Running your Own Farmstead

Release Date: 9th May 2011

Developer: Hammerware based in Brno, the Czech Republic

Genre: Simulator/Tycoon

Mode: Single

Family Farm can easily be summed up as a kind of Sim Farm (although this ancient title already exists) or Farm Tycoon and revolves around building up and running a 19th century style farmstead. It does so quite well by balancing realism with simplicity.

Family Farm is reasonably intuitive to use and has a good tutorial built into the earlier games to help learn how to play. There is also a manual available.

Family farm has a series of game challenges called stories as well as a more free-form sandbox mode. There is also a rank system to unlock new plants, animals, areas and other goodies to try.

Goals of short term yearly, as well as longer term story and trophy goals drive each story forward. Your farm needs to be both managed and expanded and you only have a limited time to do so. Each year is broken into two seasons of spring and summer only and each season is played like a full day. You have to get all the planting, harvesting and other farming activity done in that day as well as feed your workers. Sundown stops all activity and can be disastrous if you haven’t planned well.

Thus, Family Farm has a strong time management element as well as the need to manage the farm finances. To help things along, you can expand your family via children or hire temporary labourers. There is a lot to do such as plowing, growing vegetable crops, raising poultry, breeding animals and expanding the house or farmland.

The system built into the game has skills, abilities and things like soil fertility. Altogether it is a well balanced system with enough depth without bogging you down in serious simulator detail.

I should also point out that this is an extremely family friendly game. It should be playable by relatively young people and while reproduction is represented it is only done so via the atypical pop here suddenly we have a baby, calf etc. None of the ugly side of real agriculture is presented. What is presented, is of some learning value.

Family farm is not too difficult and is aimed to be inclusive of a wide gamer base. The stories do get progressively more difficult, however.

Family Farm is not at all innovative but is well done in the genre and is good learning value in both basic farming and time management and so has some positive entertainment value.

Graphics are a colourful, fun style exaggerated almost to cartoon style which are adequately clear, except on occasion it can be difficult to tell workers apart if they are wearing the same clothes.

Good sound effects, including background sounds, some decent music.

I experienced very few problems with Family Farm which was play-tested on Windows 7 and Linux Mint. Saving the game can also only be done at years end in all games. In Linux Mint some portraits are missing.

Family Farm runs on all three major operating systems; Windows, Mac and Linux. There is a generous demo available for all operating systems on the main site. Family Farm is translated to several major languages besides English. You can get it direct from the website or via from Desura, Mac Game Store, Impulse, Direct2Drive, GamersGate and even Ubuntu Software Centre for around $US17.99 depending on where you get it.

Consider Family Farm an excellent game for casual farming play that is truly family friendly.

Game: 3½/5   Positive: 

More than Just Not Unity

Release Date: 9th May 2011

Developer: Linux Mint Team led by Clement Lefebvre

Base: Ubuntu, Gnome, Debian

Mint. Minty Fresh? You know, I absolutely hate peppermint but I do love Linux Mint.

But I am getting ahead of myself. I am that altogether too common Ubuntu migrant checking out Mint to see if I like it. I didn’t like Unity which is not only integral to Ubuntu, but also Ubuntu’s future when they dump Gnome in Ubuntu version 11.10.

I’ve wanted to try out Mint for quite a while given its out of the box ‘It Just Works’ kind of promise and positive feedback I’ve heard. Unity gave me a good push to give it a go. As such a lot of commentary will admittedly be in comparison to Ubuntu.

Installation was straightforward with the easy replace Ubuntu option and copying goes on while doing the settings followed by a sideshow talking about some of Mint’s features. Basically the same as Ubuntu’s excellent installer.

Dabbling very briefly in the Linux Mint user community it looks promising. Active and respectful with a good mix of user levels. The community is important in Linux because this is where most of the support comes from.

To make it quite clear Linux Mint does not use Unity but opted for Gnome 2.32 instead.

Mint’s menu is beautiful. Not your standard Ubuntu Gnome menu, it presents things well to be easily accessed. There is a nice search function as well as a favourites and all applications toggle. The menu is easily configured and lets you add things to the panel. It has to be used to be appreciated but here’s a bit of a look.

Linux Mint’s default programs are much the same as for Ubuntu, including LibreOffice and Firefox 4.0 however Evolution is nowhere to be seen with Thunderbird being used for email. I’ve never liked Evolution and usually used Thunderbird on Ubuntu! Gimp, Sun Java 6 and the VLC media player are also included. Gwibber is not included. I usually used Tweekdeck which runs on the decidedly not open source Adobe AIR. If you want it, you will need to install that yourself whether you use Ubuntu or Mint but it’s easily done.

The real difference is you don’t have to spend time with Medibuntu etc getting all the codecs, flash, fonts and other simple usability improvements working. It also helps that most of the default software is a good choice. Linux Mint was originally designed with this ease of use in mind. It’s focused on the users and usability not on the open source ideals, which is Ubuntu’s focus. Neither choice is really better or worse, it just depends on what matters more to you. So Linux Mint largely delivers on the ready out of the box experience.

Mint still has the same silly overlay scroll bars as Ubuntu has but I do not actually dislike them. I guess they are there for space saving on small screens typical of the devices that Ubuntu has been aiming for. Mint’s desktop does not come with a trashcan, which is easily found in the menu. Not sure if I like that or not but it’s not a very significant thing.

It is quite true that pretty much any operating system, including Ubuntu, can be changed from its default theme to something more attractive. However, it is nice that Mint’s default theme is slick and attractive from the get go. Yes it’s true, I am not a fan of brown tones which make up Ubuntu’s default themes.

Like Ubuntu, the simpler Software Manager of Linux Mint is much improved and would say Mint has done the better job. A great tool for newer Linux users.

There is only one minor criticism of the OS as I saw it. The sound defaults to mute on install which is naturally easily fixed. I’ve tried it out a fair bit but it’s really quite stable. If you find any faults yourself comment on them below.

Linux Mint is free and open source software available here. I recommend getting the stock standard 32 bit DVD version unless you know what you’re doing.

Overall Mint is very nice and likely to stay at least till the next 6 monthly churn. Where it all goes from there is a big question. There’s the Ubuntu Unity push and there’s also Gnome 3 which is still in the early stages and has garnered more than a few critics. Linux Mint is excellent for new users of Linux and I recommend it for that purpose.

I have just installed Ubuntu 11.04 ‘Natty Narwhal’ just released. Installation was trouble free, I have chosen to dual boot with Windows 7 Professional, the other operating system I use.

The Short Version:

Pretty Unity is not good for multitasking. It may be good enough one day. OpenLibre will probably replace OpenOffice. The rest of Ubuntu 11.04 is ok but it is not as stable and bug free as other releases.

The Long Version after the fold:

There is a windows nuisance which seems to be getting nearer crisis point.

These are overheads, or if you like computer maintenance, which comprises of several wasteful mechanisms which sap you computer productivity, speed, responsiveness and your personal time.

What I’m talking about is everything on your system that isn’t core to your service. There’s always been this in effect in various ways. For example, boot up, shutdown, time to launch an application etc.

But now we have a whole new layer. It all started with antivirus updates and Windows update which were at least loosely useful. They became automated, mostly because the majority of computer users would never update unless it was automated.

But then everything else jumped on the bandwagon. MS Office updates. Silverlight! I didn’t even install Silverlight yet there it is pooped on my Windows system. Windows media updates, what a joke! Windows media has stunk for perhaps a decade now. And windows updates is excruciatingly slow.

And it isn’t just Microsoft, no. Quicken and Google and Abode and you name it have updates galore too. Even games do it. It’s not just updates, it’s the advertising, the known and unknown info passed back via the net, the forms and permissions and terms of agreement and read the privacy document first. How about discovering the hard way the program only runs in admin mode. ‘Error 412, Would you like Microsoft to try and find a solution to the problem?’ We all know how hard they try. It is indeed very trying. How about the User Account Control (UAC)? It ensures installing something takes much longer and locks up your system more than the installation process itself. And that’s not even including the never ending permission prompts.

Then there’s the need for antivirus, anti rootkit, anti trojan, link blockers and spam canners. Defragmentation which takes hours, cleanups for files and sloppy registry entries.

All in all there so much superfluous rubbish in Windows it’s no wonder Linux is so much faster. It’s not just the software it’s the focus on getting things done rather than making money from the masses.

Linux does have some of these issues too but on the whole it’s not near crisis and each problem is better managed. So what I want done gets done. On Windows the capacity to do what I want is hampered by amazing levels of inefficiency.

I upgraded to this new version of Linux and I’m posting from it right now but this was not a smooth process. I used the GUI updater (from 9.04) and it failed at 99% downloads. Restarted it after a reboot and it worked this time. I have no idea what happened.

To add insult to injury the default Australian update server is wonky and I don’t really like the new repository manager.

On the positive side it seems stable and is even cleaner looking than 9.04 was. Haven’t played with it that much we’ll see what I think of it in the long run.