Has anyone played this and what did you think about it?

I'm a few hours in, just made it off the first island and I just can't get into it. It feels like a cross between Harvest Moon and the Sims. The reviews on GameFAQs were mostly good, there's some activity on the boards, the Lionhead Studio boards were very enticing. I like the premise, there's some interesting features, it's graphically beautiful.

But it's just not doing it for me so far.

I swear, this is the last time I give Peter Molyneux any more of my money. He has some brilliant ideas but his execution needs improvement. He needs a partner. One who can shut him up in an interview and actually extract his good ideas and transform it into gameplay.

I played the game a year or two ago and i must say i thoroughly enjoyed it

It wasn't quite the gaming experience of a lifetime, but it was worth the money. I respectfully disagree with you on the Peter Molyneux front, to me he's still making good games, but he's taken the foot of the gas a little, and there are so many other developers out there now that he's not the visionary games creator he once was.

I haven't played Harvest Moon, so I don't get your comparison there - but I hope the game gets more entertaining for you later on. I still haven't played the expansion pack...

I was thinking about going out and buying it a few days ago (apparently, its available for about $10 at Bestbuy here), but having read some of the reviews (1up, eurogamer, etc.) I decided against it and just re-installed the first one, which, I have to say, provided me with a lot more enjoyment than I had expected. The expansion pack for the original is pretty bad, though, just a bunch of fairly uninteresting minigames.

@ Moniker42 - I'm glad to hear you enjoyed it. I'll put some more time into it this weekend and hopefully discover what a lot of people have found enjoyable about this game. Maybe I'll even figure out why my villagers are unhappy. I swear, you feed them, make them breed, you give them homes and fields... they're still not happy. They're just like kids.

Harvest Moon was from back in the SNES days. It was quite popular back in the day but after a few hours I decided I didn't want to plant crops and tend sheep for entertainment. There might be a lot more to it than that... I wouldn't know. I never got that far.

Except Peter Molyneux did not design this game, Ron Millar did.

Really? Huh. But he had something to do with it, right? His name is the one I usually hear associated with it.

So I played a little more this weekend and I really want to like it... but it just hasn't pulled me in yet. I keep hoping I'm not far enough into it yet and I'll enjoy it more but that hasn't happened so far.