A couple of save game patches are available to download at Minutegamer.org. It’s now in the public area so everyone is free to download it.

One of the patches will give you 30K in food. Great for lazy starters, and the other gives 1 million tech points, great for impatient starters.

The instructions are there as well. Even though I’ve never tested it on Vista, there are people who left comments with instructions on how to get it to run on Vista. Please check the thread there instead of asking here!

Come and get it, guys and gals.

If you don’t know what this game is, you have to try it. You absolutely have to try it. It’s the best game on the Big Fish Games community. Click this button and play it - heck, it’s free!

Hail to the Farm 51 team,

Love the new update! Gave us tons more to do. After playing for a few days, here are a few suggestions and a few certain elusive bugs. I’ve been playing this game for weeks now, so mind the length of this email. Thanks for reading.

Well, the bugs first.

I’m using Mozilla Firefox latest version 2.0.0.14 Java version 6 update 5 1.6.1_05-b13
2 gigs of ram, windows xp sp2.

If you click on the bank balance to open the ledger, it will work 3 times. Then when you click on it again. nothing will show up. Not a showstopper, but definitely annoying if you like to check your year to date every once in a while. Restarting the game by reloading it fixes the problem. The bullet buttons also work in strange funky ways. If you click on one, something else is selected. Weird.

Sometimes clicking on the silo to open the inventory and then clicking on an item can freeze the game. This is pretty random.

Suggestions - (in no particular order; the numbers are just for show)

1. This is probably intentional, but fuel acquisition doesn’t take into account of the cost of the crop circle. So if you only get 3 fuel it actually costs $20k per, while getting over 15 runs the cost down to $10K per. This is kind of misleading since there is a choice to get Cash instead, and people are probably thinking that it works the same way.

2. Free range cows should make more milk than penned cows. Giving them access to a river should mean they don’t need water. Chickens and cows shouldn’t have to be fed if they are given more than 15 squares to roam during the warm months. All this would add the realism of the game. Also, robo-animals should be “fixed” not “healed.” We should also be able to sell cows or even just to let them go - bombing them is a bit uh…inhumane, ya?

3. The alien planet is pretty useless once you max out gnurdaculture. There should be a bit more to do there. A scratch card, maybe? A riddle?

4. If you make a “deluxe” version of this game where you can download it and play it in full screen, I’d buy it. I know lots of people who’d buy it. It’d also be virtually unhackable if you keep an “online only” game where you can get tokens and an “offline mode” where you can’t. Something like the deluxe game son pogo.com where they include chat.

5. This game needs more screen space. Since you probably can’t provide that, I’d settle for #4.

6. Having multiple tractors should mean that you can harvest multiple fields at once.

7. The illusionator should have a wider range. Or the kind of range that the barn or shed should have. i.e. one should protect 6 / whatever number you decide regardless of where they are. It just makes sense - I mean, if I can have my hovershed above the river and all my iq enhancers below the river, the illusionator should be able to protect them even if it’s in the upper corner of the map.

8. A few buttons that I don’t think anybody really use on a regular basis: Buy building, animals, equipment, fences, Settings, Help, repair / heal and skills. You have a buy / build menu like your decorations menu, fences should really be under decoration, healing should be done in the barn, skills can go under inventory. You get the picture. Having so many buttons confuses new players and annoy the old ones.

9. When you sell ALL of something, the menu should stay where it is, not jump to the top.

10. a penultimate “fix all” button would be nice.

11. I love this game - keep up the good work! Thanks for reading all this, if you did.

~Sally
The MinuteGamer

It’s in! I’ll be adding images shortly, but for now, at least you’ll have maps.

Get the walkthrough (and the game!) at minutegamer.org.

It is DONE! You can find it over at the MinuteGamer.org site. I’ve linked it directly to make it easier to find.

The walkthrough includes all storyline solution videos, videos for all the harder puzzles, hints for the minor puzzles like pegs, images for all the traffic map puzzles near the end of the game, in a spoiler-free top page. Enjoy!

There are lots of game portals out there, and each offer some sort of loyalty program, discounts, coupon codes and so on. Instead of trying to cram all the information into a blog post, I’ve tabulated the features that most causal gamers care about in their portals, and added “perks” and “quirks” of each in a related article.

You can check out the article at minutegamer.org, under the GAMES section.

Go into your c:\program files\home sweet home\resourceFiles\ directory, and find the file gamedata.xml

1. Look for the word “=== WORKER DATA ===” by using edit > find.
2. There are three sections for the workers, under “Goran”, “Fat Guy”, and “Chick” - yes, I find that just slightly demoralizing. A “chick” goes around hammering nails in as fast as the other ones. Hmmm.
3. Change the Stamina to “999.9″
4. Change the build speed to “0.50″
5. Change the walk speed to “2.5″
6. Change the stamina drop to “0″
7. Do this for all three workers.

Once you’re done that, let’s tackle the global difficulty. It should be RIGHT ABOVE the worker data.

1. Look for the phrase “<DEFAULTS name=”THE_EQUATION”>” (Just use “edit > find” it’s easier that way)
2. Change value= to 0. <VALUE id=”per_furn_tools_inc” type=”float” value=”0.1″/>
3. Do this for per_furn_injury_inc, stamina_decrease_rate_inc, furniture_decay_inc, item_request_time_inc, as well as worker_injury_percent_inc.
4. Save the file.

Load up the game, and you should have workers that:

• Don’t get tired
• Don’t ask for things
• Don’t get injured
• Builds like absolute maniacs
• Walks faster
• Whose work “deteriorate” VERY slowly over time.

You can go ahead and fool around with the rest of the settings.

Come join us at Minutegamer.org to download my already modified XML file.

Save 40% off any game on Big Fish Games (for non gameclub members) from now until December 26th!

Come visit Minutegamer.org, our new home on the web.

After an entire week of late nights and hard work, the new web site is finally live. It’s not perfect, and I still have to optimize the database and do a bunch of backend work. But it is fully functional and I invite you to take a look at our new face. It will have a lot more in it and possibly organized differently than the way it is now.

I’ve added a painfully small parenting section, a news section (it is very cool, Ajax based and pretty) that updates with some great blogs everyday, a bunch of free flash games you can play right from the browser, and if you register as a user, I will never spam you (well, unless we move or something then I’ll let you know about it) and you will get updates on what I’m working on - which is mostly tests on new adventure games.

If you sign up in the next couple of days, you might find a surprise waiting for you in your user-menu. We shall see how well my microphone works on this new computer.

Visit MinuteGamer.org

Well, for one, I’m working on a new site. Then I’m going to move this blog’s content there, with better and easier navigation. That’s priority #1.

I’m also working on an adventure game. How exciting! The story phase is almost done, and it’s codenamed Anamnesis (That’s an - am - NEE - sis.) The story is pretty much fleshed out but it’s getting a bit too ambitious, so I might have to chop it in two big chapters. Some scenes are already being built in 3D and I’m testing render speeds quality vs. quantity. It’ll be 3rd person point and click; at first I wanted to 1st person slide-show, but it turned out to be too much work for the computer.

Unfortunately, I haven’t really tried writing a “tag paragraph” that doesn’t leak the entire story yet, and any attempts to write one seem to “spill.” So I’ll just tell you that most of the puzzles are going to be inventory / dialog based, and that there will only be a scant few mechanical puzzles in the game. The story so far only involve 3 large locations with sub-locations.

On top of that, did I mention that I have a from-home full-time job and a 13 month old? So yes, casual games have been put temporarily on hold. I just don’t have time for even them at the moment. When the sequel to Azada comes out though, you’ll be sure to see a walkthrough here, but I’m going to skip anything less than spectacular.