Retro Gamer Boy

Hello all! If you haven’t seen anything on here in a while, don’t worry, that was the expected result. I have a few reasons for this. The first reason is that I decided to stop doing streams for awhile because I was finding that I didn’t enjoy it as much because I kept trying to find games that I thought people would WANT to watch streams of rather than focus on games that I wanted to play. When it becomes more of a chore, it’s simply not worth it. Besides, I rarely got more than 1-3 viewers on a live stream.

The second reason is because… Stardew Valley Has TAKEN OVER MY LIFE. I saw this game on a few streams I watch but had never tried it. It reminded me a LOT of an SNES game called “Harvest Moon” that I used to play when I was younger. As it turns out, the game’s creator was inspired by Harvest Moon and wanted to remake it while also learning how to program on his own. The result was AMAZING! In fact, the game is SO GOOD that the original creator of Harvest Moon games actually said that the game is what he wished his games would be.

If you aren’t familiar with the Harvest Moon games (Now called “Touch of Nature”, I think). The game I played was on the SNES and you are a farmer. Yup, you plant crops, water them, harvest them, and sell them. You can later raise livestock, milk cows, get eggs from chickens, etc. There are a few little celebrations in the game and you can spend time with various NPCs, marry them, and have children. That’s basically the game in a nutshell, no real end goal other than to make your farm successful and after 3 years, your parents will visit and tell you how you did.

Stardew Valley takes all of these things and puts them on steroids. You have over 12 NPCs that you can date and marry (Male and Female), not to mention over 15 additional NPCs that are not open for marriage but that you can do various things to build their trust and become their friends. The game features an huge catalog of crops you can plant based on the season, it includes chickens but also adds ducks, roosters, and rabbits in your coop. In your barn, you can get cows, goats, pigs, and bulls. But oh no, it doesn’t stop there! You can create artisan products (such as making milk into cheese, eggs into mayo, fruits into jellies and wines, and many others). The game includes a crafting component where you can take raw things you find in the game world and turn them into everything from furniture to other artisan tools (preserve jars for jelly, kegs for wine/beer, spinning wheel to make cloth from raw materials).

The fact that the creator of Stardew Valley thought so hard about this is pretty surprising but even more surprising is how much extra material he added. There is a mine that you can get access to after a few in-game days where you can mine for stone, gemstones, and other natural resources. This mine goes very deep, well over 100+ levels and includes monsters of various difficulties and the deeper you go, the more amazing the goodies you can find and the more dangerous it gets. There is also a quarry that is opened later with some high level minerals that you normally would have to go deep into the mines to acquire. There is also a community center which includes an entire story line related to forest spirits that have taken it over and you can bring them various crops, foraged items, artisan items, fish, and so many other things in what are called “bundles”. With each bundle you complete, the spirits give you special items and if you complete an entire set of bundles, you unlock a “room” in the community center and get a BIG win (usually things that open an entire new area of the map).

As you can easily tell, the combinations of things you can do in this game are nearly endless so there is a lot of replay value because you can pick to focus more on crops or on ranching, more on mining or fishing, etc. I already have three different games going on with three different characters and three different farm types. So that’s where my life has been going as of lately. If you don’t see me surfacing for a while, that’s why.