Recently in Video Games Category

Last week I talked to you about the negative effects of fanservice on the artistic integrity (I feel like such a tool when I use phrases like "artistic integrity", but that's what it is, darn it) of a work. This week I come to you with tales of a more positive form of fanservice, but one not without its negative effects. No, I'm not talking about boobies this time. I'm talking, at long last, about Solid Snake.

As you may or may not know, the original groundbreaking Metal Gear Solid is getting a high-tech remake for the Nintendo GameCube as Metal Gear Solid: The Twin Snakes (this, combined with the Cube's recent $50 price cut, is all part of a Nintendo plot to steal my money, but that's another article for another day). The first trailers were released recently (okay, maybe not recently, but I just saw them, and it's my column and I'm the Resident Metal Gear Solid Historian, so if I say it's recent, it's recent), displaying what can be done when fanservice is used for good. This is a case where a good game can only be made better, and deserves to benefit from the advanced in technology that have come since its initial release. We're not talking crap like George Lucas gave us with the "special editions" of Star Wars (although the addition of a musical number by Otacon would make the game the most perfect thing ever. Make a note of it for Snake Eater, Hideo.) The Twin Snakes remake is done with care, with complete re-recording of the massive amount of dialogue (Snake is more Snake-y! Otacon is more geeky! Naomi is no longer British! But Liquid is Liquid, but I wouldn't want him any other way. BROTHER! But I digress), and the expansion of scenes to make them more dramatic or just plain cooler (I reference the Meryl sniper scene for the first category, and the ninja for the second. The ninja. ...I use too many parenthetical comments). I'm frothing at the mouth just from brief glimpses of cutscenes; if the gameplay is even half of what Metal Gear Solid 2 provided, it may possibly be the best game ever created. But, I'm a Metal Gear fan.

Nintendo has made quite a business out of remaking popular games from older platforms. Several Resident Evil remakes have been released, with just as mouth-froth-inducing improvements. Companies do this because, obviously, these are games that sold massive amounts the first time through; releasing them again only shinier and cooler can only make more money. Now, I have nothing against making money; I quite support it. In fact, give me money. Now. I'll wait.

...

Okay, nevermind.

The problem that comes with these remakes (and their cousin, the never-ending series of sequels, of which the Resident Evil series is possibly the worst offender) is that it makes for creative stagnation. Why bother to think of a new game just as cool as Metal Gear Solid when you can just slap a new coat of delicious, delicious paint on it? Why come up with anything new when you can just make another Mario game?

Hard questions to answer when you're busy rolling on piles of money. Also, a hard practice for me to object to when I know that in a few short months, I'll get to see Solid Snake and Otacon ride off into the sunset together with super high-quality graphics. Love blooms on a battlefield with real-time rendering. I'm the happiest girl on earth.

I just want you all to know that you're lucky you're getting a column this week, since Tuesday I started work at PCM Online, and my schedule has been very busy with serious work. Okay, I lie, my first day was spent reading magazines, my second day was spent messing around online, but both of those were under direct order from my boss! They had nothing else for me to do. But I'm working today. Well, not right now. But I was working all morning! Look at the Product Bullitin section of pcmag.com on Monday, and you'll see my hard work! ...what, shut up, I'm proud.

But, I suppose I should write about something that isn't my job; it'll be a few weeks before I have enough material to get 500-750 words about being paid to be a geek. And I suppose I could write about something comic or manga related, and thus have some sort of connection to the rest of the site at all. But no, you know me, I'm going to write about video games.

As you may or may not know, I'm a girl. I have, in fact, been one all my life. Now, in certain circles, this status leads to some in the gaming community being impressed with you. Or, at least, it did when I was a kid. See, ten years ago or so, most of the gaming market was made up of males, so my presence in a gaming store would be greeted with interest and/or suspicion. Suspintrest, you could call it. I remember making great friends with some Babbage's clerks when I was twelve or so because they were impressed that a young girl had such an interest in gaming.

I'm still in this mindset today. When I walk into a GameStop or an EB, I expect the clerks and other patrons to go "ooooh, OMG g1rl". But they don't, and somewhere in my heart, I'm disappointed. You see, female gamers have increased in numbers in the past ten years; a recent study revealed that women made up 25% of the total gaming populace, which may not sound like a lot, but trust me, it is. Their numbers outnumber the most lucrative male demographics.

While this is good, yay, girl power, and all that, it's given me a problem. Now I have girl game shame. When I go in to a game store, I always want to grab a clerk and say, "Hey! What'd you think of Metal Gear Solid Substance (review forthcoming, honest)? Don't the Resident Evil Gamecube remakes make you hard? Where are you going?" Because I don't want them to think that I play girl games, that I'm just coming in for the latest in RPGs or Sim games. I want the GameStop clerks to think I'm cool, and that says something about me.

There was a time about a year ago when I did purchase a girl game, the PS2 Harvest Moon: Save the Homeland (which, if you're wondering, sucks. Not nearly enough emphasis on the farming. If I buy a farming game, I expect to have some farming! But that's another article). I approached this like a teenage boy buying his first set of condoms. I hid the farming sim between a stack of blank CDs and a cheap copy of Earthworm Jim 3D. Still, though, I thought I could sense the clerk thinking, "Yes. This woman in front of me, she is a girl."

No. No, I can play Metal Gear Solid 2 on Hard Mode without radar. Don't let my breasts and occasional need for simulated farming action fool you! I am as testosterone driven in my pursuits as you. VALIDATE MY EXISTENCE, GAMESTOP CLERK.

But they never do. They never do.

Stephen wrote a review of Enter the Matrix, but I'm not going to let that stop me from writing my own. Because don't tell him, but I think I'm funnier. It'd break his heart.

I didn't go into Enter the Matrix with high expectations, primarily because I'd seen Matrix Reloaded and the Animatrix and had figured out long ago that the Brothers Wachowski are just toying with us to get as much of our money as possible. I don't exactly condone a storyline that involves you having to spread your interest across several different platforms of media, while spending a lot of money in the process. Ask me about the .hack franchise sometime, really. So, expectations were low, but damn it all, the bastards hooked me in, so now I have to play to see what the hell those big gaps in the movie were about.

The first place the game falls down is in terms of that plot. It begins with something vaguely connected to the rest of the story... that is, if you've seen Flight of the Osiris in the Animatrix. If not, you're simply running around the world's largest post office and occasionally doing slow motion flips into postal workers, which, while it is something we've all dreamed long of doing, doesn't make good plot. The plotline is possible more vague and unfocused than the Matrix films, which, as you well know, says a lot. The game descends into fetch quests, such as rescuing some character you (the player) have no emotional or plot-based connection to. Admittedly, I have not played the entire game, but the first act of anything should be where we're grabbed into a plotline, and Enter the Matrix failed this spectacularly.

The live-action cut scenes were, as Stephen said, very impressive, although the skeptic in me wonders if they were cutting room floor footage, or shot in a day, or some such. The in-game cut scenes, however, left a lot to be desired. For all the alleged money and work that went into this, Happy Polygon Rendered Jada Pinkett-Smith should not seem to have Metal Gear Solid 1-esque mitten hands at points. But I'm sure that's just supposed to be a glitch in the Matrix. In addition to this, the switching between live-action and game-engine cut scenes sometimes seemed a little jarring; for a while it seemed they would have the cut scenes that were in the "real world" in live action and all others in CG, but then I suppose they wouldn't get to dress up real people in silly leather snakeskin coats and do their hair all wacky.

(An aside: Why do all the Matrix people dress like that? Don't they realize it makes them look conspicuous? Don't the realize it makes the fight scenes look like dance numbers? And while we're at it, where did the people in Zion get dyes to make fabric? Or fabric at all? But all of these questions are for another article, another day.)

And then we get to the gameplay. Sure, running around really fast (that Happy Polygon Rendered Jada Pinkett-Smith can seriously run like crazy), doing zany slow-motion Matrix fight moves, running along walls, and dodging bullets is fun... but only for about thirty minutes. Then it gets repetitive and boring... much like the fight scenes in Reloaded! But I digress. The gameplay seemed to consist entirely of "run to this place, watch cut scene, complete fetch quest, watch cut scene, fight people all crazy, watch cut scene, watch cut scene, watch cut scene."

There was a point in the game where I made Happy Polygon Rendered Jada Pinkett-Smith jump off a balcony in slow motion, guns blazing at the armed guards below, and before I could land and unleash hell upon them, the game... loaded a cut scene. I felt deeply cheated.

On top of this, the game is as filled with bugs as a ninja who uses bugs to kill people, and the load times are absolutely ridiculous. A thirty second load time is just not acceptable. My feelings on this game can best be summed up with one title that sat across the bottom of the screen for far too long as I waited for a level to load:

Loading The Bowels.

As I mentioned in last week's article, I recently had a visit from my seven-year-old cousin. During this visit, he was looking through the various saves on my memory card (an act which made me nervous, for I knew that one twitch of his sticky little finger could destroy my 60% clear on Metal Gear Solid 2 Substance's VR Missions), and noticed one save icon that was a hopping bunny. "What is that game?" he asked, and I could feel the trouble starting.

That unfortunately chosen image is the save icon for Silent Hill 3, a game which I would not expose my seven-year-old cousin to under any circumstances. He also asked about the many varieties of Metal Gear Solid saves, and I responded with the same, "No, that game isn't for you." Now, if you know children, telling them they can't do something makes them only want to do it more, and this denial led to about a two-day-long non-stop pestering (interspersed with the "can I sleep in your bed with you" argument, which is a whole other article for a whole different website) in which my cousin repeatedly begged to know or see or play these forbidden grown-up games, and I repeatedly said no.

Now, what I find strange about all of this is that when I told his mother about this, when I told my mother about this, when I told our very own Stephen about this, they seemed surprised. I make assumptions for their line of thinking, but I could see the thought form in his mother's mind: "Video games are for video games, aren't they? They're kid stuff."

No. They aren't.

I support the video game rating system, and I want to see it better advertised and more strictly enforced. Many of the games I own are rated "M", and for very good reason. While it is one thing for me to become an expert at Metal Gear Solid 2 until I start experimenting with shooting soldiers in different body parts to see their reactions (my favorite is getting the sniper rifle and shooting them in the crotch), that is not something that a child should be learning to do. Not to mention the fact that my cousin sucks at video games, and he wouldn't be able to shoot a soldier at all, let alone with the precision to get him in the ass to get his attention, then in the head when he turns around.

Maybe this makes me sound like a crotchedy cranky old lady, but when I was a kid, video games didn't get much bloodier or more disturbing than, say, Castlevania, and I didn't have cable TV until I was ten, so I grew up without seeing the ridiculous statistical number of violent acts that they say children see nowadays. I came into my taste for violent and horrific media when I was of age and could handle it, when I understood the line between fantasy and reality. Shooting a man in the ass in a video game is fun, but I'm old enough to realize that that would not be so much fun in
real life.

My point is, the children are our future and all that, but the children are basically stupid impressionable sponges, and if we make them into monsters by giving them grown up toys before they're ready, we have no one but ourselves to blame.

(Note: these opinions only extend to games with serious violence or horrific imagery. Games with naughty language and sexy ladies will just make our kids into George Carlin, something I wholly support.)

I had high hopes for Enter the Matrix. Most likely, unrealistically high hopes. I had heard that the Wachoswki brothers, the very same writer-directors of the film, were behind the making of the game. This meant that unlike most spin-off video games, this one would be cool. It would be coherent and actually relevant to the mythos of the series. My hopes were raised further when I heard about how much live action footage was shot for the game. It soon seemed as if "Enter the Matrix" was not a video game so much as an extension of the film franchise, for all intents and purposes, it was a fourth film in the series. Or so it seemed.

When I was watching the Matrix Reloaded, I kept feeling like I wasn't getting the whole picture. There were references to the Osiris and there was that one character who was really clingy to Neo who I'd never seen before. I can't help but think this is because when I saw the film I had not at that point seen the Animatrix nor had I played the game. I thought to myself as I sat in that theatre seat, surely the anime and the game must fill in some of these blanks.

Does the game do that? Yes and no. It does but not very well. It tells you some things that happened off screen during Revolutions but it in no way helps bridge the gap like I thought it would. It's good but it's not great. I'm a large fan of the cut scenes in the game and that's good because there is a lot of them. However, it got a bit overboard at points where the cut scenes were going on for so long that I'd just put down the controller and wait to be able to play the game again.

And it was hard to wait. The game is fun. Or at least until it gets too repetative and boring. The gameplay itself is good and clean. Some of the missions made me scratch my head because I didn't care or it made no sense. But what bothered me the most was the quality of the rendered cut scenes. Some of the cut scenes were DVD-rom stuff shot at the same time as the movie. That stuff looks great. The game itself is very well designed and well rendered. But the cut scenes aren't as good (which I don't understand). Also, the voice acting is only so-so.

It is cool that you can play as one of two characters and that the gameplay switches between the two of them (not drastically but enough to warrant some replay). What annoyed me was the "hacking" feature. It was a cool way to offer a cheat menu and, again, to offer some replay value but the format of it was just annoying. I'm not a computer hacker because just the thought of typing in code frustrates and annoys me so I have no clue why I'd want to play it as a game.

All in all, it was good but not great. I rented it played it for four days and returned it. That's about all I can recommend it for.

I write this article now in a tiny hotel room in the East Village in New York City, awaiting the morning when I love into my dorm to begin my final school year. So, what I'm saying is, I've been traveling all day and my mind is a little whack-a-ding-hoy, to use the technical terms. But we've been behind and this article needs to go up tomorrow, so I press on! I press on!

This past week I had my aunt, uncle, and seven-year-old cousin Travis come to visit me. The aunt and uncle aren't the important parts in this story; it's the seven-year-old cousin that matters in the world of dorkiness. You see, when I first met Travis but a year ago, he discovered that I was the most important thing a young child can have: The Cool Older Cousin. You know that cousin, the one who's probably more than ten years older than you, full of wisdom and wit, and, best of all, likes video games. Being the Cool Older Cousin means that you become your younger cousin's favorite thing in the world, and all of the other grownups will be happy for your existence, because the kid will only want to hang out with you.

Now, while it is nice to finally be considered cool for being a grownup and still liking video games by someone, there are some downsides to this, other than the aforementioned Always Having To Deal With the Kid problem.

For one, you and the kid are going to play a lot of video games. I know, this doesn't sound bad, but the problem is how the kid wants to play video games. That is to say, the kid wants to play, and the kid, being young and stupid and not entirely well acquainted with how his extremities work, will suck. You will watch your own flesh and blood make boneheaded mistakes in the most simple of games, and you will be seized with thedesire to whack the child on the head and shout, "JUST GIVE ME THE CONTROLLER AND LET ME DO IT." But you won't, because his mom would be mad.

Another problem is that when the child does, indeed, give you the controller, he has a very short attention span. He will be delighted to watch you kick ass at the game that just thwarted him moments ago, but only for about ten minutes. Then he will be bored at seeing your prowess and want to switch to another game that he can suck at. I had to go out and buy my own copy of Dark Cloud, as my cousin would not let my interest in it carry over more than fifteen minutes. AND HE COPIED OVER MY SAVE, THE LITTLE... I'm okay. I'm okay.

Then, there is the problem of the two player game. Dear Travis asked me to select a game for us to play from his collection, and I picked Virtua Fighter 4, because I am always a sucker for hitting things with virtual small Asian girls. Now, sure, the seven year old beat me the first few rounds, but I swear, this was because I'd never played the game before and was learning the control system. No, it was. Shut up. But then when I figured out the moves (variations on forward-forward attack button work in every fighting game ever) and started repeatedly whaling on him (perhaps I shouldn't beat my seven-year-old cousin at games, you say. Perhaps I should let him win. Perhaps you should think of the shame of losing to a seven-year-old.), he got bored and moved on to another game. It was a plane game, where he impressed me by repeatedly crashing the plane directly to the earth.

With the added problems of how my cousin could not read (and you try to find a game that doesn't involve reading in some way) and how he repeatedly insisted that yes, we were going to play the games I said were "grown up games" (Metal Gear Solid and various Silent Hill games) even though they would scar him for life, I quickly grew weary of the role of the Cool Older Cousin. As the visit wore on, I became the Cranky Older Cousin, the one that yells at you and tells you to sit down and be quiet.

Warn your children.

And now I will actually write a game review about a game that has just been released. Remember this one, kids, it probably won't happen again.Well, maybe when FFX-2 comes out.

You may have heard about the Silent Hill game series. If you haven't, you should. The series started on the original Playstation console with a game that was a change from the existing monsters-crashing-through-windows variety of the survival horror genre we'd seen in games like Resident Evil and Dino Crisis (actually, I don't know if Dino Crisis counts as survival horror, but I had to think of something other than Resident Evil). It was different from those games because your hero was not a trained individual, not a special operative, but rather just a normal guy in the wrong place. This lead to having a character who could hold and fire a gun, but might not be able to properly aim it, and would get winded after running a long way.

But the real draw of Silent Hill was not having to stop to catch your breath, it was having to stop the game to catch your breath. The game had some of the most terrifying settings, graphics, sound, and events that had ever graced the console. It actually made me need to sleep with the light on.

Because of this standard of freak-out excellence, the release of a Silent Hill game series on the PS2 was awaited with excitement, and had success with Silent Hill 2 (which is a whole different column). A successful sequel begets another sequel, and Silent Hill 3 was released.

This game is both a delight and a disappointment. You play as Heather, a standard teenage girl lost in a world of horror. Heather is a refreshing change from the protagonists of the previous two games, Harry and James, who were middle aged men and, to put it lightly, total tools. (One of Silent Hill 2's five endings features James killing himself. That's my favorite one.) She's a girl you can't help but like, who has a good attitude about the freaky things around her. (For instance, she reacts to a closed locker with blood pouring out of the bottom with "I don't think I need to open that one." Quite different from her predecessors.)

The game has not wimped out when it comes to terror; it has, in fact, surpassed the levels of sheer freaky freak freak-out stuff in the first two games. The magic of technology allows for new graphical jiggery pokery to make you cry, such as blood that oozes and crawls along the walls itself, and backgrounds jittering and going out of focus while Heather stays perfectly solid. The ambient sound effects add to the overall atmosphere of fear (hah! oh, what, it rhymed). There is nothing that makes me whimper like a little girl like walking down an empty hall and suddenly hearing a child crying from nowhere. The music, as in the first two games, is darkly beautiful -- and conveniently enough, a soundtrack is included with the game.

Now, sadly, we have to get to where the game falls short. To begin with, the gameplay had some very frustrating aspects. I am not one to complain about Heather not being able to aim at times, because even though she is a teenage girl, she is no Raiden. My frustration came with the fact that there are death-trap times; you die instantly, no chance to escape. Okay, so maybe I shouldn't have been wandering around on the subway tracks, but when the station is filled with evil mummified dogs with split heads, you don't expect a train to come! At least, I don't.

My largest complaint and disappointment with the game comes with the plot. Silent Hill 1 had a plot about occult nonsense that made little sense. Silent Hill 2 had a beautifully subtle and psychologically terrifying plot that still gives me chills when I think about it. Silent Hill 3 has a plot about occult nonsense that makes sense, but is really neither interesting nor frightening. The storyline is directly connected to the first game, which means that it is full of cults and reborn demon gods and women in dark dresses proclaiming about prophecies in bad accents. Not what I want in my cutscenes.

The combination of this poor plotline and the fact that creep-outs andcat scares are only really frightening the first time through greatly decreases the replay value. The game has two endings (and one gag ending), and I don't really see myself playing beyond enough to see all of those. Unlocking new costumes and weapons is not enough of a draw for me.

So, in conclusion, if you want a game that will make you turn on all the lights in the house, go for Silent Hill 3. If you want a game that will make you turn on all the lights in the house and that has a good storyline, get Silent Hill 2. And if you are afraid of monsters... well, I wouldn't look behind you right now. Trust me.

Spider-Man for the PS one is a decent enough game even by today's standards, which I think says a lot for the care that Neversoft took making this game.

It's based on the early 90's Spider-Man cartoon and as such it has decent voice acting for the most part (a few choices such as Venom are just annoying but that's more of the cartoon's fault than Neversoft's). The figures are blocky, but this is a PS one game, so what are you gonna do? The cut scenes are good (not great but solid) even if the figures do have pretty limited body language.

The game allows you to do a few creative web tricks without making the controls too complicated. And even if you do find them a bit difficult you can always try the "Kids Mode." As Guy Ryder said, "there's no shame in Kid's Mode. I just leave out that part when I'm telling people I beat the game." If you're over the age of eight, however, and have more self-respect than Guy (which is not hard) then you can do the training mode and try to improve yourself. To monitor your progress there's a record section that keeps track of all your best times of each event.

It's evident that Neversoft loves Spider-Man. Each major arc of the game even has its own comic cover to kick off the introduction. Also, they've hidden comic covers throughout the levels (thanks to a FAQ from gamefaqs.com, I was able to find them all). You can also unlock numerous variants of the Spider-Man costume such as Ben Reilly's costume, Scarlet Spider, the symbiote Spider-Man, Spider-Man 2099, Spider-Man Unlimited, Peter Parker and even quick change Spider-Man among others (my personal favorite is the Amazing Bag-Man).

But those aren't the only extras. It also has a character viewer where you can get a three dimensional look at all of the major players in the game and even a few important cameo players such as Daredevil, Captain America, the Human Torch and a couple of others. There's also one of my favorite features, a movie viewer where you can see cut scenes from any point in the game. They also have the storyboards from each of the sequences. Another little quirk is that if you leave the controller alone during the opening menu you will see a few demos, including Spider-Man in a James Bond parody. I think that in terms of extras, this game is as good as the PS one gets.

The story that holds the whole thing together is pretty thin but they do their best to see that it holds up and for the most part it does. The problem comes in that Neversoft is trying to get in every villain that they can get. In this game you have to fight the Rhino, Venom, Carnage, Lizard, Mysterio, Doctor Octopus, and Scorpion, not to mention countless thugs, goons and lugs. When the creators cram in lots of villains into one game, the storyline almost always suffers from it.

The game has an adjustable difficult setting but for the most part it is straightforward and easy. The ending is surprisingly difficult considering how easy the rest of the game is but the final cut scene is worth putting in the time to defeat the game.

The best part is how cheap this game is, if you can find it. I got my copy from Blockbuster for five dollars. This is a good clean fun game and it's a good way to spend an afternoon or two.

When Stephen (who is the boss of this website, in case you didn't know. But not the boss of me. Most of the time) first approached me to write this column, he described it as a column about manga and anime, since this is allegedly a comics website, and those things are sort of related to comics. I, of course, being a diligent and obedient author, said, "I think I'll write about video games." And Stephen acquiesced anyway, because he knows I'm the only one of his friends who can meet a deadline.

And so, in the weeks leading up to the grand unveiling of the new and improved website, I promised him that I would write an article about Metal Gear Solid Substance. Oh, what an article about Substance it would be, with informative insights and clever commentary on all of the tactical espionage action. "I'll get that Substance article to you soon," I told him.

Then I handed him this article instead, and he told me I'd never work in this town again. This lead to some confusion as to what town, since we live in different cities, and while he was distracted, I published the article anyway.

A couple of years ago, I fell in with some bad stuff. It was by accident... you know how these things are; you start out innocently, curious, just experimenting, and before you know it, you're hooked, up until three in the morning, barely blinking, just thinking about your next crop.

Yes. I'm talking about farming sims.

Harvest Moon was released for the Super Nintendo in 1996 by Natsume and Ubi Soft. I remember seeing a small feature on it in Nintendo Power (because of course, I was a Nintendo Power subscriber from the first issue on for six years), and thinking "Gosh. Farming." And then, years later, when I was involved in the shady world of downloading SNES ROMs (since the SNES is effectively dead, I don't feel too guilty. But remember, it's illegal, and we at sequentialarts.typepad.com don't condone illegal activities. So if anyone asks, I slipped and fell onto my mouse and clicked on the download.) I went mad with power and decided it was time for my moon to be harvested.

It's deceptively simple. You play a young man who has just inherited a farm out in the country (as opposed to those city farms you hear so much about) and have a given period of years to bring it from its ramshackle state into a thriving source of produce and livestock. It is not what one would expect to be a fun game. You will spend hours weeding, chopping wood, tilling fields, watering your crops, milking your cows... and for what reward? Well, as with any simulation game, you really only get the satisfaction of having done something correctly. If you water your crops daily, they grow, you can sell them, and have money to... buymore crops. Or perhaps trade with the elves that live beneath your farm for a magical watering can.

I lost weeks of my life to this game. It addicted me to such an extend that when I saw the Playstation sequel, Harvest Moon: Back to Nature, I embarrassed myself by shrieking with girlish farming delight in the Circuit City. They knew my horrible secret, but it was okay, because I could see on the back of the box that there were even more crops to grow and you could even raise sheep. Sheep! And sure enough, it was everything I could imagine. There were something like twelve different crops, and a bevy of livestock to be raised. I named all of my chickens after Evangelion characters. Shinji was my best hen. He laid golden eggs because I hugged him a lot.

Yes. If you hug your chickens a lot, they lay golden eggs. Because this is Harvest Moon, and it's a farming sim, and it's here to make you think things like "I have to get my cows inside, there's a storm brewing" and "This drought is hell on my tomato crop" and worry about whether or not you'll have enough feed for your chickens to get you through the winter. If you let it get to you. If you listen to the siren call of farming.

(EDITOR'S NOTE: While I was shocked to find this article posted on the website, I do have to say that it's quite good. So I told Whitney that she could indeed work in this town again. Her response was, "which town, Stephen?" To which I responded, "Any town you want, Whitney. Any town you want... Also, Guy has asked me to correct Whitney in saying that she is the only friend that I have who can follow a deadline. Instead of correcting that I will reinforce it, because as we all know, Guy is more of a tool for hire than a friend.)