(__) (^^) Ushi No Tane /-------\/ Harvest Moon News / | || Issue 46 * ||----|| www.fogu.com/hm/ ~~ ~~ March 06, 2005 I finally received my copy of Songs of Happiness yesterday, picked my girl player, and selected the Riverside house for my location. The game is a lot of fun ^^ There are 30 days for each of the 4 seasons. Each hour in the game is about 45 seconds of real-time, so a day can be about 13 minutes depending on when you decided to go to bed that day. You will always wake up at 6:00 am. Every morning you can check the next day's weather and the weather does not change throughout the day. If the forecast is rain, it will rain all day. You'll start with some basic tools and furniture for your house. The tools will increase level depending on how much you use them. To upgrade the tool you just have to go to Hans and Ann's shop, and they'll have the next upgrade for sale. You don't even need to bring them ore from the mine. There are 2 mines; one behind Leon's (Rival) ranch and the second is in the middle of the lake. Just like in previous versions of HM, the lake's water has to be frozen before you can go digging in the special mine. The characters seem to move in automatically as the game progresses. I had a large group of them appear when the first Horse Race event occurred, but they didn't have a place to live! Instead they would just appear around the Plaza every other day or so. Almost like a mini mob of homeless characters. Eventually homeless Duke sent me a letter saying he opened a Bar, and homeless Carl started working there. Eve also moved in with the Bar. Land for planting is everywhere, but there are some restrictions. If you press the Z button, the map will section itself out into different colors. Blue colored land belongs to you, yellow land belongs to the other villagers, red land belongs to Leon, and green land is free for anyone to use. You can buy more land for yourself at Woody's shop. There are a lot of festivals but you can't participate if you don't meet the requirements. With the Spring Horse Race you can't play if you don't own a horse! In the Spring there's also an Egg Festival, Flower Festival, New years Festival, and Cow Festival. Summer season has a Beach Day, Bamboo Festival, Firefly Festival, Fireworks, and Sheep Festival. Basically you get a festival a week ^^ When it is a Festival day the date/time displayed in the upper-left corner of the screen will have the kanji for Festival next to it. There are 100 Happiness Tones to find in order to de-stone the Goddess. The Tone's inventory screen will give you a little hint on how to find each one, and when you do find one you are told exactly how you found it. I've received a tone for not moving for 5 minutes, being out in the rain for 10 hours, and throwing 20 things into the garbage can. They're everywhere! Your character will vocally shout "Lucky!" when you find one. PachiMachi mode is available to select at the beginning of the game. There are only a few games to play but you can unlock more of them as you go through the main SoH game. Even if you don't have friends to play with, the CPU will play the extra players so you can play by yourself. I started on making SoH videos. I have 7 up right now and I expect to do more as I progress in the game ^^ http://www.fogu.com/hm6/soh.php As for Sprite Station, the game will be released in 11 days for Japan. The always-clever Terranigma Freak has found some new scans of the game from what looks to be Nintendo DREAM magazine. He posted the images on the UNoT forum. http://www.fogu.com/hmforum/viewtopic.php?t=17018 I'm a little swamped with SoH info right now to go through the details, but it looks like Flora might also be one of the potential wives ;) Until next time! - Which side of a chicken has the most feathers? -- The outside! *-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-* POLL QUESTION Last issue's results: Q: What house would you want to choose in SoH? 46.9% = River House - Moonlight skinnydipp'n for me! 30.6% = Beach House - Peacefull and relaxing... 16.3% = Village House - I don't like to walk far. 06.1% = No house - If Moi can do it, so can I! (Total votes = 49) This issue's poll: Q: Would you play SoH's party-game PachiMachi with your friends? Vote at http://www.fogu.com/hm/hmlist/poll/ *-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-* *-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-* Harvest Moon News from Ushi No Tane To unsubscribe - http://www.fogu.com/hm/index.php *-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*