Harvest Moon 64 was a game I rented entirely after reading about it in an issue of Nintendo Power.  The premise was fairly simple-  you’re some kid taking over his grandfather’s old farm, trying to revitalize it, and making friends with the townspeople in the meantime.    There’s no shortage of things to do, from taking care of your crops, to taking care of your animals, to mining in the winter mine, to upgrading your property, to making friends with people, to seeking out the hidden mysteries of the game.  which is what I want to bring up, actually. 
    If Harvest Moon could be faulted for one thing, it was a lack of clarity in some cases.  You could build a greenhouse, but a hurricane might well destroy it.  unless, maybe, you had a wooden pig.  by way of winning a festival, you could win this amusing tree-made hog that sat in your house, doing nothing at all.  Except that, for some reason,  people on the internet got wind that perhaps what your pig did was prevent hurricanes.  an amazing feat, no?  except that it didn’t prevent hurricanes all the time, just sometimes. 
    I think of this being a time during which the internet was still fairly young, (though that may not actually be the case…) and, as a result, rumours and speculation about such things were doomed to remain only that.  There was no way to get a straight answer about such a gameplay device, and no way to propagate it even you DID manage to produce such magic. 
    Gamefaqs was in existance at this time, and there was one particular FAQ that my friends and I spent a long time pouring over.  Haunter120 wrote an FAQ that, in retrospect, was pretty horrific.  full of random tangents and stuff that he appears to have completely made up. talk of secret festivals, photo albums, and house extensions that no other FAQ had any idea of.  but we believed that there might be a grain of truth to it, because, after all, the game itself had left plenty unexplained.  Why couldn’t there be a ton more? 

Of course, there never was a second photo album.  your house was as built up as it could possibly be, and no amount of wishing was going to change that. But the idea that a game could have that many secrets was, and still is, something that I find incredibly appealing.