Now, games have been made for the females of the species before but they usually never turned out to be any good. If anyone needs reminding of these offences they include Spice World on the PS1 (shudder) to the disastrous Barbie Groovy Games on our beloved GBA (let us never speak of it again from this day forward). To say that these outings had good intentions to incorporate the ladies does not justify them being a steaming pile of nasal fluid. Harvest Moon, however, is a unique genre and very playable game and so we welcome a game that is worthy to be put into our shiny (if you have a platinum) 'Cube and also caters for the fairer gender of the species.

Harvest Moon: Another Wonderful Life is basically an updated version of the original Harvest Moon on the 'Cube with adjustments made to show a female's views and aspects of the story. As the game progresses, for example, there will appear five male love interests for the sweet damsel to occupy her time with along, with all of the previous tasks found in the original Harvest Moon such as farming the land, selling the crops and tending to the animals about the farm.

Harvest Moon wasn't your normal kind of game, with Japanese manga-esque characters sporting big heads and eyes and an general open ended feel to the game giving the player a lot of freedom to move around and do things at their own pace. The player can enjoy simply finding things out for themselves and learn how the game works and progress the story for themselves.

HM isn't to everyone's tastes and people who didn't enjoy Animal Crossing and the vague objectives may not be able to immerse themselves in the Harvest Moon world. But given time the player may find a whole host of activities to endure and will enjoy the development of the farm and taking the young lady through her love interests down at the local bar.

It is nice to see that the female gamer is being considered and Harvest Moon is an innovative for the new step forward into a world where female gamers can kick just as much arse as their male counterparts. Although the differences between the original game and this new version may seem slight and inadequate (imagine if there were a female version of every game) it allows females to finally have a product catered to their character and that might actually be good… Instead of mocking their intelligence and competence as many past games have done.