update. This is shaping up to be the most definitive yet, and maybe it should be the last iteration we see until the guys and gals at Natsume can reinvent the franchise... we'll find out when it's released in the UK in the Summer.