Do you enjoy locking S-foils in attack position while piloting your X-Wing? Do you like when Serenity pulled a Crazy Ivan maneuver in Firefly by rotating one engine? How about when any sci-fi spaceship slowly lowers a walkway or extends its wings or has a bunch of metal moving parts that slowly shift into position and make a cool-looking ship even cooler-looking?
I'm gonna go ahead and state, for the record, that the vehicles in Farming Simulator 22 will give you that same feeling of pleasure. In fact, I think anyone who loves cool spaceships will love Farming Simulator 22's vehicles and equipment. You're not zooming through outer space or blowing up TIE Fighters. You're probably just baling hay or harvesting sorghum or spraying a field with pesticides. But damn if these machines aren't completely satisfying to watch.
Just look at this sucker below unfold. Take off the treads and stick a couple rockets on it and you've got a spaceship (probably called a Scorpion) getting ready to spray a cruiser with laser fire:
I've never really given the Farming Simulator series a go, so with FS22 I wanted to ease myself into it. What's the easiest crop to farm? I figured it was probably grass. Grass just grows on its own, right? And then you mow it, and then you're done. I thought I'd start as a grass farmer to keep things simple.
Grass, it turns out, is hella complicated. Yes, it grows and you mow, but then there's a machine to turn the grass around so it can dry, and a machine to arrange it into rows, and a machine to turn it into bales, and a machine to collect the bales. Grass is friggin' complicated. If you want to turn it into hay, it gets even more so. And it's super expensive. But those machines are awesome to see in action:
They're spaceships, I tell you. Am I getting ready to push cut grass into rows or am I about to make an attack run on the Death Star? Are those bales of grass rolling out the back or are they proximity mines? Screw the Millennium Falcon, I've got a Berthoud Bruin 4200.
After I completely failed at creating a profitable grass-farming empire (hours of work and a half-million spent on equipment wound up earning me only a couple thousand dollars) I just went to the equipment shop, leased a bunch of vehicles, and unfolded them in the parking lot. Even stuff that didn't look interesting in the shop window usually did something cool when I unfolded them. Like this:
What does that thing do? I don't remember. It just looks like a truck and it probably collects beets or something. But I could watch that baby unfold all day, or at least until I leased whatever the heck this is and hopped into the cockpit:
Is it even better when they're red? Yes, I think it is:
Pretty much any random piece of farming equipment does something awesome when you climb in, turn it on, and press the button. I know I'm just burning through the remainder of my cash by leasing vehicles, staring at them, and then returning them, but I can't help it. I may be driving around through piles of cut grass, but it feels like I'm soaring through outer space.
