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Sugar Rush Of A Game

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 7 / 8
Date: July 28, 2004
Author: Amazon User

John Deere American Farmer is bug ridden, very slow at times, and doesn't come with much else to do than complete 11 scenarios and create your own. I'm a campaign/mission person myself. Despite these faults, I found it wholly entertaining and semi-addictive at times. For a little while. It's a game that could have been so much more though if it had stretched a little further.

The scenarios ask varying things, but each starts with giving you a plot on a large piece of land, with the option of buying and selling aforementioned land. If you've played tycoons before (or the Sims) the layout should be familiar. You can build 4 types of structures: utility, hobby, leisure, and housing. Utility is all the farming stuff; hobby allows you to buy 4 types of extra buildings (like the vegetable garden) where you can get produce to sell at a road stand. Housing and leisure are to keep family members happy. See, you always start with 1 or 2 family members, and can always hire more workers. The family members work for free, but complain a lot and their satisfaction goes down. You can build lots of leisure objects, but you are delaying the inevitable. The family members (except for original one) will always leave.

Kudos for the vastly different family members and workers, I only wish they had more personality. 4 or 5 hillbilly statements does not a character make. Another simulation game I really enjoyed, Space Colony, derived a lot of its charm from the characters.

If you are hoping for contact between the characters, or to get them to use one of the 6 (ONLY 6) leisure objects available, you're out of luck. For better or worse John Deere is purely a work simulation. It goes so far as to skip the winter months, since there is no work to be done (in this game). What you can do is plant and harvest 4 types of crops (corn, wheat, sunflowers, and soybeans) and take care of 3 types of animals in commercial marketing style. You buy them as infants, feed them, then sell them for meat. I tend to stick with the dairy cows myself, since they can be milked instead of butchered.
What animals you buy or crops you plant is your choice, but if you want to succeed you're going to have to pay attention to the market trends. Sell high, buy low - just like the stock market. Watch the trends and predict. Happily, you can store crops in silos until the prices are to your liking.

The equipment, crops, buildings etc at your disposal in John Deere seem vast and confusing in the beginning, but once you've read the very helpful in game help/manual a few times it's not very hard at all. There is no tutorial, and the scenarios are not listed in order of difficulty or any other discernable pattern. The first scenario happens to be one of hardest, but after you beat that one you should pretty much know the game. The scenarios get more and more pointless the more you master the game, as there are long periods of nothing to do and then short bursts of extreme activity. There are 3 speeds, but these are not sufficient to alleviate the switches between extreme boredom and stress for the player.

The graphics are pretty so-so but get the job done, while the music gets on your nerves after awhile. Game play is so-so, but with all the bugs it seems limited. Controlling your people is not as easy as it could have been, and often get stuck in buildings. Be prepared to save a lot, as the bugs in this game can suddenly block off a building or get your tractor stuck transferring grain.

I played John Deere non-stop for about a week. It was entertaining and educating, but the lack of scenarios (hardly enough to satisfy long term) and the bugs, as well as the lack of objects and personality of characters made it the pc equivalent of equivalent of a sugar rush - short, sweet, and ultimately leaves you feeling unsatisfied.

Great game

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 6 / 7
Date: December 24, 2004
Author: Amazon User

This is a great game.. but make sure you download the patch! It corrects the problems mentioned. This would be a classic if only there were more crops, animals, buildings, etc. This title is screaming for a mod or expansion pack. But even in its basic form, this game is a lot of fun and surprisingly addictive! The first time I sat down to play, I burned almost 3 hours before realising it. It's much better than SimFarm, and is a title that really is unique. So if you are looking for a different kind of business sim, try this one out!

Caught the kids attention as well as mine

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 4 / 4
Date: January 08, 2006
Author: Amazon User

I love this game. My only problem is getting it away from the kids so I can play it. My 12 year old as well as teenager and older kids all love it. I was trying to find something that would entice them away from the shoot-em up games and this did it.

Yes, it has it frustrating moments as a player (when lots of things need to be done at once), but that is what sim games do for you. We have had NO problem with crashing. It may have to do with meeting the sytem requirements listed.

Great fun and a lot of learning. I'm sure a real farmer might not like it, but this IS a computer game, not real life. I know when we finish all the scenarios in this box, we'll get the next edition as well.

It has made us much more aware of agricultural issues (weather, crop prices, government farm prices) in the news and we comment on those stories to each other. This never happened before.

Great game! I had gotten tired of building Sim-cities and SimFarm was way too hard (picking up fence pieces and perfecting matching them together lest the horse gets out was stupid; chasing that tiny pixel size horse over the county was even worse). John Deere farms reign!

Too many bugs in game

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 6 / 9
Date: December 26, 2004
Author: Amazon User

I bought this game for my husband for Christmas and although he liked the concept it just gets hung up too often to make it enjoyable to play. We downloaded the patch somebody else referenced but it would not install. We may be doing something wrong but there was also no instruction/information pamphlet with the game so who knows. Basically he has quit playing already because of all the bugs so I'd have to suggest that you not waste your money on it.

Go ahead, make your millions

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 4 / 5
Date: January 14, 2005
Author: Amazon User

I really like this game because you can succeed rather quickly. Ok, so it's not realistic, but it wouldn't be fun if you couldn't get anywhere! In a little over two weeks, (real time) I have been farming for 50 years. In that time frame I have been able to accumulate 3749 acres to farm with five family members and three employees. By means of rather unrealistic prices, (like $7.73 a bushel for soybeans) and my own personal storage system with a capacity of 550,000 bushels, I have $1.3 million in the bank and have a net worth of $5.96 million. It has been really fun to work on my farm; I look forward to when I can work on it again each day. I would highly recommend this game for anyone who has even a slight interest in farming. As I have said it is a bit (ok, so more than a bit) unrealistic. So after mastering the game don't go out and try farming in the real world based on this game. You wouldn't get anywhere except debtors prison. But in the world of virtual reality, go ahead, make your millions!

Not bad but could be better

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 5 / 8
Date: February 07, 2005
Author: Amazon User

Not a bad game overall but compared to other sim games very much behind the power curve. I haven
t had many problems with it other than it just shut down once but I save often now. An auto save feature would be nice. Also, it would be nice to be able to assign the workers a specific task, such as milk cows and such. Another nice thing would be more animals as well as equipment offerings. I realize that it will be all john deere items but more of them would be cool. The graphics could be better but overall they are not bad. I hope that Bold does some more work and makes this the game it could really be.

Thank you John Deere

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 7 / 15
Date: October 11, 2004
Author: Amazon User

We had considered buying a farm. We know better now. Thank you John Deere for helping us avoid what would have been one of the biggest mistakes in our life. If your considering getting into agriculture, you really should play this simulation first...

Needs work, but great game

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 5 / 9
Date: April 08, 2005
Author: Amazon User

I too agree this game needs alot of work, never the less it is addicting. One major problem I have been having is my people freezing up to where you can never get done what they froze on. This happens with me more often than not when either cleaning out a barn with a tractor or repairing the dairy barns. If it is an employ, just fire them. If it is a family member however, you are stuck until either they quit, or you sell all your cattle and destroy the barn. I have learned how to fix this last problem. You can NOT build double fences on a dairy barn. Just make the fence all go to one side of the barn as opposed to two seperate sections. I went through 6 dairy barns before I figured that one out. I don't know why, but for some reason they will freeze every time if you have the two seperate fences. The rest of it, I don't have a clue.
As someone else stated, there should be more equipment. I live on a farm here in Texas, so the first thing I obviously noticed it was missing was hay bailing equipment. There should be bigger combines and planters, and there needs to be a way that two different tractors can be on the fields at the same time, otherwise you simply get to where you don't have the time to get it all in. Also maybe some irrigating equipment. Now we rely on rain only. And the thing I'd like to see the most is to be able to assign employees to certain task, or even all the task in a certain barn so they aren't running all over the place unneccesarily. My brother-in-law lives next door and has the game too and our computers are hooked together via LAN, it would be pretty cool to be able to hook the games together and share equipment.

Disappointed Dirt Clod

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 5 / 11
Date: April 25, 2005
Author: Amazon User

Don't waste your money. I bought this hoping it was a modern, more appealing take on the old sim farm. My 4 year old loves John Deere and I thought he would enjoy playing it. Nope. The interface is too complicated and filled with tedious tasks for a kid to stay interested - Seems you spend most of your time getting people in and out of vehicles, which would be great if it were an equipment simulator, but it is not. Too many selections are needed to access regular tasks like hiring crop dusters or checking market trends. The only positives are that the graphics and animation are better and there are more choices in equipment. But overall the game is incredibly tedious. There is no way to schedule tasks in advance (a great feature of sim farm). You can miss your planting or harvesting windows if one of your dolt employees wanders off. I don't want to buy more land as I cannot even fathom the aggravation of getting crops planted and harvested in more than 6 fields. The 4 available crops are a joke. Sim farm had 20 or more. As others noted, you really the ability to assign workers specific tasks - You can lose half a season if one wanders from the veggie plots to clean a barn on the other side of the farm - especially since in the process they will avoid any vehicles! You also need a pause option where you can assign several workers tasks, instead of losing valuable time trying to find out where Clem wandered off to. Where are the equipment sheds? What self respecting farmer will leave a 300,000 combine sitting in the rain? Finally, I truly expected many more equipment choices given the John Deere headline. Maybe even a dealership where I could go test drive, after all, the dinosaur sim farm let you fly the crop duster. This is the first John Deere toy I've ever bought that was a disappointment. Maybe they should have given Ertl a crack at it.

Pretty good farm simulator

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 2 / 2
Date: January 12, 2007
Author: Amazon User

This is a pretty good farm simulator, although there are a few bugs in it. You can become stuck in buildings and such, however this raley happens to me and I've put a few hours on this game. I would recomend picking it up from a local software dealer though as you should be able to get it for $9.99 now.

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