By The Clarius March 5, 2005 There has been a lot of heartache for the Harvest Moon fans these past few years. The Playstation 2 Game, Harvest Moon: Save the Homeland, featured no marriage or festivals and seemed like a dumb, mission based, role-play game trying to be passed off as Harvest Moon. Then the colossal disappointment of last year, HM (Harvest Moon): A Wonderful Life for the Gamecube, which was so painfully dull and pointless that entire websites shut down because of it. But now, almost a year later, a ray of hope. 6. Yes 6 whole games are in development in Japan, at least 2 of which are definitely coming to North America. The 2 I speak of are HM: Another Wonderful Life and HM: More Friends Of Mineral Town for the game cube and the gameboy advanced respectively. These are exactly the same as the previous games of a similar title with one major exception- you play as a female. For the first time outside of Japan, you can play as a girl with all the expected female benefits. You can change outfits, you can bake, and you can pursue the bachelors from each game, (in HM: AWL, its Rock Gustava and Marlin and in HM:Mfomt, it's the old rivals from the boy's version). These games our both coming to North America in June of this year. While Harvest Moon is mainly a Nintendo based game, it has put out games for the Playstation franchise, most notably the tremendously popular HM: Back to Nature. There are 2 games set to go over to Playstation, HM: Oh! A Wonderful Life and the Playstation Portable version of Harvest Moon, which is still untitled. Oh! A Wonderful Life will be very similar to the Gamecube version except that you will now be able to have a male or female child and Lumina, (the 10 year old……), will be a potential wife. Oh! AWL seems unlikely to come to North America and HM:PSP has almost no information on it now, but keep your eye out for these games if you're a Playstation fan. The last 2 games, which are the ones us fanatics are really looking forward to, are HM: Song of Happiness for the Gamecube and HM: Sprites Station for the Nintendo Dual Screens. Sprites station takes place in Forget-me-not Valley, which is where AWL took place only 100 years later. It features characters from AWL as well as some look alike characters from BTN/64. The presumed eligible girls are the 5 BTN/64 look alikes, the 3 AWL girls, the Harvest Goddess and the brand new Harvest Witch. The top screen of the DS will be for gameplay, while the bottom screen will have conversation boxes, maps, menus and advice from the Harvest Sprites. The stylus will be used to wash farm animals and likely many other tasks. Song of Happiness takes place in Flowerbud village, the setting for Harvest Moon: 64, and is in many ways a throw back to the very first HM game on the Super Nintendo. It features a boy and girl playable character, 3 farm locations, (the beach, the river and the village), a rival farmer to compete with, the quest of finding "happiness tones" for the stoned, (as in made of stone), Harvest Goddess, multiplayer, the ability to set things on fire and all new pets farm animals, including pigs and dolphins. The bachlorettes are updated versions of the SNES girls and the bachelors are all new, (although most of them look like the BTN men). This game was released on March 3rd in Japan and both are likely to come to North America. If you feel like getting more info on any of these games, or any of the old ones that I mentioned, I would recommend going to hmotaku.com which has lots of info in the site and the forums as well as links to other good sites. If you have finished reading this and still don't know what a Harvest Moon is, read my editorial "My Harvest Moon" (it's a farming simulator). Enjoy.