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         (@o)     Ushi No Tane         
  /-------\/   Harvest Moon News       
 / |     ||         Issue 13      
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September 16, 2003

I finally picked up my copy of AWL from the Post Office 
yesterday :)

The game's scenery is absolutely wonderful. The view of the ocean 
from the path next to Besta's farm is virtually right off of a 
vacation postcard. There are a lot of different shaped trees and 
plants.

On the other hand, the village of Forgotten Valley isn't as large 
as it looks on the map. I would say it's a little larger then the 
one from Save The Homeland. There is no load times when wandering 
around the world, but you'll see the game pause when you go 
through a door.

I went ahead and made a small movie of the scene that appears 
after you select your name :) Basically Takakura is introducing 
you to some of the villagers.

http://www.fogu.com/hm4/awl/awl_vid01.wmv (3.8MB, 3 minutes long)

The "free play mode" doesn't seem to be available. The game 
automatically loaded into Story Mode and threw me into the 
beginning "chapter". I really didn't get much of a choice! Perhaps 
the free-play mode is available after the story-mode finished.

The 3 Harvest Sprites live in the tree to the north of your farm. 
You have to eat the "strange mushroom" by their door in order to 
shrink and go inside :) On the other hand, your farm is right in 
the middle of the village instead of on the outside edges like 
the rest of the game. You can even see the tops of other 
buildings right from your front door.

Besides starting out with 3000 G, you also have 2 Tomato seeds 
and a Record in the Cabinet, located in your Tool Shed. You can 
take the Record out and put it on the Record Player that is 
inside of your Farmhouse. The new Record exchanges with the 
background-music Record that is currently playing. It felt a 
little strange having winter-theme background music during the 
Spring (Parlot) so I switched it back to the Parlot music and put 
the winter-music Record back in the Cabinet :)

The link-up to the FoMT game is along the path to the mountaintop. 
Takakura takes a stroll up there in the mornings but if you try, 
the Sprites will stop you. So I connected up my GBA and FoMT and 
gave it a whirl.

A whole lot of noth'n special happened.

The games did connect and transfer some data, but after that 
nothing really happens and you're returned back to Forgotten 
Valley. 

In FoMT something does change a little bit. In the past when one 
has attempted to connect to the Gamecube (without AWL of course!) 
the Goddess will show 42 stars on the screen after the linkup 
attempt. Now that I've connected to AWL (twice), 2 of the stars 
are blacked out and the remaining 40 are still yellow-colored. 
Perhaps something will actually happen once I connect 42 times? 
Nothing has changed in my FoMT game after the 2 connections.

Until next time!

- How does a cow do math?
-- With a cow-culator! 

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Harvest Moon News from Ushi No Tane

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