7) Harvest Moon: Friends of Mineral Town
This game will ruin your life. For those of you that don’t know the usual Harvest Moon formula, you inherit a shithole farm from some relative that obviously hated you, and it’s your job to sort the damn place out. Yup, you just got trolled from beyond the grave.
So now you have to plant seeds, break rocks, chop wood, cut up grass like it stole your wallet and feed your damn chickens just to make some money. Sounds boring right? It’s a good thing you can take a Gameboy Advance outside, or you’d just seem like a nerd for playing this! Just wait until you play it, it’s addictive as crack and Sick Chirpse combined.
Just like in real life, the main aim seems to be repetitively giving girls items every day for months at a time (some of these items ain’t easy to get hold of, either) until they eventually realize you must be Scrooge MacDucking in money to afford all those fried eggs you fed them and they will agree to marry you. You have to get a double bed first though, or they’ll just think you got all that money from Student Finance.
Friends of Mineral Town gets damn bizarre at times. You can summon a demon by throwing cucumbers into a lake, dig until you’re practically at the center of the earth, bet on the horse races and even marry a Pagan deity if you fulfill some even more mind-splittingly obscure and difficult challenges. Also, the pink-haired girl likes it when you give her weeds — I guess she’ll be popular among veteran Sick Chirpsers. What else would you expect from Japan?
There’s also a game called More Friends of Mineral Town in which the main character is a girl and you get to marry boys. What? Of course gay marriage is too much to ask, now leave me alone while I summon a demon and make these elves my slaves!
The only problem with Harvest Moon is that the music, unlike basically every other entry on this list, is painfully repetitive, so cut that noise off by turning down your volume and blazing Sleigh Bells or whatever you trendy pricks are listening to nowadays.
[TEST url=’http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WaM-iNv0Pq4′]
