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N-Philes: There are quite a few Harvest Moon games, what changes between each to differentiate it from the others?Markay: Well, you know, this being on the DS and using the DS features, one thing I forgot to mention is the fact that you can plug in Friends of Mineral Town and More Friends of Mineral Town into your DS, and when you do so you basically unlock five women that you can additionally marry that normally you couldn't. So you can unlock those and, at the same time, the events that go with those girls.
So the DS [version] itself, it offers a few different varieties to it. In this one, you actually collect the materials and use them to build a barn, a silo, a cannery. So you'd use those materials and based upon the materials that you'd use they can actually be destroyed by the weather. So it's something a little new to the Harvest Moon series, but at the same time it always follows that fundamental path of "hard work is rewarded" and a balance of social and your own economical needs.
N-Philes: About Freedom Wings, we were playing that and there's quite a bit going on in it on the bottom screen...
Markay: Freedom Wings is a flight-simulator pseudo RPG and obviously you follow some sort of story. You basically are introduced into the APA, the Air Patrollers Association, as a new pilot. You earn experience points and money as you shoot down pirates. The higher level you get, the better equipment you can buy [such as] different types of planes. Obviously you start off in a rinky dink, hard-to-control plane. As you upgrade you get better engines, better armament, better weapons. You have to go around liberating the different cities and you kind of follow a set path as you do so.
In regards to what's going on in the screens, the game offers two modes to try and lower the learning curve. And those two modes are the AI mode, kind of the auto-assist mode, and the manual mode. In the auto-assist mode, you hit auto-assist and you take off and then the computer would take you off naturally so you don't have to worry about doing anything. You would use the bottom screen to lock on, control your throttle, control your elevation. You know, not that complex, so allowing anyone to do it, even if they've never played a flying game. But if you're more experienced in terms of playing flying games, you switch over to manual mode and that's when the screens switch, and the actual plane is on the bottom in the stylus area, and then you use the stylus to lock on and you can actually control everything: control the rudder, the altitude, and everything else. So you basically have to line everything up.
It does allow multiplayer use in terms of local [play]. Four people can play on one cartridge.
N-Philes: Is it online-enabled?
Markay: No, just local. Like, if the three of us had it we'd all hook up and go in a room and dogfight one another. Basically using what's available at that particular point in time in the game.
N-Philes: You mentioned the auto-assist. Do you think it makes the game too passive?
Markay: Well, it does to somebody that's more experienced when it comes to certain types of games. The whole reason it was set up is that if you're having any sort of difficulty, it's easier. You know, say you're a six-year-old, an eight-year-old, you're not used to locking on. As you upgrade in planes and armament as well as engines, stability and things start to level out and become a little bit easier. The better quality of plane, the easier it is to control and things of that nature. In the beginning, it might be a little difficult; you might not have a good feel for it, but you want to still progress in the game and you don't want to be stuck in the same area over and over. So, the auto-assist kind of gets you into the hang of things, watching the computer do it, set it up. You still control shooting, the altitude, throttle; you tell it what to do, where to go.
Like my salesmen. Boy, they need that auto-assist mode left and right. But they're not gamers. But gamers, they'll take that manual mode in a heartbeat.
N-Philes: Even when we were playing the manual mode, the controls are pretty sensitive, so it does take some getting used to.
Markay: Well, it's also unfortunately due to the fact that we're using roms, and the roms are what save the game. We had data on the roms early on for Harvest Moon [DS] as well as Magical Melody, but needless to say after a day and a half of the show, people have saved over our data. So now, everything's at the beginning. You're playing with the plane that you start the game with. And yes, it is kind of slow, a little hard to control, but as you get better planes, they're easier to control.
