I found this game in a lot I received from the liquidated Desinteer studio in Minnesota. It's a very early version of an unreleased PS2 game for John Deere. From what I can deduce it's using the Infernal Engine from Terminal Reality. Your character starts on a farm without much around. Driving of a single vehicle is implemented in this version. As are the use of some tools. And trivial weather. The farm has an exit which leads to town. Which is where things start to get weird. It is possible to enter some of the buildings and talk to the NPC present inside. None of the dialog is available and the game gets slightly unhappy during the sequence. There are some debug and hack menus, likely from the underlying engine as some of the options are puzzling for a farm game. Bonus barnyard animals.
Must be a precursor to Farming Simulator. I'm intrigued to why this one wasn't released, the build year must give out some speculation and all.
This is an awesome find. Any date(s) you can find on this? Also I'm curious as to way the scroll bar says "Welcome to John Deere Springtime planting. Your ads wanted here!!!", as if this isn't advertising John Deere enough. Hahah.
I'm not sure if it's a precursor to the Farming Simulator franchise. Destineer put out a few other John Deere games: John Deere: American Farmer in 2004 and John Deere Harvest in the Heartland in 2007. Possibly another one as well, but I can't confirm. Neither seem similar to this alpha. This is likely just a demo to secure more IP from John Deere. All the dates are from 2008. The two disks are labeled 06/22/2008 and 07/17/2008. That matches the file creation dates on the DVDs and the build information in the debug menus. In the later build which I haven't spent too much time with they've changed the ticker at the bottom to contain more information, similar to the ticker in Sim City. "Taxes increase. A fair is in town and Pig is needed. Interest on loads increase." and so forth. Sadly there's a serious lack of monkeys in the game.
Yes, two different builds. The later one has improvements, but not too many. Still nothing that resembles game mechanics. They work on the TEST PS2, but I've been using pcsx2 mostly.
