Usually I'm not the type of person to interact with anyone on Facebook. Generally you'll find me accepting friend requests and then a few times a month looking at peoples pictures, just to see what they have been up to. However, my wife is a completely different bird, always updating, and constantly playing the flash games available. The latest game she started playing was Farm Town and she dragged me right along for the ride.
Farm Town was created by a company called Slash Key and contains the basic elements of what made Sim Farm, developed in 1993 so much fun. It's all about planting crops, developing a plan, and trying to earn enough money to purchase the Mansion instead of the run down shack you start out with. Thanks to my wife, I am now playing it almost as much as she is and find myself logging into Facebook just to check on my crops to see if they need harvesting.
Farm Town is not nearly as complicated as Sim Farm was and the options are fairly limited. Furthermore the creators of Farm Town have integrated a leveling system to keep players logging in and interacting. Usually experience points are awarded for helping out on friends farms, planting crops, or plowing fields. To really start moving through the levels though takes coins, which you will use to purchase buildings and fences. Everytime you buy a higher level item you gain massive amounts of experience points, then the process starts all over again.
Sim Farm
Well, thanks to this friendly reminder of how much a farm simulation can be, I decided to hunt down Sim Farm. Thanks to the interwebs you can still find this abandonware available for free download, but requires some serious tweaking to play on a new computer. DosBox came in handy and after figuring out it's install I was ready to start playing Sim Farm again for the first time in 16 years.
The only problem I've ran into when running Sim Farm on Vista through DosBox is the window size. It tried tweaking the config file as suggested on the wiki's, but still no luck. The solution I use, but causes some graphical errors, is to alt-enter, which plays in full screen mode. Generally this works, but from time to time will cause everything briefly look like a lake. Small price to pay. 