But then i got distracted by Stardew Valley, which i'm blaming entirely on
Okay, to be fair i'm sure i'd have heard about it pretty soon anyways, given that it's up to almost half a million sales in the first two weeks (http://www.pcgamer.com/stardew-valley-sales/) which is pretty damn good for an indie title!
Anyways, i haven't played a _lot_ of it yet since as previously mentioned i've also been chugging through the AMV.org VCAs. I'm currently at about 7 hours of playtime and only 3/4ths of the way through the first month/season. (At least some of that playtime was the game being paused while i dug around in wiki pages and such =)
However at a $15 price tag i think i would say i've already gotten my money's worth out of it, even if it inexplicably tanks when i get to the next season :)
Obviously it's very much like Harvest Moon. It's also giving me a bit of a Recettear vibe, probably because of the dungeon delving in the Mine and having to juggle time between maintaining your base of operations vs doing more of that dungeon delving. However i admittedly haven't played a lot of the Harvest Moon games so maybe some of them had a dungeon element as well and i'm just not aware of it.
I definitely haven't been playing in a very optimal manner. I almost certainly should be keeping more crops in rotation. I definitely should have opened up the extra section of the beach earlier. Instead of buying the backpack expansion first i probably should have saved the money for strawberry seeds at the Egg Hunt Festival. On the plus side though i did encounter the warning that the chicken coop is an unnecessary money sink early in the game before buying it.
I also wish i'd checked ahead of time and found out that same-sex marriages are allowed in the game. If so i'd probably have made a female avatar. (I also kind of wish there was a dateable girl who was gothy _and_ geeky, but i've already got Avalyn in real life so i guess i can't complain too much ;)
In any case i'm sure i'll be playing more of this, especially after the VCA semifinals round wraps up. I'll probably get back to Master of Orion 4 at some point too, but who knows when that will be.