Review: Harvest Moon GBC for 3DS

They say patience is a virtue, yet it's not a virtue that modern video games seem particularly keen to encourage.

We're either assailed by ceaseless walls of action or goaded into speeding up a sedate adventure through the medium of in-game transactions. The notion of patience no longer seems to exist in quite the way it once used to.

Now that Nintendo has brought the Game Boy Color version of Harvest Moon GB to the Virtual Console, Nintendo 3DS owners can experience the slower pace of life once again.

Plowing through

After a ghostly visit from your grandfather, you inherit his farm and get saddled with the gargantuan task of restoring it to its former glory within a year.

To achieve this takes diligence. Clearing up the weeds and rubble from the old farm is demanding enough, but planting crops and watering them daily can be quite tiresome. The assignment becomes even harder when you begin handling livestock, which need to be fed every day.

You're restricted even more by the fact that you can only push yourself so far. Working for too long at one task wears you down, entailing a break or trip to the sauna to refresh.

But, while this can be frustrating at first, soon you'll learn how to fill the time with other tasks so that you can operate at maximum efficiency.

Your day is also broken up into the three distinct time periods of morning, afternoon, and night. Within this there are two key moments - when the shops are open and when your stockpiles are taken away for sale.

Because of this, you'll want to make sure you don't work through the night too often, that all your harvesting duties are dealt with before five o'clock in the evening, and that you visit the shops in good time so you can purchase new seeds to grow.

Fun that just crops up

While this may sound unenjoyable, it's actually absurdly fun.

It's just so gratifying to see your farm - a brown patch of land you've nurtured from the brink of death - slowly transform into a busy site teeming with life and activity.

It may well be old now, but Harvest Moon GBC is still as fresh as ever, thanks to its pin-sharp sprite-based visuals and incredibly robust gameplay.

If you like to take your time and feel a real sense of accomplishment, you'd do very well with this rewarding release.