There are three kinds of children’s games:

1. Children’s games that children can enjoy,
2. Children’s games that adults can enjoy and
3. Children’s games that noone can enjoy.

Sadly My Farm Around The World falls firmly into the third category. Well, maybe I’m exaggerating a little bit. I did rather enjoy myself for a day or two, but it was more a case of laughing at the game than laughing with it. I should dispel a misconception right off the bat though: it’s called “My Farm”, but you don’t actually grow any crops. You’re a rancher and you rear various animals either for the produce they give or so you can fatten them up and resell later.

You start out farming on an American farm. The animals are all pretty standard: hens for eggs, ducks, turkeys and pigs for fattening up, that sort of thing. There’s a day and night cycle, but the day passes so slowly that it would take about an hour to get through each one. Luckily you can press the forward button to make time go up to 64x faster. Every day goes pretty much like the one before it:

1. Feed your animals
2. They get dirty once they eat, so you have to brush them
3. They also poop once they eat, so you have to clean the poop
4. Sell whatever produce they’ve given so far
5. Every other day one of them will fall sick. Give it medicine.
6. Watch them until they fall asleep at night and wake up again.
7. Start over again from step 1.

That’s all there is to it. Your animals have Lost In Blue-like metabolisms, so you’ll have to feed them pretty often, which means you’ll have to clean their poop pretty often, so that’s what 80% of the game will be spent on: feed and clean, feed and clean, sell produce, feed and clean. Repetitive and unexciting gameplay.

But wait! Once you’ve bought one of every animal you can get for that region, you’ll unlock a new region and you can go over and start the process all over again. There’s the American, African, Asian and Australian farms to get through, none of which will take you very long. The laughs I talked about came from the African farm, mostly. Do you know what animals you’re supposed to fatten up on your African farm? Hippos, rhinos and lions! Seriously! A picture speaks a thousand words:

Look at them right there, Rhinos! And hippos behind them. See the lions in the pen on the right? Very cute, well-behaved creatures too. If you starve them they’ll just die quietly. None of that attacking your gnus (pen on the left side) or  eating your baby hippos nonsense that real life lions would do in real life, no sir. Btw, those brightly colored creatures behind the hippos are parrots. I always thought those particular parrots were native to Southern America, but I’m no expert.

Also in the laughs category, the game makers created a neighbor in each region for you who helps you get started and comes over every once in a while to warn you if your animals fall sick, i.e. every day. To give some extra African flavor, your African neighbor always says “Nimefurahi kukutana nawe” when he comes to give you the bad news. Now file this under “unlikely but true”, but I actually know a bit of Swahili and I’m 99.99% sure that “Nimefurahi kukutana nawe” means “Pleased to meet you” not “I have some bad news for you” so I think now’s a good time for the developers to look into hiring a new Swahili translator.

Hmm, I guess My Farm Around The World DS wasn’t a complete waste of time, then. I’ll remember those lions and tigers and kangaroos for a while, at least, and I got a little Swahili revision out of it. On the other hand the gameplay was dull, simplistic shallow and repetitive, the graphics were weak, the goofy-looking animal design wasn’t really my style and there’s absolutely no reason to ever replay this game. So yeah, category 3 after all.