10 Annoying Things About “Frontierville” That Make Me Want To Claw My Face

1. That damn leprechaun.

Hate him. All I want to do is harvest my 1,000 peanuts so I can win whatever worthless prize is part of that mission. And up pops the little urchin, flashing in all his redness and taunting me. But because I’ve already clicked on 30 plots and I’m waiting for my little man to work his way through the line, the game won’t LET me click on the leprechaun’s “Scare Me” symbol until I’m done harvesting. So I have to stare at the dancing little bastard for way longer than I care to do so.

And when I finally get to click on him, he runs behind a building and I have to hunt around until I hit it just right. And then he doesn’t even give me something that’s part of a collection, just some stupid coins. Arrrgh!

2. The Kissing Tree.

First of all, I really don’t care if ANYBODY hooks up in the Old West. Why are you forcing me to be invested in that? If I wanted to do some shotgun match-making, I’d have joined a game called “LoveVille” or “HumpCity”. Second, can you come up with some missions that involve actual wooing or courting? How is harvesting 100 cabbages sexy? And why are there SO many required missions? By the time I finally got my lesbian couple to the top of the Love-Meter, I was ready for an annulment.

Speaking of, why don’t you let two MEN be couples? Just sayin.

3. The inordinate amount of “cloth” that you need in this game.

You need cloth to make clothes, you need cloth to make comforters, you need cloth to make freaking FIRE. (By the way, explain that last one to me, can you?) Oh, and my lesbians had to have a whole buttload of cloth for some pointless mission before they could announce their nuptials at the dusty rodeo during the Beef-Riders Roundup. Can we stop with the cloth obsession?

Yes, I know that I can just go visit my friends’ farms and snag a cloth with every visit. But it takes so MANY pieces of cloth to make just one item out of the 30 that I need. (“To construct a jock strap for Hank, you need 1 wood, 2 eggs, and 483 cloths.”) I’m not sociable. I don’t want to spend all my game time visiting other settlers on Brokeback Mountain. Sometimes I just want to stay on my OWN farm and raise crops for Jesus, okay?

4. The jittery crop placement.

When I’m trying to plant my 80 bushes of penicillin to complete the “Lasso STD’s On The Prairie!” mission, I want my squares to line up. I’m very particular about that. So imagine my dismay when the game processors get a little sluggish and one of my squares gets plunked down out of line due to no fault of my own. It makes me insane. I can’t have a random tomato plant in the wrong place, it just won’t work for me. So I have to get out of “planting mode” and change to “move mode” and tidy things up, meaning I’m still up at 3am trying to get some symmetry on my homestead. Do you feel my pain?

5. The unfairness of the missions.

Hold up. I just had to sell 500 “adult” pigs for Part I of the “Everybody Loves Bacon!” challenge. Then, for Part II, I have to “tend” 500 more adult pigs? You just made me sell ALL my pigs, and now I’ve got to buy more and raise them to adulthood? I don’t have any pigs, people. Stop it! Why can’t I sell the 800 chickens I had to hand-feed for the “Cackler’s Need Love, Too” mission?

6. Speaking of the chickens…

Okay, I get it. One of your programmers figured out that crafty people like me were taking advantage of the chicken and chicken coop “glitch” wherein you could work your way to making obscene amounts of coins and experience points in a very short time. (For those players not privy to this hole in the code, this explains why sometimes you would stumble on a farm with 20,000 chickens and 90 coops. We didn’t have an infatuation with poultry, we were just greedy.)

So the programmers needed to stop that. Understand. What I don’t get? The vicious way you took retribution, introducing those hell-born coyotes that would snarf up massive amounts of chicken when we tried to “collect” on the chicken coops. I was losing hundreds of chickens at a time, a horrendous carnage of feathers and destruction. So I stopped collecting.

Until you started making missions where I HAD to collect from the coops. Really? So you were forcing me to watch little chicks that I had bottle-fed be eaten alive. That’s nice of you. Sure, I could “expand” each of my coops, but the sheer massive number of items I needed to collect in order to do so was just not worth it. And you knew that. For this code change alone you should go straight to the 9^th layer of Hell.

But I’m not bitter.

7. What’s up with the Care Packages?

These are supposed to give me things I need for my current missions. And sometimes this works. Sometimes it does not. The code should know I need 80 billion kumquats so I can build a Blacksmith shop that produces caviar. But I’m not getting kumquats. I’m getting condoms that I needed for the “Safe Sex!” mission I completed in 1987.

8. The dying critters.

This one pretty much takes the cake. You’ve arranged it so that there will be sudden appearances of sickly animals showing up on my farm. Yes, I’m given an option to help them or decline. But who in their right mind is going to say “no, just die” to an injured deer? Of course I’m going to accept the challenge.

Then, sadists that you programmers are, you up the ante by making this innocent, life-support creature CRY. The whole time I’m playing the game. I can’t help but be bothered that Bambi is lying there, unable to lift her head, but them tears be a-flowing. Which means I’ve got to get some “critter milk” to make the pain and the waterworks stop.

Sadly, obtaining critter milk is harder than getting a Republican to have a conscience. So Bambi cries EVERY DAY on my farm. You people are sick.

9. What the hell is the point of the Barber Shop?

Enough said.

10. The irritating pop-ups wanting me to buy highly-desired “horseshoes”.

I know that you have them for sale, I can’t get away from your constant reminders. And I’ve even bought a few. (Mostly during the “help Japan” fundraiser, which, to be fair, is a brilliant way to allow gamers to game and thirsty people to get fresh water. Kudos on that.) But seriously, stop with the incessant pop-ups. It makes a person cranky when they are in the middle of harvesting 9,000 diaphragms for that STD Clinic and “Jack” pops up with a special discounted offer. Wait until I’m done with population control before you start with the shilling…