The whole thing seems a little vague at the moment but right now it seems to be a game that consists largely of driving backwards and forwards across fields. It’s kind of hypnotic.
First you plough it, then you cultivate it, then you sow it, then you spread fertiliser on it then you lose the will to live close it down and beat zombies to death with a guitar just to gain enough feeling in the grey matter to ask yourself just what in the name of god almighty possessed you to buy the bloody game in the first place.
The best bit so far is that a lot of the actions are bound to the same key that turns your tractor left, so adjusting your obviously crooked line up the field a fraction turns off your fertiliser or does something arcane with your plough. And you have to reverse your tractor up to each tool you want to use and then… oh for gods sake, what the hell was I thinking?
I would suggest you do a Let’s Play, Nellie, but I’m going to go ahead and guess that it would consist of one video: a tractor going back and forth over the corpse of your loving yet spacially-unaware farmer’s wife.
You’ve given me vague hope that it might be possible to turn this into Farming Accident simulator.
As every uk child of the 70/80’s knows farms are phenomenly dangerous places and I therefore hope that it will be possible to create the numerous accidents that befel the children in the government safety films of the time. I’m pretty sure that one of them drowned in slurry.
Two of the guys at work were playing this co-op during lunchbreaks for a while. If I go to the local department store, fully half of their PC games rack is given over to this and similar ‘games’ - farming simulator, forestry simulator, street cleaner simulator (yes, really. You drive one of those little street sweeper buggies around), bus simulator, tram simulator and so on.
Landwirtschaft (farming) Simulator 2011 is currently no.7 in their PC charts.
I played it again last night. It’s strangely compelling.
I still don’t have any cows.
I still don’t know what I’m doing, but I did find out how to set the vehicles on auto pilot so I had 3 tractors all simultaneously driving up and down a field.
There doesn’t appear to be any seasons or any particular reason to why prices occasionally go up or down and, contrary to what I’ve heard about real farming and without even having to pretend to be French in order to pick up massive EU subsidies, it seems pretty easy at the moment to make piles of cash.
As there’s no manual I’m playing on easy so maybe it becomes a bit more of a business sim than a tractor sim when the difficulty level goes up.
