So i _was_ playing the new Master of Orion early access for awhile. (After 3/4ths of a game plus watching some Let's Plays, my impression is exactly what i expected. It's a well done Master of Orion 2 reboot that's vaguely disappointing to me as a Master of Orion 1 fan.)

But then i got distracted by Stardew Valley, which i'm blaming entirely on stormfeather ;)

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.