In an attempt to encourage the creation of more pony visual novels, Taivastiuku decided to create a web-based tool for that purpose and called it PoniPoni. It's still in a fairly early state, mind you, and the average person probably won't give this more than a passing glance at the moment, but I get the impression that if this ever gets anywhere it could become a rather useful tool for folks wanting to whip together a quick VN. Perhaps more developers would be attracted to the project if the source code were to be released on GitHub or something, I dunno.

 One day Bobby Schroeder decided that she liked shipping cartoon horses enough to warrant creating a silly game about it: Super Lesbian Horse RPG was the result of her labour. Overall awareness of the game spread quickly after its announcement by virtue of its somewhat odd title, along with a rather amusing /mlp/ thread which claimed SLHRPG was something else entirely, and now here we are with the somewhat final product (given that there will probably be several bugfix releases in the near future). Expectations for the project have been fairly high overall, but does it live up to them? For that, dear reader, you will have to read the rest of the review.

Horse Time below the break.

 Yes, it's finally here (and quite late as well, missing its original release date by a whopping 6 months). Quite likely the pony fandom's strangest RPG as of yet, Super Lesbian Horse RPG was created in the spare time of a fairly generic Tumblr user, the type who gets legitimately angry when folks assume his "SFW" game contains pornography based off of the title. Some of the fairly recent additions have been somewhat controversial, sure, but is the rest of the game alright?

...You'll have to find out in the morning, since it's past midnight over here and I'm going to bed.

 For those of you who are into karaoke and ponies, My Little Karaoke must be practically a godsend, and you'll be pleased to hear that they've released an additional content disc with a bunch of new songs for you to sing along to. It includes "the Equestria Girls soundtrack, silly things such as PFUDOR, and the first S4 song (Hearts Strong As Horses)", along with some performance improvements and general bugfixes. There may or may not be some other things, but I wouldn't know since I haven't really looked into it that much.

Will I play this myself? Probably not, since I'd rather keep my terrible singing to my goofy Skype calls, but if you enjoy being humiliated by a computer program criticizing your voice, this is for you. One can download it at http://www.mylittlekaraoke.com/index.php?pages/Game-download

 After spending a couple months as one of the pony fandom's most popular projects, Hasbro decided to go easy on Starswirl Academy for some reason and ask that the characters be renamed, in addition to some slight modifications to their designs. This means that it is no longer pony-related in the slightest, but is now yet another generic "schoolgirl dating" visual novel with not much going for it aside from its pretty art and the reasonable cost of $0. They've taken down all their trailers and demos from the internet, by the way, so you might want to hang onto your copy for now.

Before you ask, this does mean that yes, we won't be posting about Starswirl Academy anymore (unless an "unofficial mod" comes out to make some...erm, adjustments to the VN).

 Some of you may remember the My Little Game Dev Marathon which was held earlier this year, and I'm (would say "we're", but the others aren't here so...) happy to announce that they've recently launched another one. The requirements for entries are fairly simple: at least 1 level playable level, bare essentials, decent graphics, no R34 content, and finally the marathon logo should be present somewhere within the game. The deadline is December 30th: so if you're interested in participating then you should probably get started soon and have your project ready before then, where they'll pack all the games together and send them to various prominent fansites for reviewing.

More detailed information can be found on the thread at http://mylittlegamedev.com/forums/showthread.php?tid=1105&pid=5933

 Browsing the graveyard that is Ponychan's /collab/ board can occasionally bring up interesting stuff if you have the patience to wade through the endless corpses of once-promising projects, and Super Pony Wars appears to be one of the few which isn't quite dead yet, as a demo for it was released a couple days ago without much ado. From what I've gathered it's supposed to be some sort of strategy/RPG game based off of Super Robot Wars (which I have neither heard of nor played), featuring a cast made up of original characters, an unintuitive interface that could really use some documentation, and a bunch of placeholder RPG Maker sprites. It could probably become a pretty decent game if it were given enough love, sure, but it's been kind of overlooked on Ponychan and the creator seems to be losing interest.

Dunno if this one will ever come to anything, unfortunately, so in the meantime all we can do is watch and wait.

 After spending several months in a more or less inaccessible state, the My Little Game Dev community has finally relaunched its main site and forums to the general public. The forums (along with their quirky Cloudsdale group) are still the main draw for MLGD, of course, while the main site will apparently post articles on pony game development and whatnot. The latter I find to be an especially interesting idea if they manage pull it off well enough, as it's something I've always wanted to do myself once I actually manage to finish one of my own games. After all, articles on game development written by people who've never actually tried it tend to go horribly wrong, as The Round Stable unwittingly demonstrated for us back in August.

If you're interested, you can check out their forums at http://mylittlegamedev.com/forums.

 While taking a brief break from working on the 4th Nightfall beta, Night Breeze from Silly Mare Games decided to clone a favourite game of his, the name of which cannot be mentioned here for various reasons. Choke on My Woona was the result, a shooter involving Woona and changelings. Upon inevitably dying in the game Woona will respawn, and be assisted by the ghost of her previous self. This goes on for 10 levels although I haven't gotten nearly that far yet, given that it practically runs in slow-motion on Wine and I'm not as patient as I once was (having beaten an unstable version of SuperTux running at 5fps). If you aren't using Linux or OS X, however, the game looks pretty fun so I'd definitely give it a shot if I were you.

Meanwhile, I still haven't figured out how to get Windows 8.1 to play nicely with Linux.

 Before you ask why we have big green letters in the post's header, >CLOP is "the game of pony friendship and world domination", whipped up in a week and playable entirely in your web browser in all its wondrous, half-baked glory (the game lacks a front-end designer as of now). Players are given their very own nation to manage, and they can interact with other players via the online marketplace. It's still very unstable and, being under active development, still missing quite a few important features, but I get the impression that >CLOP might be worth looking into.

No, I haven't played it yet; I'm still snickering at the awful webpage.

 Even if the Horse Game is pretty much a proof of concept demo, it's still rather fun, especially now that the developers have added bots and made some improvements to its innovative spell-crafting system, among other things. It may be nowhere near ready for a review yet, sure, but the project is rather promising and I'd advise that you folks keep an eye on it for the near future, and maybe even volunteer to help out if you have any coding or 3D modelling skills.

Interested in giving this fabulous update a spin? Then download the Horse Game at http://horsegame.ca/.

 Puzzle games centred around chain reactions can be rather fun and Elemental Reaction is fun when you first start it, but after a while this one gets kinda dull. Then again, it could just be that this cold/headache is adversely affecting my enjoyment of this game, so maybe I'll have to give it a shot later when I'm not coughing up mucus every so often. Can't really think of much more to write about it, so...yeah.

Enjoy your day.

 Oh, looks like futzi01 made another quickie game, this one being a clone of Fruit Ninja. You drag your mouse cursor around to chop up vines, all the while avoiding ponies and wishing Fighting is Magic wasn't cancelled so you could play it instead. Pretty basic, I know, but still fun for the most part.

As to why this isn't on the Arcade...let's just say that futzi01 has grown really fond of exporting his Flash games at rather high resolutions.

 Multimedia Fusion 2 gets kind of a bad rap, and after spending over a year developing Temno with it Lexo Astonov grew sick of its quirks and decided he was just going to switch over to Unity. This provides several benefits, such as support for higher resolutions and native OS X/Linux binaries, along with the possibility of an Android app. Temno is also no longer a solo project; it is now being developed by a Czechoslovakian indie team currently known as Little Bit Interactive, which should help speed up development a tad (even if the game only features original characters now, to protect it from receiving a Cease & Desist order).

I'm still not sure what to think about OC-only fangames, to be honest, especially since the last one I encountered wasn't free.

 A strange trend noted by several people in the community is that whenever a pony fangame comes out and is at least partially based off of another game, it almost always ends up being more difficult than the original. Oddly enough, this usually seems to be entirely unintentional on the developer's part, and it is often debatable as to whether or not the increased difficulty is really a good thing. MegaPony is already an infamous example of this, sure, but is the game's quality negatively affected by this?

The answer, along with the rest of the review, can be found beneath the break.

 Somehow this review ended up getting delayed for nearly three weeks, partially due to a nasty headache on the day it was supposed to be written that caused it to be pushed back further and further until now; so as I sat at my desk and waited for everyone else to wake up, it seemed prudent to finally get this out of the way so I can get on to reviewing other stuff (such as the final version of MegaPony). Fair enough?

Following standard procedure, the review can be found after the break.

 On May 12th a demo for some RPG Maker game named War of Harmony IV was released, oddly enough without other WoH games I to III. Perhaps Marshall Ruffy thought the roman numeral 4 looked neat, and decided to quietly include it with the game in the hopes that nobody would ask about the missing first three instalments in the "series", or he could be planning on releasing the other entries later on and out of order (the latter of which seems the most likely, given some of his recent tweets). Either way, it's still kind of a weird decision in naming, one that the game itself will hopefully make up for.

As usual, you can find the rest of the review after the break.

 Just a reminder that the "Gaming for Good" thing we posted last week is coming up today at noon EST. They'll be playing games and stuff, which wouldn't be all that exciting if they weren't doing it for charity and interviewing the Legends of Equestria and Mane Six development teams. Still, in a way I'm honestly getting kind of sick of these podcasters interviewing the same fangame teams over and over again, and wish they would chat with some smaller developers (such as Bobby Schroeder or Donitz) for once, but since that's unlikely to happen anytime soon we might as well sit back and try not to get too upset over the lack of variety.

 Once the event is ready you can watch it at http://events.yoursiblings.org/.

 Much to the surprise of absolutely no-one, a post released yesterday by Hoppip states that the once incredibly-promising Ponykart project is now completely dead, as most of the team members went on to become professional programmers/game developers and no longer had any time for fangames. It's quite a shame, yes, but at least the source code is still freely available, so anybody with some C# experience can pick up and resume where the developers left off (as some anon on /mlp/ is currently attempting to do, although I kind of doubt he'll get very far).

The original post can be found at http://ponykart.net/we-ded/.

 In an effort to show that his Equestria Adventure fangame (which we posted back in September) is not dead, mpa has released a brand-new demo featuring 4 levels and a boss. The controls still take a while to get used to and the boss is kind of boring, but once you get used to them the demo is quite fun while it lasts. As the game's creator put it on his project's /collab/ thread, "I honestly don't think I'll ever finish this thing, but hopefully this is fun enough to please anyone who has been eagerly waiting".

 Meanwhile, these headaches are getting rather annoying...it's been over a month since they started, and I don't know how long they're going to last for.

 Some guy on deviantART decided he wanted to make games with ponies too, so he whipped out Stencyl and wrote up a brief Flash demo for a sidescrolling shooter. It has some obvious issues (such as the fact that you can get Twilight stuck in the lower bushes and that the player can fire projectiles way too fast), but with a little work it could become something worthwhile. There's also some kind of easter egg in the project, which I haven't bothered looking for yet today.

Also, happy Remembrance Day (or Veteran's Day, if you're from the United States).

 As an extremely pleasant surprise, The Hub has released a sequel to their Adventure Ponies Flash game from 2012. If all goes well I should have a full review for the game up at some point tomorrow (because starting a review at 7 PM would be pushing it a little), but in the meantime I hope you folks enjoy the game!

...Is it just me, or is this the first My Little Pony game ever to feature more male characters than female?

 It seems that Night Breeze of Silly Mares Games will be especially busy this November due to college, and since the real fourth beta for Nightfall isn't ready yet he's decided to make a relatively minor release in the meantime to pacify the masses. Enjoy, fellow pony fans, as I look into the possibility of eventually switching over to the Ghost blogging platform while listening to sludge metal and wondering why the fridge's water dispenser pours warm water instead of cold (which doesn't make any sense to me).

Release notes have been copypasted below the break.

 Yesterday verycrazypony, macho-sadist extraordinaire, released a brand-new version of Crazy Pony with fancy new features like an online leaderboard and player avatars (which, sadly enough, don't seem to be working for me right now on Linux Mint), along with some some new levels in case you've beaten the original. Mac OS X support is also available for those willing to compile the game in Xcode, although I expect that verycrazypony will provide official OS X binaries fairly soon like he did with the previous releases.

Want to give the updated Crazy Pony a spin? Then check out the download page at http://crazypony.net/site/index.php?id=download

 In case you've already forgotten (in which case you should be ashamed of yourself, as we only posted about it 3 days ago), the Legends of Equestria team is livestreaming right now, and will continue to do so until tomorrow at noon EDT. They'll be making stuff live in front of an audience, and cover up their extended breaks with panels on various things related to their upcoming game.
 

Also, for some reason they moved the event to a different channel, so head on over to http://www.livestream.com/nutsonclark to watch it.

Edit (3/21/15): Someone in the comments section said this has a virus in it? I don't care enough to fact-check, so I'm commenting out the link to the download. Feel free to correct if he's wrong. -Red

 Today I was sitting around, expecting a creepypasta to show up in our email inbox as they usually do during this time of year, and what do you know? Some "Anonymous" person submits this game titled muffins.exe, created in GameMaker Lite and featuring a gratuitous amount of screamers (thus rendering it very NSFW).

 If you intend on playing this, I'd advise that you do so before reading below the break, as the review contains spoilers.

 So...Moonstuck. Quite possibly the fandom's most beloved webcomic, Moonstuck managed to win the hearts of many with its adorable main character and unique art style while it lasted. After it ended on November 4th in 2012, SylrePony decided to adapt the comic into a isometric fangame, the first part of which he released in March. Our reviewer Arctic Lux gave it an 8/10, and all seemed well and good, but now that the second part has been released and he's not around it seems that it is time for my take on the second entry.

Does this unofficial Moonstuck adaption live up to the charm of its namesake? Find out after the break.

 So I knew that I was going to be posting about at least one adventure game today, but to be quite honest with you I was rather surprised when I opened up my deviantART notifications and found a demo for a first-person point & click adventure game right before my eyes. It stars Octavia (duh) and Vinyl, as they venture into a dilapidated mansion after following some poorly-written directions to a Nightmare Night party, and yes, it does run splendidly in Wine once you install dsound. Thing is, it is quite a bit darker than your average pony adventure game, although the fact that it's being released so close to Halloween probably explains that.

Heh heh heh...

 Back in August we posted about Never Heard From Ever Again, a weird little first person horror game with the nastiest lolipop-related jumpscare you'll ever see. The full thing was released today on Desura, marking the first time a pony game made it onto the service, but it's $1.99, also giving it the unprestigious "honour" of being the first My Little Pony fangame for the PC platform that is neither free in freedom nor free beer. Mind you, that's not a lot of money, but there are still plenty of people who will probably find this choice in distribution objectionable.

Meanwhile, guess who's too cheap to buy a copy?

 Last year's Canterlot Siege was extremely popular amongst the My Little Pony fan community in general, although I wasn't all that fond of it myself due to my not being a real tower defence person. Since I am really not suited to reviewing this sort of thing I'll just wait for Arctic Lux or Enigma Sage to do it later, but needless to say most of you who liked the first entry will probably end up enjoying this one. Also, playing strategy games in general with a pounding headache is a terrible idea, and will probably make anything but the biggest pushover feel like a horrible nightmare.

 It seems that Mark, after stealthily releasing his last pre-preview on MLPchan back in September, took the feedback he received and whipped up another one for his followers to enjoy. It features an expanded world, more visually impressive bossfights (yay!), and the miraculous ability to summon money from thin air. Good thing the latter won't be present in the final game though; imagine what could happen if you could "bribe" particular bosses to leave you alone. You'd probably end up with some kind of weird joke ending where all the big bads go on an expensive holiday in their private yacht, only to have their fortunes taken away by the Equestrian Revenue Service.

 Kind of a shame that Mark probably probably won't be able to release the game in time for Halloween, but ah well. At least the final game should be well worth the wait, if these previews and his previous projects are anything to go by.

 Back in 2012 some Texans decided that the My Little Pony fandom needed a Castlevania-type game and began to create one themselves in Game Maker, with the splendidly original title "Ponyvania". The project seemed to progress smoothly, with the latest demo being released in July '13, but I remained entirely unaware of Ponyvania until some Anon posted about it on /mlp/ last Saturday, bemoaning the overall lack of attention that it has seen (aside from an Equestria Daily post about a pre-demo trailer). The Anon also mentioned Legacy of the Pony, which I shall hopefully cover later now that I have a working dual-boot setup, but in the meantime I shall focus on this sadly neglected fangame.

My thoughts on the project can be found below the break, as usual.

 By some strange coincidence fangame news and releases tend to come in short bursts, with everybody releasing something at around the same time. Chances are, most of them are probably not involved in a conspiracy (especially these guys, since Starswirl Academy technically isn't a fangame at all), but I still find it amusing, yet at the same time rather annoying. At least it's not like they mean any harm, right?

 Anyhow, hope you all enjoy the demo. I'm not really going to mess around with it until the final thing is released, due to my not being particularly interested in the genre (which I accidentally typed as "drama", for some reason).

 On September 29th Mark Sprague decided to release a brief "pre-preview" of Minty Fresh Adventure II on MLPchan, which remained unknown to outsiders until today, when some anon posted it in /mlp/'s Game Dev thread. It's fairly brief, but contains a WIP bossfight, several relatively minor easter eggs and some of the nicest voice acting I've ever seen in a My Little Pony fangame.

I would link the original thread, but I'm not sure if MLPchan would appreciate the influx in newbies. In the meantime, enjoy the preview-thing!

 As most people probably figured out by reading the game's title, Twilight Sparkle vs Trixie is about Twilight and her would-be arch-nemesis casting spells at each other. For some stupid reason they decided to position themselves on opposite sides of a hill, which means that they'll be blindly tossing spikeballs and whatnot over it in an attempt to damage their foe. Thing is, the multiplayer feature doesn't appear to be working at the moment and the singleplayer AI has incredibly bad aiming skills. In the course of a long match against it I was never hit once, unless you count the time I had a shield equipped. I can understand wanting to make a game that's easy to get into, sure, but there isn't much of a point in coming back if there's no real challenge.

 One happy summer day Blue Cookie Touch the pony creator OC and his best-ish friend Flamerunner were mucking about on the small Island of Desertedness when they stumbled across Spike the samurai and Eric the soldier. Applejack the thief was there too but nobody could find him for some reason.

"Happy birthday, Eric!"

"Cookie, it is nowhere near my-"

"Want to go on a magical birthday adventure for Big Apple Ponycon?"

Eric, sighed, and shrugged. Blue Cookie, being the positive thinker that he is, took this as a yes.

"Yay!"

  As Crazy Pony went for months without an update, people began to think that the project had died; this theory was all but confirmed when the website went offline. However, what nobody noticed was that the website came back online in April, and without further ado its Bitbucket repo began to show signs of life. Since then a brand-new release of the game has came out in July, and by compiling the source code one can find wonderful new features like Linux support. Multiplayer support is probably still a ways off, unfortunately, but in the meantime one can easily help by making new levels in Inkscape. Maybe I should contribute to this project a little myself, eh?

 Speaking of level design, we have another post related to that subject coming up later on today. Stay tuned!

 For some reason it seems that fangame releases seem to all be clustered around the same time, followed by long periods of silence from everybody. These usually provide an excellent opportunity to search around a bit, find some projects that have been overlooked or remained obscure for long periods of time. I'm not entirely sure if Stabyourself.net's (they're the guys who made Order of Twilight, by the way) Trosh would count as a pony fangame or not, given that you run around shooting pony OCs that belonged to an annoying user on their forum, but at least it's something, right?

Last time I checked, the OS X build for this game was broken. And yes, I do have some more games to hopefully post later on today.

 Strangely enough for a visual novel, the identity of Starswirl Academy's protagonist has remained unknown ever since its unveiling, with the promise that they'd reveal him "soon enough". Now that they're holding a panel at the Crystal Fair in Saint Louis, we might finally get some answers. They're showing off a demo of the project at 11:00 am CST on Saturday, and afterwards the demo shall be released for the general public to play. Now, hopefully they remember to release OS X and Linux builds of the demo...

 Come to think of it, I'd be rather amused if the demo never actually revealed anything about the main character, or featured an entirely different protagonist from the real thing.