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: 

Spending is a lot more fun when you have the money

Release Date: 8^h February 2011

Developer: McKinney

Genre: RPG, Educational, Simulation

Mode: Single Player

Spent is a game where you place yourself in the shoes of the marginally employed for a month. Your goal is to simply survive financially. In a sense it is an educational game because it highlights difficult choices which face people in that situation and shows why it is difficult to move beyond poverty. Pretty relevant given the hard times the US is facing right now.

You begin by getting a job then live from day to day hoping to make it all the way through the month. Some may feel the choices are a bit vicious but really that is the whole point and the reality of the situation. It would however, be fair to say, some of the difficult situations aren’t quite so frequent as all that. That higher frequency is balanced out by the game ignoring the small-time expenses of life, such as more shopping and petrol.

I should warn that this game is a lead in to a charity; ‘Urban Ministries of Durham’. I briefly checked it out and it seemed clean enough though I felt it’s claim to not be church based misleading. If donating, consider other worthwhile charities for people in this situation.

Spent offers positive entertainment because it allows people to experience things which they may never have experienced, and likely never would want to. It is innovative, conveys the situation very well and helps to improve the awareness of a problem many like to ignore.

The flash graphics look good and convey the message and challenge well. Sounds effects and music in Spent are light but aid the sense of immersion adequately.

Spent’s Difficulty is fairly high. I won 2 out of 3 games so it is quite possible to survive. It all depends on what you are willing to sacrifice.

Spent runs in browser and is flash based so most modern browsers will be able to handle this. It is the full game and is free to play.

Game: 3½/5      Positive:

With the nuclear disaster in Japan it’s clear to all knowledge about nuclear power plants, radiation and meltdowns are not at all well understoof publicly.  A lot of that is of course fear and secrecy from the nuclear heyday in the 50s.

Geoffrey Noles made a highly simplified nuclear plant simulator using Adobe flash.  It can help to understand some of the most basic principles in the plant operation including…. you guessed it… meltdowns.  What I do want to stress is that the real nuclear plants are run by experienced professionals and have redundant systems ensuring the chance of these sorts of disasters is very rare.  That being said things like earthquakes and tsunamis interfere with operations quite drastically.  You can give it a go here.

h/t Boing Boing

The rubber duckies all agree that this is a fun, positive game

Crazy Machines 2 by Fakt software, released 2008, is a single player puzzle-simulation game. Some content can be shared online.  There are 3 addons I will discuss later, one of them is Crazy Machines 2 -  Time Travel released very recently on 12th March 2011.

Crazy Machines 2 involves being presented with incomplete Rube Goldberg machines where the aim might be to do something very simple such as pop a balloon or move a container into a basket. In a nutshell, Rube Goldberg machines perform a simple task in a complex fashion, usually by way of a chain of many simple steps. So to turn on a toaster, might involve letting a bowling ball fall on a switch, which activates a fan, which blows a balloon over to turn a crank, which generates power to start the toaster. In essence, a crazy machine.

To do this in game you take various objects provided, which the game names ‘elements’ and you position them to create the desired outcome. There are many such elements, for example, a balloon an electric generator or a gear. Usually the puzzles involve several simple outcomes to achieve in order to obtain bonus points. While this sounds simple the actual difficulty varies considerably depending on the complexity of the machine. The game offers hundreds of these ‘experiments’, and you can make you own and try other people’s via the online feature. This means there’s plenty of content.

Crazy Machines 2 may look original, but it is not original. Apart from being a sequel, it is based on an old game series called The Incredible Machine. The original Incredible Machine was released in 1992 in MS-DOS format as well as others. So while Crazy Machines 2 is not original the concept has been polished up a great deal since those days.

Despite this, it’s not a widely exposed niche and has a lot to offer to Positive Gaming and Entertainment. There is a lot to discover and learn about physics here such as energy conversions, gears, levers, gravity and other mechanical concepts.

There is a significant amount of scope for creativity making your own Rube Goldberg machines and discovering different solutions to the experiments provided. Altogether Crazy Machines 2 provides quality Positive Entertainment.

The graphics for Crazy Machines 2 is the real selling point lifting it past it’s older versions and The Incredible Machine predecessor. The graphics are beautiful in full 3D. Movement is reasonably free and there are appropriately used effects. The elements have high levels of detail. Because the game utilises the PhysX physics engine the gameplay is enhanced by the more natural physical rules, which also enhances the overall visual effect.

Music in Crazy Machines 2 is catchy and uplifting but far too repetitive and perhaps a bit too noticeable while you are trying to concentrate on the puzzles. Likewise the sound effects are very good but some background and unnecessary objects such an an exhaust fan can become an irritating distraction.

Guiding you through the tutorial and rest of the game is an Einstein-like mascot who often makes silly comments (see the italicised subtitle above) and numerous scientific and pseudo-scientific cultural references. Fortunately he’s reasonably fun and not too in the face.

The game also includes achievements and trophies and, if the puzzles get too tough, there is a decent hint system.

One of the best things to see in Crazy Machines 2 is the interactivity integrated into the main screen. There objects can be manipulated under the PhysX engine, and there is chalk to draw with on a blackboard.

One criticism with the game is the tutorial is so important in a game like this. While the bulk of it is relevant, helpful and snappy there is one section, namely ’1-6 Fire and Steam’, where the placement of an element does not trigger the next step in the tutorial, thus hanging the newbie out to dry to either skip or try to discover another trigger by chance.

Crazy Machines 2 runs on Windows only. A demo version is available here.

Crazy machines 2 is available for download on GamersGate or Steam for $US20. It is also available from the main site on disk for the same price. There are also Crazy Machines bundles available.

Game : 2/5   Positive:

I was looking around for games to cover and saw Virtual Families by ‘Last Day of Work’.  These are the same people behind Virtual Villagers which enjoyed some modest success.

Virtual Families is a stripped down Sims clone. As such, and with the rather poor graphics, it is quite easy to dump on but it does have a few things to offer such as collectibles and a medical system.  It also does the basic simulation quite well.

Overall though, the ‘no go’ assessment stands. You can play the demo here if you’re curious. It is time limited for 1 hour only.