Tumgik
#season in review
gordiemeow · 1 year
Text
If anyone is curious how much I value the Wings over my own sanity, I watched at least two periods of 78 games live on TV or in person.
6 notes · View notes
colorful-horses · 2 months
Text
Tumblr media
charlie
3K notes · View notes
novelconcepts · 2 years
Text
The defintion of hell is knowing a show is incredibly well-received in its first season, but if people don’t become machines churning out tweets, content, and rewatching 24/7, there’s no likelihood it’ll get a chance to tell its whole story. This shit is madness. Shows in different genres shouldn’t have to pit-battle for dominance. First seasons are MEANT to be baselines establishing worlds and characters, not complete storylines. The idea that this golden age of television has turned into “get it done in one or get out” is revolting.
36K notes · View notes
moonflowergayy · 8 months
Text
Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media
Good Omens (2019-) + Letterboxd reviews⭐
bonus:
Tumblr media
3K notes · View notes
neil-gaiman · 7 months
Text
This is nice.
2K notes · View notes
animereviewsxx · 6 months
Text
Spy X Family: Season 2 Episode 2
Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media
Shout out to Damians friends and the teachers at Eden for noticing that there was something wrong with Damian and trying to cheer him up.
Seeing Damian smile and have fun just being a kid makes me so happy!
580 notes · View notes
thesoftboiledegg · 5 months
Text
Tumblr media
"Unmortricken" was a lot. In fact, it might have been a little too much.
To start, I loved the glimpse of what exists outside the Central Finite Curve. The visuals were stunning and reminded me of M.C. Escher's drawings. The Jetson-like family was a nice touch--if anything can happen, who says they can't have different animation styles? All those colorful portals make me wonder what's lurking just out of sight.
It's also funny that the space outside the Curve is full of Rick's favorite thing: crystals. If he took a trip there, he'd come back with his pockets stuffed with gemstones.
Evil Morty's reappearance gave us a decent character study. Since he wasn't the antagonist, we saw him interact with the C-137s as a regular person. Morty's a little impressed, and Rick has a grudging respect for him. Others have called Evil Morty the Rickest Morty, and I agree: similar intelligence, similar technology and similar bloodthirst.
I was glad that he left in the end because that's what his character arc is about anyway. He doesn't want to be part of anyone else's story, not even another Morty's.
Tumblr media
However, that's also part of the issue that I had with this episode. Seeing Evil Morty was great, but it was also a little...pointless? You could've had the same story without him. He's not working with Prime, and he has no ties to C-137 after "Rickmurai Jack," so it felt like the writers just said "Hey, you know what would be cool?"
I'm not against writers having fun and giving the audience what they want. "Spider-Man: No Way Home" (yeah, groan at me, Marvel haters) is fan service in blockbuster form, and it was one of the best theater experiences I've ever had.
Still, if Evil Morty came back, I think he should've had a separate episode. The episode juggled C-137 Rick, Morty, Evil Morty and Prime Rick pretty well, giving them satisfying interactions with each other, but no Evil Morty would've meant more relationship development for the C-137s.
Evil Morty's backstory also didn't reveal much about him. I mean--yeah, we all figured that he had an abusive Rick and got fed up. The fact that he had a "regular" Rick instead of a deranged lunatic does make a point about the banality of abuse. Monsters aren't always raving maniacs who torture people in their basements. Ordinary people can wear you down with a slow drip of toxicity and neglect.
I enjoyed this episode, and Evil Morty's return was exciting, but cramming the series' two biggest antagonists and storylines into twenty minutes was a little overwhelming. New plot developments kept showing up, too: Rick found Prime! Prime's various lairs! Omega device! I would've preferred a two-parter.
Tumblr media
I'll admit that if you told me that we'd see Evil Morty and Rick Prime in the same shot, I never would have believed you, but here we are.
On that note, Prime's characterization was perfect. No attempt at a cutesy, sad backstory; he's a laughing monster until the end. And is it really the end? He has regeneration abilities, but C-137 acts like he's dead and even gives up the search. This leaves us with a few options:
C-137 killed him.
Prime fooled C-137 into thinking that he's dead when he isn't.
C-137's keeping him alive for later use.
Hopefully, this is more complicated than it looks because I'll be disappointed if this is the end of Prime. He's a brilliant reflection of C-137: the Rick he'd be without his tiny shred of humanity.
And Prime's a maniac, but he tells C-137 the truth. Rick broke into Prime's house. He pretended he belonged with this group of strangers. He latched on to Prime's grandson because he never had his own. His brutal, violent streak never went away no matter how long he tried to play house.
Prime says "Admit it! You would have been me!" In season three and parts of season four, Rick was close. His love for his family--love that he pretended he didn't have--and desire for their approval just barely pulled him back. But what kept that spark alive? How close was he to becoming a cold, unfeeling shell?
In the end, C-137's not satisfied after he destroys Prime--and weirdly, I'm not satisfied, either. Beating Prime to an unrecognizable pulp doesn't bring Rick's original family back. It doesn't erase the atrocities that Rick's committed. It doesn't make his grief go away. It doesn't change the fact that Rick teetered on the edge of turning into the monster that he despised.
Tumblr media
What's more satisfying is that Rick didn't turn out like Prime. His Morty doesn't give two shits about Prime, but he loves him. He hugs him in relief (come on, Rick, hug him back already!), cries out "Rick? Rick!" and shakes his body when he thinks he's dead, and talks excitedly as they return home.
Rick's going to therapy, which Prime would have mocked. He went from having nobody to living with FIVE kids if you count Morty and Summer. Even he and his Jerry are pretty tight.
Rick knows this, but he still feels empty all the time. Vengeance doesn't work, drinking doesn't work...wouldn't it be easier if he just switched off his humanity and laughed at everything, even his own death?
But now that he knows how it feels to be loved, especially by his hypothetical grandson, I think he'll always find himself at the Smiths' doorstep.
420 notes · View notes
mlpoutofcontext · 1 year
Text
Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media
2K notes · View notes
chalkrub · 6 months
Text
Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media
art trade stuff for @sharkflan ! love these thangs
459 notes · View notes
irresia · 3 months
Text
okay it's been around hm 10 hours since s3 dropped and here is my full review of the season
Tumblr media
this season feels like a fucking hallucination i was fED SO WELL
312 notes · View notes
doritynant · 7 months
Text
REPOSTEEN ESTO ‼️‼️‼️
Buenas genteee. Solo para recordarles de que mañana se cumple un mes desde que salió Good omens, y se piensa hacer un ReWatch a lo grande. Vean la serie todo el día!!! (O el tiempo que puedan). No olviden también subir cositas de good omens con los #RenewGoodOmens o #GoodOmensSeason3 a partir de las 3 pm en 'X'.
Los amo gente!!! Vamos por esa temporada 3!!! (Etiqueten a Amazon, a Neil, a quien quieran)
______________________
SHARE THISSS ‼️‼️‼️
Hey people! Just to remind you that tomorrow will be a month since Good omens came out, and we plan to do a ReWatch in a big way. Watch the series all day!!! (Or as long as u can). Don't forget to also upload good omens stuffs with #RenewGoodOmens or #GoodOmensSeason3 starting at 3pm on 'X'.
I love y'all people!!! Let's go for that season 3!!! (Tag Amazon, Neil, whoever you want)
Tumblr media Tumblr media
483 notes · View notes
braisedhoney · 9 months
Text
Tumblr media Tumblr media
so this is basically the whole space trip thing right.
777 notes · View notes
libraryleopard · 2 months
Text
Tumblr media
the true detective reddit is primarily full of haters but this post did make me laugh
176 notes · View notes
stemmmm · 3 months
Text
Close to a year and four rewrites later, I present to you...
Stem's Thoughts on the Game Design of Harvest Moon on SNES
Tumblr media
I’m not going to lie, if you don’t like farming sims, you won’t like this one. At their core, every farming sim (at least in the rpg genre) is nearly identical, and that’s because of this game. In a way, I might dare to say that Harvest Moon for the SNES is the perfect farming sim because it has every one of the usual elements in their most simplified form and it just works straight from the get-go. It works so well in fact, that after this game came out in 1996, four more entries to the series were released before the year 2000.
If you are someone who does like farming sims, I can’t recommend this game enough. It’s simple and to the point, with a fast pace and enough random events and points of intrigue that the game kept me relatively engaged for my whole playthrough.
Also, by nature of this being the first game and therefore hard to cover concisely and by nature of taking so long to write this... it's long as hell! Enjoy! :) <3
I can’t say my appreciation of this game doesn’t come with a few caveats. I’ve intermittently played HM games all my life, starting with the GameBoy port (GB1) all the way to Pioneers of Olive Town, so while I don’t know exactly how the series has evolved, I’ve seen it at some of its earliest and at its latest. My vague childhood memories of GB1 (a game I didn’t own and didn’t play much of) were that it was pretty sparse and bland, so knowing that this original game was allegedly the same thing but with a little more content, I was expecting the bare minimum. I was prepared to never even be able to leave my farm, but the first thing the game did was shuttle me off to the nearby town and blocked the exit until I talked to everyone there. 
Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media
(Maps of the town, mountain, and farm via The Spriters Resource)
You learn everything you need to know about the game right here at the beginning; Firstly, that this town is small as all hell and has hardly anyone in it aside from the five girls you can marry and their immediate family members. The next thing you’ll learn is that there’s a fence on your farm, and you need to be taking care of that. Of the few repetitive lines of dialogue any given person in town has to share with you on any given day, a fair amount are devoted to reminding you to fix your fence, to make sure it’s in good repair. There was just a big storm so watch out! Remember to check it every day! Are you chopping enough wood? Because you’ll need it for that fence!
I’m being dramatic of course, you aren’t reminded about it that much, though the thin variation of dialogue means it comes up a lot. The emphasis on your fence does exist, and it isn’t for nothing: while it doesn’t matter as much if all you do is grow crops– if you keep animals, the game tells you that the ideal thing to do for yours and the animal’s happiness is to put the animals outside to graze. Animal feed bought from the livestock shop will keep them fed, but it's nothing compared to fresh grass grown on your farm. You can’t even buy animals without a certain amount of grass planted! And sure, you can cut the grass to store for later, but it’s at its best straight out of the ground. However, the way the game is programmed, the animals only eat when the day rolls over, so putting animals outside for the day and taking them in at night isn’t an option, and on top of that, there’s things that come out at night that can hurt your animals. This is where your fence comes in.
Tumblr media
The Utility of Fences
At the entrance to your farm is a cluster of buildings: your house, a small lumber shed, a barn, coop, and silo, a tool shed, and an old, dried up well. Just barely surrounding all of these is a little wooden fence that looks more like a row of upright logs than anything else. Despite this farm having presumably been abandoned, the fence is in perfect repair. You’ll quickly discover that the fence as it is won’t work out; there’s hardly space to plant anything within it, and with the well dried up, you’re forced to hop it to get to a water source to fill up your watering can. It’s pretty clear that you’ll need to expand your fence, and it’s easy to do with all of the tree stumps littering the massive field that it’s blocking off. 
On top of needing to expand the range of your fence, the individual planks eventually will rot away and leave useless stumps. They show up more frequently after rain or a large storm. The posts don’t rot away completely so they have to be manually removed, but replacing them is as simple as smashing the old post with a hammer or ax and popping a new post in its place. It becomes a very natural part of your daily routine to run a lap around the farm’s perimeter before you go to bed to make sure everything looks safe and secure. It’s a good way to ensure your animals are put away and debris is cleared out, too! It slotted very nicely into my daily schedule until a certain point.
Tumblr media Tumblr media
With how much time you have to spend hopping over the logs to get to the rest of the area too large to fence in, you might be tempted to leave one out of place for easier traversal. When night comes, it’s clear why that would be a mistake. Sometimes when you go to bed, you’ll hear your dog barking. It’s a small detail, one that took me a long time to notice because I didn’t always play with the sound on. There are wild dogs that prowl around the wilderness surrounding your farm, and only at night do they dare to come close. Your dog, if left outside, isn't able to do anything other than warn you of their presence if they show up. There’s nothing to notice during the daytime if it happens, unless you happened to leave one of your animals outside. There was one night that I left my chickens outside, having thought my fence was in perfect order and repair. I went to bed and heard the dog barking, followed by a horrible crunch. When I went out in the morning, I saw where my chicken had been before, it had been replaced by a pile of feathers. On the north side of my farm was a rotted fence post I’d failed to fix. 
The Reality of Fences
After losing my chicken, a cluster of pixels on my screen it may have been, I didn’t feel comfortable leaving my animals outside. I didn’t want to take a risk again, the sound and sight of feathers was upsetting enough. On a more logical note, the chickens didn’t even lay eggs if left outside so there was no value in it. Cows were a pain to put back inside the barn too, because of some silliness with the game’s collision. As much of a disappointment as it was to not have my animals roam around, it was just easier. At the time, I was focusing on upgrading my house anyways, so I didn’t have time to take care of my animals outside where time would pass when I could use that time gathering wood, and everything I had was being saved up for the house so I didn’t have any extra materials to repair my fence with. My fence was all rotting away. Because it was inconvenient for getting to my crops, I started smashing all the old posts as they went, too. That’s when I noticed something: the wild dog wasn’t coming anymore.
Tumblr media Tumblr media
I didn’t pay much attention to it until I was looking up a completely different mechanic and discovered a forum explaining how the fences were broken. Rotted posts attracted the wild dog, they said. It didn’t matter if you had gaps in your fence, or even a fence at all–in fact no fence was the best kind to have because the mere existence of posts that could rot was a liability. 
I was hesitant at first to test this concept, after all there wasn’t much I could gain from it. My chickens wouldn’t lay outside, and my cows would be too challenging to get back in if the forecast called for rain. The thing that got me to finally try it was when I was trying to hatch more chickens. My coop felt like a nightmare to navigate due to its current population. I wanted less animals inside that I had to feed, so I threw a couple chicks outside–they weren’t laying yet anyways. Lo and behold, the dog didn’t come. More days passed and more animals were left outside, and it never came. My fence had rotted until there was nothing left at all. No dogs could ever come to my farm again. And I realized that the game’s own insistence on its mechanics was all a lie.
How You’re Told To Play - How The Game Lies
Of course, my animals didn’t stay outside. For a minute it was fun having a crowd of cows milling about while I tended to my crops, but letting them wander free and uninhibited made it impossible to find and milk all of them without any trouble, and there were the rainy days to watch out for. After the novelty wore off, they went back inside and stayed there. The thing is, that didn’t make a single bit of difference in how much they liked me compared to how they were living in the barn. On top of that, they didn’t seem to care whether I was feeding them grass or store-bought food either, though I mostly stuck to the grasses since they were cheaper and easier to get. Nothing about how I was told to care for animals really mattered past feeding them every day, petting it and maybe brushing it, if it was a cow.
Tumblr media Tumblr media
It gets worse. The most basic aspect of the game is the fact that time passes. The story takes place over 2 and a half years, running through each day until the end, and these days last from 6AM to 6PM according to the game’s own internal time setting. After 6PM, all of the shops aside from the bar will close and you lose the ability to sell anything as you’re told it would rot in the shipping bin overnight, so there’s nothing to do but sleep until the next day. Issue with this is that when the days stop at 6PM… they just stop. Time doesn’t flow anymore. The game doesn’t give you any kind of clock to know the exact time it is until after you’ve upgraded your house, so all you have to go by before that is the color of the environment and whether or not your character has played an animation to eat something (you’re automatically fed when you wake up, at noon, and at night). I discovered this because I was curious if I could actually see the wild dog by staying out, and left the game running for probably 20 minutes in real life only for nothing to happen. Because of the time freeze, the time after 6PM actually becomes really valuable for farm logistics. You can’t sell anything, no, but you can pull up all the weeds on the farm, water your crops, fix your fences, feed and care for animals if you hadn’t already, and harvest wood for fences and house upgrades which would have taken a lot of valuable time to get during shipping-hours. The only thing that gets in the way of doing all that is you running out of energy.
Your energy is what allows you to use your farming equipment like your ax or watering can. Running out of it doesn’t mean you fall unconscious or anything, but your character will play an animation of them stumbling over and will fail to use any tools. The most obvious fix to this is to simply go to bed, as sleeping gives you a full recharge. You can also, however, recharge it by going to the hot spring on the mountain, or by eating food bought at the restaurant in town or foraged for in the forest. You can’t tell easily how much is refilled, as there’s no visual indicator like a health bar, but you’re able to eat more than once, and jumping into the hot spring seems to count whether you did it or not more than how much time you spend in there, so you can hop in and out a couple of times and call it good. 
Tumblr media Tumblr media
Individually, time freezing at 6PM and energy being endlessly replenishable aren’t bad things. Even together, they’re not the worst. Having free time to focus on profitless chores is nice, and I think it’s important to be able to replenish your energy in case you have a limited amount of time to do things like for example, cut all of your grass before winter kills it. What makes an exploit out of these is the fact that the resources in the forest will never run out. Every time you re-enter the forest, all forage items and tree stumps are respawned. The infinite amount of forage makes for infinite energy refills, and could also make for an incredible money exploit if you didn’t have a very limited amount of time to ship things. You don’t have a limited amount of time to cut up tree stumps though. If you wanted to, you could run up to the forest after 6PM, chop every stump, then simply reload the area, and everything’s back. You can get all of the wood you would ever need to fully upgrade your house in one night. It’s a bit of a grind to do all at once, but it’s a grind you’d be doing over time anyways. It’s not the worst exploit in the world, since you still need money to pay for the house upgrade, but arguably because of how you have to focus your energy elsewhere for most of the game, the wood is the harder thing to get. Additionally, when the game has very little to do in both fall and winter due to the lack of crops, this exploit takes away just about any reason to play those two seasons other than to take care of animals. It’s an optional exploit of course–as all exploits are–but once you learn about it, it’s hard to resist the desire to get the grind out of the way all at once and mess up the pacing of the game.
Tumblr media
The Charm of the Game
Learning that the fences were completely broken as a mechanic was a huge disappointment for me. From the moment I got a grasp on how the game was supposed to work, I wanted to eventually surround my whole field with fencing and keep my animals outside so I would have some life on my farm while I worked. I didn’t just want this, I was excited for it! This was something I’d never done in a farming sim that didn’t already manage putting animals in and out for you like Stardew Valley or newer Story of Seasons games do. My routine is always the same: I go into the barn and coop to tend to each of my animals, I take care of my crops outside, then run straight to town to talk to everyone, and go to bed. The change in routine that would come from taking care of the animals outside and patrolling the fence every night felt fresh to me. It made me feel that even though this was the first game of its kind, it was different and required new things of me. But in the end, I played it exactly the same.
Harvest Moon is still very different from all of the games that followed it, though. In many ways, it’s because it has less “stuff” in it– both in terms of items and things you have to do. But I wouldn’t say that it feels incomplete. Harvest Moon runs over the course of 2 and a half years before your work is evaluated. Until that happens, you have the ability to farm four different crops, you can raise both cows and chickens, you can upgrade your house to have more features, upgrade your working tools, build relationships with the townspeople to a small extent, go to town festivals that happen each year, and you can get married to one of the five girls living in town with whom you can have up to two children. Everything that you would come to expect as a fan of games like this is already here from the very first iteration. The most notable lack this game has, and one that seems to be completely unique to this game, is that there aren’t any crops in the fall or winter, which means that unless you have animals, there’s a whole half of the year that you don’t have anything to do. The game is clearly aware of this though, because in an average playthrough, this is where you’ll start to run into the story events.
Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media
There isn’t much of an overarching story in the game, past the general concept that you’ve run away from home to work on an abandoned farm. The conclusion rests on how good of a job you actually do. In between those two points are smaller events, usually tied to when you get tool upgrades or special ones for each of the romantic interests. The first event you’re likely to run into happens on the very last day of summer, where one of the woodsmen comes to your house in the morning to ask if you’re okay because he heard a huge crash at night and you should check your farm. What I found was that a tree in my field had fallen over, and its remaining stump had a big empty hole in it. When I inspected the stump, I was suddenly underground in a cave filled with loud and industrious music, and I was faced with two, little green people–Harvest Sprites, though I don’t know if they’re called that yet here. One asked me if my scythe worked well, and when I said yes, told me that they had made it and that I should check my shed tomorrow for a better one. Other tool upgrades are obtained in similar fashion; one comes from feeding a starving sprite a mushroom and another comes from another hole in the farm opening up to reveal another part of the cave system that has a couple of hints on how to unlock other things. 
Tumblr media Tumblr media
The events for romantic interests happen at less scripted times, as they’re tied to how strong your relationship is with each girl. Each girl only has one event, and it only triggers when your relationship is high enough that you would ask her to marry you. The events usually take up a whole day, and don’t necessarily add much to each character. Ellen’s revolves around how she’s no good at keeping pets– something established on your second day at the farm when you get your dog from her, Eve’s hammers in her fraught relationship with her grandpa, and Ann’s is about losing the chicken weathervane, or “weathercock” which sits on the roof of her workshop and goes missing every time there’s a storm. Conversely, Nina and Maria’s scenes bring up entirely new events that bring up a number of questions while providing no answers. Nina disappears while looking for a medicinal plant because her mother is apparently sick, and Maria vanishes for days until you find her hiding away with the woodsmen for some reason. All of these events, whether they share new information or not, manage to add some greatly appreciated depth to each character by giving them more room to speak and be sincere than their short and repetitive day-to-day dialogues do.
Tumblr media Tumblr media
The dialogue in this game is simple, to the point, and sparse– probably because there was only so much memory that could be reserved for approximately 15 people who all have multiple lines of dialogue, and only so much money to pay someone to write more. There is simple dialogue that doesn’t tell you much more than “hello, how are you” would, more dialogue that I’d label as tutorial text, and a few lines that I truthfully couldn’t understand well because of the sub-par translation this game received for english. The dialogue that exists to inform the world really manages to create a unique vibe though. Nina’s dialogue, almost always about plants, goes into forays about how they’re creatures with wills to live, too. Ellen’s uncle who runs the ranch shop tells you that it’s much better to feed your animals fresh grass if you try to buy any from his store, and if you decline to purchase he laughs as if he’s won something. There’s even dialogue referencing the silent player! Multiple lines exist to comment on him not paying attention, and inspection prompts have people telling you not to touch something rather than being an item description. It was the last thing I expected, to get the same level of personality out of the main character as I did from each of the girls, albeit very subtly. He went from a kind of nothing, self-insert into being what I perceive to be a hyperactive boy, akin to a border collie who was let out into a field of sheep for the first time–the exact kind of person crazy enough to take on an abandoned farm and succeed.
Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media
It’s these short little character details that bring life into the game. Each day, you’ll really only see one line of dialogue from each character, be it new or old, with that dialogue usually only changing if there’s a change in season or festival coming up. The repetitive, pretty mindless routine of the game can turn into a sort of meditation if you let it, where you spend your time working thinking about the folks in town and what they had to say to you the previous day. The developers took this concept in stride and gave the side characters loads of dialogue about life, about God and religion, and about… very basic morals, but morals nonetheless. It’s a children’s game after all. When you take the thoughts, questions and prompts the characters give you back to the farm to do your long and tedious routine, you have to ask yourself– what are you working so hard for? For the feeling of accomplishment? Recognition from your peers? For the sake of some higher power, if you worship one? For me personally, it was to write this essay, but it was also for a good grade on the high score screen at the end, so to be honest a lot of this stuff was lost on me until just now when I was reviewing the game to get screenshots.
Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media
Setting The Standard - Why You Should Play HM SNES
You may read all of this and still think, well, it doesn’t sound like the game has much in it. And you would be right, it’s a very small game, but it’s also extremely quick. On average, my days only lasted about three minutes of real life time. Everything flew by, and I think I finished the game in 20 hours or less. I barely got a chance to notice that there wasn’t much going on because every second of my day was spent busy doing something, and when I wasn’t busy, the break was appreciated. I didn’t start to run out of things to do until I was finished with the second year, and when I looked up what I needed to do to get a decent ending, I was already most of the way there. It was easy to push through those last two seasons to get to the end, and it was so, so worth it. 
As I mentioned earlier, the game ends with a high score screen, meaning it has to track all of your accomplishments. These include, but are not limited to: the number of things you ship, number of each crop you grow, number of animals you have and how much they like you, how upgraded your house is, who you married, how much all of the girls in town like you if you didn't get married, how many kids you have (which basically equates to how long you were married), your happiness score (increased by going to festivals and decreased by having animals die), and how many times you’ve pet your dog. In addition to these being tallied up and presented to you, you get special cutscenes not just for each one of these accomplishments, but additional ones for if you managed to do even better! I got a cutscene for having a cow, followed by one for having lots of cows, followed by yet another for having cows that loved me! Watching them play one after the other felt like taking a victory lap even without getting the best possible result. Seeing all of my numbers come up at the end made me want to try again to actually get those other cutscenes, not to get to see them, they’re so easy to find on Youtube, but because the game made it feel like an accomplishment! If I weren’t following this game up by immediately playing its GameBoy port, I absolutely would have started a new file right away. I’ve been playing the Harvest Moon series since I was a little kid and this was the first time I’d actually managed to beat one of these games. I struggle to think the finale of any game following this will feel as good as this one did.
Tumblr media Tumblr media
I started writing this whole thing about the fences because it was an easy and silly entry point to get into my core issue with the game, and so I could have an opportunity to dig into game mechanics and the way the knowledge you have of them will completely alter your playstyle, because that’s all fun and interesting for me to talk about. Another reason why I focused on that was because it was near impossible for me to pick any kind of focus point when talking about this game. After all, I’m trying to study a whole series of games that spans multiple decades, and this is not only the first game in that series, but a game that created the whole genre of farming sims and defined that genre so thoroughly that you can see its DNA in every single game that followed.
 I didn’t expect much to come out of my experience with this game. My expectations for it before I even picked it up were that it was going to be basically featureless, as informed by my experience with one of the first games I ever played as a child, Harvest Moon GB, which I will get into next. This game was not that at all. I think that everything it did manage to get working right came together just about perfectly. Harvest Moon is exactly what it wanted to be, and where it wasn’t, it lied about how it worked to try and make you play the correct way anyways. When I believed that lie, my time playing was even more enjoyable. Maybe if farming worked just a little bit more like how you’re told it’s supposed to, and if there was just a little bit more story, those would cover the things I felt wanting for the most. But maybe a little flexibility and ambiguity is a good thing. Maybe actually maintaining a fence is just too hard, and maybe if the girls were more fleshed out, I wouldn’t be able to enjoy filling in their gaps in my head.
There are many more things I could say and wanted to say about this game, but this has grown far too long already so I'm cutting myself off here. I'm sure my later entries aren't going to get near this length. If you managed to get to this point, thank you so much for reading!
Tumblr media
148 notes · View notes
occidentaltourist · 3 months
Text
bbc: Some sweet #Silvacre content for your FYP ❤️
156 notes · View notes
martinsharmony · 3 months
Text
I had not seen this article before!!
The fact that Sheen so deftly employed a charming crush performance leading up to this moment makes the twist of the knife when Aziraphale fails to meet Crowley halfway all the more painful. According to Sheen, that ending was built into his performance all season long. “We always knew where they were going to get to at the end of this particular part of the story,” he told IGN. “And I think retrospectively thinking about that, it made it a more, I think, interesting and exciting journey to be able to seed in things all the way along that would mean that endpoint that they get to be as difficult and as satisfying and as challenging and heartbreaking and all the rest of the things that you would want it to be.”
168 notes · View notes