Nicholas’s current great interest is Farming Simulator 22, after he has seen a fair few videos on YouTube talking about the array of machinery you can drive around. He has been keen to get me involved in a multiplayer game, and after weeks of putting it off, here we are.
It took us 20 minutes to get a game set up, mainly because he’s installed all sorts of mods and DLC onto his Steam game, which aren’t available on the Xbox (or, in some cases, I hadn’t installed them), meaning our games were incompatible. We worked out what we needed to do in the end, and so I entered the farm with some trepidation over exactly which crops I’d be harvesting or sowing or watering or whatnot.
I needn’t have worried. This wasn’t a simulation of farming, it was a simulation of driving around a town in big expensive machines, blocking roads, turning other vehicles over, and generally causing havoc. The farm we inherited had large fields of sunflowers and wheat, which were wrecked as two large tractors had a (slow) race through them. An irrigation machine with large arms was used to block roads. Combine harvesters pushed over quad bikes.
We parked a few vehicles on the train tracks, not expecting a train to come past. For some reason vehicles clip straight through your avatar, but interact directly with other vehicles. We found that there was a large beetroot-picking machine balanced on top of a house.
It’s all a bit silly. I asked Nicholas if we could actually try harvesting the sunflowers, and he tried to buy the right equipment and it still didn’t work. So he concreted over the field instead, so we had more space to park vehicles. As long as I don’t drive more of them into the river.
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