Earlier this month we posted about about this upcoming event called My Little Game Jam, a 2 day game-creation competition. Back then we had no idea as to when this was taking place, but now with the release of the team's new, sexier website website we can now confirm that the event will be taking place on October 5th at 23:59 UTC. Theme voting is also up, so if you want to help decide what the games must be about then you can do so over at http://www.mylittlegamejam.com/themes/. You can also suggest new themes if you'd like, but try and not go overboard like you guys did with that silly Dub the Dew contest. After all, who would want to play (or make!) a My Little Pony fangame about Fred Durst Society of the Humanities and Arts, eh?

And no, I am not wishing luck to the hopeful contestants, as I trust that they won't need luck. Our fandom has some very talented developers, you know!

It's been a long time since we've heard anything from the Spike's Quest developer, but yesterday he decided to release a graphical showcase of a particular ingame room. It's fairly obvious that he has put a lot of work into this project, but it almost feels as if it is missing something. Part of it probably has to do with the cluttered environment and overwhelming amounts of detail that take the focus away from the main character. At times Spike almost feels invisible with all pillars and grates standing in front of him, but thankfully good ol' MisterBull appears to be aware of the issue and will hopefully resolve the issue before the next playable release.

I am also of the opinion that adding a slight parallax scrolling effect to the pillars in the front and back would have a positive effect on the environment's three-dimensional feel, although again it's up for MisterBull to decide as to whether or not he will include that effect.

Back in March a visual novel-type game was announced named Welcome to Ponyville, and for some reason people got really excited about it. Most would expect that the sudden explosion in popularity had something to do with that desire many Bronies have to visit Equestria, but eventually it turned out that most of you sickos just wanted to get your hands on the romance portion of the game and ship yourselves with Lyra Heartstrings. To be honest I wish that they had downplayed the romance portion of the game, but either way Welcome to Ponyville should be a rather interesting game.

As this post's title should have indicated to you the first act of Welcome to Ponyville was released earlier this morning. The 1.14 gigabyte download (which they foolishly refused to compress) is enormous for what essentially amounts to a demo for a visual novel, although from the looks of it most of the space is taken up by audio files. We'll give you a review of the game and guides to running the game in Wine once we have finished downloading and playing it, but hopefully Act 1 is worth the 1.14GBs of hard drive space that it has taken away from me.

Also, for downloads we recommend that you use the torrent over at http://kat.ph/welcome-to-ponyville-act-1-t6676897.html for faster downloads. If you can then we would really appreciate it if you seed the torrent after downloading; after all nopony wants this torrent to be dead by the end of this day, right?

I'm not really the singing type, but I know that there are plenty of Bronies that would like nothing more to sing along to songs from My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic and get points for it. If you happen to be that type, then today is your lucky day! My Little Karaoke, a massive song pack for various karaoke games (such as UltraStar Deluxe, Performous, and Vocaluxe), has seen its first release and features various songs both from the show and from our glorious fandom. I haven't played it myself since it happened to share its release date with Black Mesa (which I spent all of last night downloading) but I hear that it's really great, so why don't you give it a shot, eh?

The vast majority of our fandom's fangames are in 2D, and for good reason. Ponies in general look much better when drawn in two dimensions then in three unless some performance-taxing cell shaders are applied. Even then they don't look quite as good as some would hope, but alas, some game types are nigh impossible to create without 3D graphics. Is Questria one of these games? No. Many a hack 'n slash RPG has been made with hand-drawn sprites but this game refuses to use anything but 3D. Does it work? As you can see from the above trailer...not really. The ponies look rather unconvincing up close but thankfully the game's top-down perspective hides this most of the time. Questria still needs a lot of work, but if all goes well it shall hopefully develop into a wonderful little multiplayer RPG to play with your friends.

We saved the actual gameplay video for the space after the break to scam more pageviews out of you. Aren't we mean?

Even though we just posted about The Lost Kingdom a few days ago we decided to give the game yet another post due to the release of two more gameplay videos. Why not just add them to the previous post in an update, you might ask. Well let's just say that the above video contains a bossfight preview and since everypony likes bossfights we decided on letting it share an entirely new post with another recent gameplay preview that, sadly enough, suffered from a distinct lack of gigantic arachnids which fated it to sit below the break, unseen by those too busy or lazy to bother reading what lies beyond that fantasmagorical link below.

Back in late July we posted about a very interesting RPG titled MLP FiM: The Lost Kingdom that was of an unusually high quality and managed to overcome some rather annoying colour limitations in RPG Maker 2003. The creator was quite grateful for us featuring his project as it was virtually unknown up until that point, and even wrote two rather nice thank you posts (found here and here). However up until yesterday there was a distinct lack of actual gameplay footage for the Lost Kingdom. Mind you the screenshots that were provided were pretty screenshots, but there's nothing quite like a couple videos to see how the game looks in motion. Upon realizing this Beanseh managed to record a couple video previews in between frustrating sessions of Canterlot Siege yesterday. His videos are pretty low-rez and have that ugly Fraps logo hovering over them but it's better then nothing at all, right?

The remaining two videos can be found after the break.

Not far too long ago a trailer was released for a retraux Daring Do platformer. What flew past everypony's radar was that a demo for the game came out within a couple days of the trailer's premiere, and I must say that it's pretty good. We'll get around to reviewing it when the full thing comes out, but let me say that it is fairly challenging and should take a decent amount of time to complete due the the length. The retraux feel of the game is also quite nice, although purists will cry foul upon the realization that the game uses more colours then were available on the NES.

Also, the game runs pretty well on Mac/Linux in Wine, although for audio to work you will need to install dsound and directmusic via winetricks. Doing the same thing for other fangames created with Game Maker often reduces the amount of audio-related issues that you'll encounter, although your mileage may vary.