Here's a link to Azada: Azada
7.1 excellent
As recently as a few years ago, there were starving kids in China who hungered for the vegetables of kids like me in the developed world. I love all vegetables, except for lima beans and green peas. Green peas are okay in soups and on salads, but lima beans are known as the "devil's paiga" and I advise you to avoid them at all costs. If you are forced to eat them, drown the beans liberally with yellow mustard (French's) and swallow them whole.
Harvest Mania To Go, by Electronic Arts, is a matching puzzle game filled to the brim with vegetables. Thankfully they're all delicious, without a single lima bean in sight. They're also super cute. Not on the same chou-kawaii level as Candy Can, but in that ballpark.
Life on the farm is divided into seasons. In spring, your farm produces talking tomatoes, onions, broccoli, and carrots. In summer, you grow talking grapes, oranges, watermelons, and lemons. In autumn: talking corn, pumpkins, eggplants, and red bell peppers. And the farm is also productive in winter: talking Christmas trees and snow whatzits. Yes, all the vegetables talk. They don't say much besides, "veggies!" and little squeals of joy, but they can talk. If you've been looking for a cute, fun kid's game, your search might be over.
When the vegetables are ready to be picked, they pop head-first up out of the ground. (By the way, when I say "vegetables," what I really mean are "cute little babies wearing vegetable outfits." Kind of like Pikmin.) Not cottoning to modern planting techniques, you've flung your seeds into the field in a mixed jumble and your plants are sprouting up randomly here and there. But you can only harvest veggies in groups of four. (I'm not a farmer so I don't know the specifics.) This limitation is big problem. Luckily for you, the vegetables can walk.
Gameplay involves telling vegetables where to walk to in the garden. Each turn, you click on a vegetable and drag a path to where it should walk to. If it can find a path through the other vegetables, it will walk there. That seems simple enough, but new vegetables are sprouting every turn and filling in space. Until they completely emerge, their older siblings can walk over them, but as the garden becomes more and more crowded, you might run out of elbow room. If that happens and you haven't completed the harvest, it's Game Over. Your goal is to harvest a set number of veggies for the market each season. Any group of four or more like vegetables placed in a 2x2 square will be automatically harvested, as well as any neighboring vegetables of the same type. Squealing with joy, they'll jump into the back of your rusty bucket-of-bolts clunker of a farm truck. Meet your goal and away the truck goes.
The more vegetables you chain together before making a match, the more points you get. In some seasons, once you've harvested one of each type of vegetable, flowers begin popping up in the garden. They're worth three times the points, so rake them in!
Every now and then a crate drops into the garden (possibly from a passing hot air balloon or dirigible) with a powerup inside. By directing four of the same type of vegetable to stand one per side around the crate, you can break it and free the powerup. The bumper crop powerup harvests all of one type of veggie. The tiller powerup harvests all the vegetables in one row and column. The frost powerup stops new veggies from growing so you can clear out some of those that are fully grown. And the fun, cute gopher powerup frees the wily garden gopher, who burrows into the garden and harvests (by the roots) ten random veggies. A book I read about gophers contradicts this benevolent behavior, so don't rush out and buy a box of gophers before checking with an expert.
The more veggies you harvest, the more stuff you can order for your virtual farm. The interface is kind of confusing, so I didn't manage to order anything but a dog, some daisies, and a pig pen. The less said about my pitiful excuse for a farm, the better. Once you get into the game, you might enjoy unlocking new items, ordering them, and choosing where to put them on your farm property.
The music in Harvest Mania To Go is perfect hoedown music. Yee-haw. If you like to annoy your neighbors with loud music, you'd be hard-pressed to choose between this game's soundtrack and the theme to Three's Company.