Despite the name leading us to believe that it'll feature gameplay similar to the Age of Empires series, Hopeabandoner is evidently aiming for his RTS to be more like the Starcraft series, which kind of disappointed me since I'm rather fond of the former. There's also some plans for "original elements", which probably have something to do with unit customization (something that's been available since 1999 in Warzone 2100, along with a crapton of other RTS games). Even so, the pony fandom doesn't have enough real time strategy games and it would be nice to actually see one get finished for once, so...

Follow the tumblr, I guess?

 When Wishdream announced Part 2 of the My Little Game Dev Marathon, he said that sites would have to wait a couple days after the event's end to post things while he whipped up a compilation video. Thing is, "a couple days" turned into two bloody weeks, and the video purposefully leaves out several key games to make room for ones that were either a part of the previous marathon or not even entries at all, but separate games that he just decided to throw in there. I'd say that's more than a tad dishonest: kind of makes me wish that I'd never agreed to wait for this in the first place (especially since it comes out on Sunday, which of all days is supposed to be my day off).

Given how poorly things were handled I'm not even going to bother posting the video, so I'll just post the games separately and give them the attention they deserve instead of shoving them all into one big compilation post.

 Given the heavy load that Legends of Equestria's servers are under, it was a wonder I was able to get into the game at all. Many were not so fortunate; I've heard of people who literally spent several hours trying to log in before giving up, and over the weekend things are probably going to get even worse as people use their day off school/work to participate in the open server weekend.

 Aside from the connectivity issues (which are to be expected, given the game's current popularity), how good is Legends of Equestria in its current state? You can find my thoughts on it below the break.

 On Friday at 12:01AM EST the Legends of Equestria open server weekend will presumably begin, provided that their servers can handle the load. Even now they are crumbling under the weight of thousands rushing to download the MMO's client in preparation for the big day, and quite probably things will only get worse come tomorrow. Still, if you do actually manage to get in and play for a bit you'll be able to experience lawyer-friendly locations such as Ponydale, Cantermore and the Evershade Forest, and thanks to the /stuck command earth ponies will no longer be subject to eternal damnation in Tartarus.

 You can download the game here and read their exclamation mark-riddled announcement post here, but I'll copy & paste some of it below just in case the site goes down.

 Despite the infamous Pony Creator utility being the most commonly-used of, well, pony creators, there are still a fair amount of people who prefer the Pony Avatar Creator demo for various reasons (even if its pony model looks a bit off, and it doesn't have a really wide variety of manes or accessories). The creator could have kept it in its current state and simply added more stuff, but it seems he has other plans for it and is in the process of transforming it into a full-fledged web service called Equestria Jukebox, with chat rooms and whatnot.

 Will this take off? We'll see once the open alpha comes out, but in the meantime you can find an exclusive sneak peak of the service below the break.