If you haven’t figured it out yet by, you know, the title and images and such, we’re here to talk about Farming Simulator. Specifically, Farming Simulator 16-Bit Edition, the latest entry in the long-running series from developer GIANTS Software. The first entry in the series came out wayyyyy back in 2008 and here we are 17 years later with a new cartridge version of Farming Simulator 16-Bit Edition for the Sega Genesis! That’s right, Farming Simulator has gotten an official demake! Now you can fire up that old CRT and impress your friends with your farming prowess! While this has been available in a PC version via download directly here for a while, GIANTS has partnered with publisher Strictly Limited Games to release a physical copy of Farming Simulator 16-Bit Edition of the game due to high demand!
As a result, you can now preorder a copy of Farming Simulator 16-Bit Edition for the Sega Genesis/Mega Drive from Strictly Limited Games directly, as well as from Amazon and Video Games Plus. Fans who preorder from Strictly Limited will get a clamshell Genesis case with hangtab, green cartridge, and printed instruction manual. There is also a deluxe edition available there with a physical soundtrack and Farming Simulator themed cartridge holder. Customers ordering from VGP and Amazon will get the standard black cartridge but the remaining contents will be the same as the limited edition. This review covers the standard release of Farming Simulator 16-Bit Edition, but we’ll be talking about the soundtrack as well!
Immediately upon booting up Farming Simulator 16-Bit Edition, you’re treated to a handy mini-instruction book that refreshes you on the button controls for the game, and how the basics of farm cultivation work. This isn’t a complex game by any means, but you’ll still want to note which buttons do what and what the land looks like in various stages of growth. As someone who plays a lot of games, I found this to be refreshingly handy, especially if you take an extended break from the game and then come back to playing it. After moving past the two screens, you’re in the main menu and it’s time to get started. From here you can start a new game, continue from one of three on-cart save slots, or manage options in the game. You have limited management options here, but they are different from the in-game options, so make sure you know what you want! You can change the button configurations to presets, change from music to sound effects, or test music from the menu. I went with the default settings at first, but shifted from music to sound effects, which I’ll discuss later. Sorry about the glare, it was sunny in my room for that one! The game looks better than that as you can see!
You can also choose from three levels of difficulty in the game. However, that doesn’t mean that farming itself gets any harder. Instead, the difficulty only adjusts your starting money, crop values, and used farm equipment sales values. The higher the difficulty, the less money you start with and receive. I went with easy on this playthrough and started with an ample amount of money, enough that I wasn’t worried about running out of cash filling up with fuel or trying to balance the speed I grow crops with the money I needed to upgrade equipment.
There’s not a lot of ceremony to the beginning of Farming Simulator 16-Bit Edition. There’s no plot and you just start with an idling tractor. The goal is to grow and sell your crops and there’s only one type of crop in the game so you’ll just be filling your seeder with seed and getting back to the fields. Before you do that however, you’ll need to cultivate each field. That means getting the tractor with the cultivator to each field and running over all the bare earth until it’s ready for seed sowing. There’s a visible change in the ground as you cultivate it and cultivation uses more fuel than just driving from place to place. To activate the cultivator, you hit the A button and a little egg icon shows up in the bottom corner of the screen.
You can also set your tractor to Cruise Control at a tap of the B button and a tiny “CC” shows up in the same corner of the screen. Once you accelerate, the cruise control will hold you at top speed unless you run into something and you can focus on steering instead of holding down acceleration on the d=pad, which makes it much harder to navigate. The cultivator is fairly slow at first and you’ll find that it takes a long time to prepare each field for seeds. If you’ve got cruise on, you can waggle the d-pad left and right and get your cultivator bed to swing back and forth, speeding up the process, but it’s very timing-based and you may occasionally miss a square. There’s a certain slow reassurance in quietly plowing fields though, so you might just want to steer and let things go as they will.
Once your field is plowed, it’s time to come back in and seed it. Using the C button, you can switch from vehicle to vehicle on your farm. It’s time to go back over the same field you just cultivated with a tractor and seeder, but you’ll need to fill the seeder with seeds as well as gas before you do. Just drive over to the seed shop and buy some by parking in the green square. Seeding the fields is virtually identical to cultivating them, though depending on your timing, your field may actually grow before you get a chance to finish the field. Seeded crops grow at set intervals whether you have just seeded them or have already moved on. Once you’ve seeded, it’s time to wait. There are three stages of growth you’ll have to wait for before you can harvest and each takes place automatically with no external cues. There’s no day or night in the game so you’ll just have to be patient and swap back to different vehicles to see how your crops are doing.
Once your crops turn yellow (I assume this is corn), it’s time to bring the harvester in. The harvester is by far the slowest and largest machine on your farm and you’ll have to be patient moving it from place to place and reaping the fields. You’ll also want to use the tractor and trailer to transport your crop for sale. It can hold far more than the harvester and it’s much faster too, which means you’ll be able to quickly dump your crop for cash as soon as it’s full. Just pull the harvester next to the trailer and it will automatically unload, then switch to the trailer and drive to one of the sales points to get that sweet sweet cash. Once you have harvested, the ground is once again unworked and can be cultivated again immediately if you wish.
There’s not much else to do here, but I found that once I had a good rhythm going, I could cultivate a field and move my vehicle to the next one, then seed a field, then switch to the harvester and harvest a field, and finally switch back to the cultivator and begin the cycle again. I just had to stop and get gas and seed occasionally which throws off the rhythm a bit. On easy it only took a couple hours to rack up some major cash and then it was time to try the rest of the game.
In addition to running the farm, you can also upgrade your equipment and access additional maps. There are three different farms in total and each one has a different configuration of fields and farm buildings. You can actually move your equipment between farms too, once you unlock them so you’ll be able to maximize each farm. The crops grow simultaneously in all the farms too and once you’ve got enough vehicles and a good pattern going, you can generate a hell of a lot of cash really fast. Of course, it’ll take a while since the second map costs $1,000,000 and the third is $2,500,000, but you’re building a farming empire here, so what’s a bit of time? Tractors, cultivators, harvesters, and trailers can all be upgraded to various types too, typically with more storage, wider decks, and more efficient engines, so as you upgrade, things get much, much faster.
The visuals are fantastically retro here too. There’s really nothing else that quite looks like a Genesis game, especially when played on original hardware and a CRT. Note that all photos for this review are taken with the game playing on CRT using a Samsung S24+ camera and it’s hard to photograph CRTs. The early summer vibe of the farms mixes well with the sprite design for the tractors, equipment and barns and the map layouts are well-done and varied in a way that changes up your patterns on each map. The color changes in different equipment are great too, but it’s a bit of a shame that you can’t customize your paint jobs. All in all, the game is vaguely reminiscent of the look of Battletech for the Sega Genesis, albeit much more colorful and mellower.
The music is also one of the big selling points of the game. There are eight new tracks here by Chris Hülsbeck of Turrican and Great Giana Sisters fame. These are some pretty upbeat chiptunes and the deluxe edition even comes with a physical soundtrack. You’ll be pleased to note that even the standard version of the game also comes with a code allowing you to download the soundtrack (as well as ROM/emulator to play the game on PC and a digital manual). Oddly, you can only choose to have sound effects or music running on the main options menu, but not both. If you want to hear the diesel engines, you’ll have to close the game and use the main menu to change from music to sound effects. I ended up doing this after hearing all the tracks because I found that after a while, the looped chiptunes felt like they didn’t match the steady pacing of the game. It’s a solid soundtrack however, so make sure to check out all the tracks!
That’s the gist of Farming Simulator 16-Bit Edition. It’s a slowly building farming experience that becomes a zen exercise in time management as the hours slip away. There’s no real challenge to the game other than making sure you don’t run out of seed or gas and depending on your difficulty choices that can be fast or slow. This is truly a game for people to relax and turn off playing and while I’m not a farming aficionado, I blew through a surprising number of hours just working the fields and relaxing. Sometimes it’s nice to take a break with a low stress game that doesn’t demand too much from you and honestly, Farming Simulator 16-Bit Edition hits that button. At $50 for the regular edition and $70 for the Deluxe it isn’t the cheapest game out there, but that’s a reasonable price for a well-designed retro throwback that’s fun to chill out with. If you can’t find a physical or don’t want to spend the coin, there’s always a digital version available directly from the GIANTS Farming Simulator storefront for 15 Euros too, but if you can, it’s a oddly more enjoyable experience on the Genesis.
This review is based on a physical copy of Farming Simulator 16-Bit Edition provided by the publisher. It was played on a Sega CDX using a 27” JVC I’Art flat panel CRT TV. Farming Simulator 16-Bit Edition is also available digitally for PC here.
Nate Van Lindt has been a gamer since the days of yore (aka Commodore 64), and has played a bit of virtually everything out there. He's also an avid comic book collector, both vintage and current, and reads a fair amount of sci-fi and fantasy. On top of that, he watches a fair number of movies and TV shows as well. Oh, and he has a family, a full-time job, and lives somewhere in the urban wilds of Southwestern Ontario, Canada, foraging for old video cables and forgotten game soundtracks.