Harvest Moon (Nintendo DS)

Harvest Moon DS is a new adventure is the popular, pastoral Harvest Moon setting. The Witch Princess conjured up a prank that went too far -- now it`s up to you to restore the magic of Forget-Me-Not Valley. Seek out all 101 Harvest Sprites as you plant fields, tend livestock and find the right wife to share your farming dreams. As you find the missing Harvest Sprites they can help with chores around the farm. Some might even unlock various activities or important information.

• Raise your own cows, sheep, chickens and ducks
• Plant and grow a variety of crops and trees
• New festivals, extensions, items and minigames
• Inserting your copy of Harvest Moon - Friends of Mineral Town or Harvest Moon - More Friends of Mineral Town into your Nintendo DS will unlock many surprises in Harvest Moon DS!
   

While gentler games like Nintendogs and Animal Crossing: Wild World have become the best selling games on the DS, the Harvest Moon series has been ploughing very much the same field for nearly a decade now. As always the game starts with you inheriting a farm and most of the game revolves maintaining and growing your crops of vegetables and herds of animals. You have to work pretty hard at it too, planting crops, watering them and then harvesting them. Animals have to be watered and feed too, eggs collected from chickens, cows milked and sheep shorn.

Once you’ve tired yourself out with your daily chores though there’s a whole village to explore around you, as you collect wood to make new buildings or harvest fruit and other rare items to sell at the shop and expand your business. Your main goal in town though is to find yourself a sweetheart and woo her enough so that she’ll agree to marry you. As fun as all this is though it’s exactly how the Harvest Moon games have worked since the original SNES game and this version takes almost no advantage of the DS.

The touch screen is used merely as an inventory and as a means to pet your animals - other than that it’s almost entirely superfluous. Even worse, the graphics seem identical to a GBA game and not even a particularly good one at that, with some very poor animation. There are a few new features, such as a mini-casino run by the harvest sprites, but it’s not nearly enough to tempt you if you have one of the more recent GBA versions. If you haven’t though, it’s a reasonable, if unambitious, introduction to the series.
HARRISON DENT