Prinzessin Rabe

Random list of things new players are sometimes confused about:

• Restoring the community center and buying the Joja membership is mutually exclusive. If you want to experience both, you need two save files. You can start with the community center bundles and later decide to go with Joja, but not the other way around.
• After you unlock the community center, there will be a little tree icon added to the inventory view. You can click (or tap? whatever controller users call that) it for looking at the bundles without having to walk to the community center building in town. The icon pulsates when you hover over an item in your inventory or a chest that is needed for the bundles.
• Speaking of chests, craft chests to store things. You can store extra crops, fish etc. in case you need them later, and you don’t have to carry all your tools around all day. You can put chests anywhere on the map, but be vary of villagers’ walking paths and the resetting mine floors (top floor of the mine is fine, though).
• You can buy backpack upgrades from Pierre. After you do, you get an additional row of inventory space. You can switch your toolbar to the next row with (*looks up control scheme*) L1/R1 on a PS4 controller or the tab key on a keyboard.
• Crops die at the end of the season. If you plant something on Spring 20th that takes 8 days to grow, fine, you get your last harvest on Spring 28th. If you plant the same crop later, you will only find a dead crop on Summer 1st. There are multi-season crops that last for the two or three seasons that they can be planted in, but even those die in winter.
• Farm animals usually feed on the grass on your farm. But they don’t go outside in winter or on rainy days. So you need to feed them. Robin can build a silo that stores the grass that you cut with a scythe as hay for your animals. Then, you have to manually get the hay out of the dispenser in the coop/barn and place it in the feeder (except after you upgraded your coop/barn twice, then it’s automated). Alternatively, you can buy hay at Marnie’s.

Always, not just this weekend: Nintendogs + Cats on 3DS. I’m not in a rush to get through everything the game has, and I’m not “good at the game” insofar this is even a criterion for this type of game. I posted a screenshot in a comment to the weekly thread a few weeks ago. Since then, I discovered that you can only have 3000 screenshots on the 3DS’s memory card (I made a post about that on [email protected]). 3000 might sound like a high number, but it is really not if you have a lot of near-misses in pressing the capture button. So now I have the interesting secondary task of sorting through all the screenshots that I moved to my desktop. Not really a game, though.

In addition to that, I started a new playthrough of Pokémon Crystal. I’m doing a not-so-hardcore Nuzlocke challenge to make it more interesting for myself. But this is really not about difficulty, this is what I can play in short bursts without having to use my brain all that much (I have other games in my backlog for that, and also other non-game things to do). While I still have my childhood Gameboy Color and game cartridges that I keep for sentimental reasons, I opt to play on an emulator on my Android for convenience.

Stardew Valley, maybe? There is both a Mac OS and a PC version.

Silly predictions for upcoming third-party games:

• Capcom reveals the Ace Attorney spin-off Space Attorney. Like the original, but in space!
• After the remakes of Harvest Moon: Friends of Mineral Town as Story of Seasons: Friends of Mineral Town and Harvest Moon: A Wonderful Life as Story of Seasons: A Wonderful Life, Marvelous surprises everyone by skipping over the Wii games directly to the 3DS game Story of Seasons (2014), soon to be remade as Story of Seasons: Story of Seasons.

(Both Ace Attorney and Story of Seasons have completely different names in the original. So a concept that is based on the English name sounding funny is highly unlikely. But hey, who cares, I’ve got my speculation fun.)

Playing video games? I’m over here playing with my pets.

Image description: screenshot from the 3DS game Nintendogs + Cats. The image features a Yorkshire Terrier puppy, a grey tabby kitten, and a calico kitten. The dog is standing on its hind legs, front paws at the camera, wearing a blue collar with a white pattern. The two cats are a little further back, gracefully walking on the wooden floor. There are some furniture items in the background, with sunlight streaming in from a window.

Image description: photo of a church building in front of a cloudy sky. The building consists of three towers, built out of light stone with green-ish roofs. It is generally built in baroque style, with exterior decorations like columns and little statues.