Load up on the flouride and check your blood sugar. Über-sweet farming/life simulator Harvest Moon: Island of Happiness has been confirmed for release on the Nintendo DS on August 26th.

The latest DS outing for the franchise is said to be the biggest ever , with EVEN MORE huge-eyed chicks to marry and raise happy children with.

It's all so.. beautiful. Sniff. That's it, I think I need to go and have a bit of a cry.

To celebrate the 10th anniversary of the Harvest Moon Games, pre orders can nab a plush chicken. Yes, you read that correctly.

Harvest Moon: Island Of Happiness [Natsume]

Back at E3, we had a chance to check out some of the titles Natsume is publishing in the US. Titles like Rune Factory 2 for the DS. It's of course the second Rune Factory game, which is best explained as Harvest Moon meets fantasyland. The game's going to be out this fall, and here's something I didn't know about it: Rune Factory 2 has over 9,000 words of text. That's a lot of text! For those not into the fantasy element, the DS and the Wii will both see new Harvest Moon games. Bring on the farming and marrying!

The Harvest Moon farm/life sim franchise is coming up on ten years old! Natsume will toast the anniversary with not one, but two new games "later this quarter", and promises tons of commemorative goodies, too.

There's Harvest Moon: Island of Happiness for DS, and Harvest Moon: Tree of Tranquility for Wii. And yes, there will be pre-order bonus stuffed toys.

Please hold the girl jokes, but as a fan, I think this news is amazing. Especially because the screenshots, handily provided for you after the jump, show that in the Wii version, you can ride on an ostrich. Horses are so ten years ago. And screenshots for the DS version (one of which seriously shows a girl saying "Wow, it's bigger than I thought"), reveal not only that the possible girlfriends are as decision-wrenchingly cute as always, but that the top screen map will actually show you where townsfolk are so that you can visit them.

Full announcement after the jump.

Corporate confusions! When Harvest Moon developer Natsume decided to found a pachinko company a few years back, it could've picked any name for the new company. Natsume didn't and instead gave the pachinko company a corporate game moniker we all know: Atari. Here's what the CEO of Atari Inc. says about the company's name on its English page:

When naming our new company, we desire to maintain these objectives. We also thought of a Japanese word, "atari", used in the expression such as: A World of Hit business is counted by "How much you earn if you hit atari"; Pachinko is a game to aim "atari"; and thus in such a world by working hard We want to come up with big atari (big hit) machine!!. So, summing all up, we decided a company name, "Atari Inc."
Participating in all the business areas and projects, our top rated development staffs are aiming to reach literally the Biggest Atari by collecting all their wisdoms and ideas.

I know the 2600 was never big in Japan, but don't these guys know? Or Care? Maybe that's a good conversation starter. "No, we're the other Atari."

Greetings [ATARI Inc via Insert Credit]

Eee! Singing sheep! Nexon's not-new-but-new-to-the-US MMORPG Mabinogi is moving to open beta as of this coming Wednesday. The Harvest Moon-meets-MMORPG has already been through a closed beta and pre-open beta test run, apparently to a good response. You can sign up at the Mabinogi website or over at FilePlanet. I'm a total sucker for stuff like this, so I'll be wandering over to check it out. Full release after the jump:

Well the comments from last week's VC Update were overwhelmingly in favor of continuing, and that's probably a good thing as this week sees the release of one of the hardest to find titles for the original SNES. Harvest Moon sows its seeds on the Wii Virtual Console this week, with 800 Wii Points worth of raising animals, growing crops, and luring unsuspecting country girls into an ultimately loveless marriage where you sit around playing Lords of Thunder all day long while she sits in the barn crying for her lost youth. What's Lords of Thunder? Why it's this week's second VC release. A TurboGrafx CD side-scrolling shooter (800 Points), LoT casts you as a legendary warrior taking on six stages of combat in order to stop the resurrection of Zaggart: "The Dark One" to the dulcet sounds of the best in gaming metal. Raising livestock and blazing guitar rock - it seems like last Monday was not a good day to die.

Leigh Alexander of the Aberrant Gamer/Sexy Videogameland/Worlds In Motion is a woman after my own heart, and her latest AG column is on one of my favourite games, Harvest Moon. What does your HM mate selection say about you? Rather, does playing the field - or not - reflect on you, or on media more generally? Having spent many an hour, especially while jet lagged, flinging chickens, petting cows, and building up the farm empire of my dreams, that whole marriage thing is usually the last thing I get around to - I'd rather have sheep producing golden fleece and a prize-winning horse. So, I tend to pick the potential spouses that look most low-maintenance, being a little too lazy to play the field - but Alexander throws herself into the task of wooing virtual women (or men) with aplomb:

Pretty slim pickings this week. There's not the customary three games on offer. Heck, there's not even two games on offer. Just one. A single, solitary game. But proponents of the saying "quality trumps quantity" will be high-fiving across Europe and Australia, as that one game is Harvest Moon for the SNES. It's not my favourite Harvest Moon (A Wonderful Life somehow holds that honour), but with some Wii points change lying around and no new games to play I may just settle in for a weekend of tedious, back-breaking virtual labour.

Yasuhiro Wada is best known for cult hit barnyard RPG Harvest Moon. But he's also busy running Marvelous Interactive! You'd think a guy who's had creative and business success would be content. Wada still has things he'd like to do — grand plans if you will. Plans that include a Spore-like game. Wada explains:

Eventually, I'd like to make something like Spore, where you create something, and from there, new stuff is going to be created again and again and again. In a micro world, like The Sims for example, you have the city expanding but you can't see it. But you want to be one of the people living in the city, and to be a part of this growing too.

Marvellous have gone and announced another Harvest Moon game (and no, it's not the "online game" series boss Yasuhiro Wada has spoken of previously). Just in case Harvest Moon fans were feeling a little left out in the cold. Harvest Moon: Sun and Friends is for the DS, and features some Sunflower Islands, wild animals that help you out on the farm and the ability to trade items (sadly not wives) over wi-fi. Oh, it's got voice-chat too, so anyone looking to save a buck or two on international calls, you have been advised.

Harvest Moon Plants Another on DS [1UP]