Non-Arcade Spotlight: Hoofball by Donitz

This week's spotlight is focused on a game that isn't currently playable on the arcade due to emulator limitations. The best way to play these kinds of games is to download Flashpoint Infinity, where you can find almost all the games on the arcade and more!
Hoofball is a game made by the legendary Donitz, who has brought us classic titles like Derp till Dawn, Story of the Blanks, and Twilight vs. Walking. Hoofball is a demonstration of Donitz's engine designed to emulate the restrictions of the original SNES, a successor in many ways to Story of the Blanks (minus the horror), which emulated those of the NES.
The main content of this demonstration is the titular fictional game, Hoofball! A clone of football played in two dimensions where each team is only composed of a striker and goalkeeper. Start off facing off against Rainbow Dash and Scootaloo, and after defeating them you're on your own to see what other Surprises the game has to throw at you.
After getting your flank handed to you, be sure to right-click the game window to access the level editor to get an idea of the level of effort this engine had put into it!

Send us your ponified desktops!

Where else do we keep our precious pony games except on the desktop? If our games are ponified, then why not our desktops? Why not our computers or laptops? Why not our entire home? WHY NOT THE WHOLE WORLD?
We want the answer to that question! Send us your ponified desktops, laptops, setups, etc!
Show us how you live ponies! Are pixel ponies running amok on your desktop? Send it! Fifty pony widgets taking up half of your system resources? Send it! Have you made your own custom pony themes? Send them! Is your laptop covered to the brim with pony stickers? Send it!
We will compile all the awesome ponified setups and desktops we see next week! If you don't have a desktop full of ponies, you still have plenty of time to make it to your liking! There are plenty of online communities where you can find great skins (but please don't run any executable file willy-nilly) or get help to make your own.

Arcade Spotlight: Spike Toss by futzi01

Looks like we've got another futzi01 game for this week's spotlight! Spike Toss is a simple little physics game in the Angry Birds/Crush the Castle mold, though it's more about gem collection than destroying things. It's fun to see just how many gems you can get in one toss! I haven't managed to fully clear a single level yet, so if any of you out there manage to 100% all of them, enjoy being the Official Equestria Gaming Spike Toss Gamer God.
Y'know, a long, long time ago, some arcade games had little author comments or summaries to go with them. Spike Toss was given the description "Be Rarity for a day and treat Spike like dirt," and in all honesty I think about that every single time I see this game and it never fails to get a chuckle out of me.

Equestria Gaming at 13 - Looking Back and Moving Forward!


On January 12th, 2011, at the dawn of the pony fandom and juuuuust before it would paint the internet pastel pink, a fan named Strawberry Spice registered the blog that would eventually become Equestria Gaming. After a quiet first few months, the site officially opened on April 3rd — thirteen years ago today! Over the next decade-and-then-some, we've seen a whole heck of a lot: the first steps of the fandom, Pon-E3, the rollercoaster ride that was the life of Fighting is Magic and Them's Fightin' Herds, alllllll the way on down to the end of Friendship is Magic and the beginning of the next generation of My Little Pony. So many periods of high energy power posting sandwiched between lengthy radio silences, the coming and going of more than a dozen staff members, and no less than three changes of ownership in five years. It's been a wild ride!

2023 was a record-shattering year for Equestria Gaming... and not for any reasons worth celebrating. Except for the five month window in 2016 when the site was actually dead, it has become the low-water mark of the site's history, with a whopping three whole posts and an almost half-year-long outage of our inbox and the arcade. You could very well make the argument that, as of last year, there was barely any difference between uptime and outage to begin with — we rather infamously stopped checking the inbox, and over 90% of the games in the arcade hadn't worked in years. For all intents and purposes, it seemed like Equestria Gaming had finally, at least in spirit, joined most of the other G4 sites from the early days in the digital afterlife.

Well, we say that it doesn't have to be that way, and it won't! Over the past few months, the winds of change have been blowing behind the scenes here at Equestria Gaming, and today we're proud to announce we're re-launching the site! Read on below the break to find out what we've been up to, where Equestria Gaming is headed, and how you (yes, you!) can be a part of it.

The War Thunder Mobile "Flying is Magic" Update

Seems like they're feeling the April Fools spirit over at Gaijin! Earlier today they released the "Flying is Magic" update for War Thunder Mobile, which adds (among other things!) a variety of pegasus units into the game. Apparently this isn't the first time ponies have found their way into War Thunder, so it's nice to see them make a comeback.
If you're curious, check out the announcement video and read through the update post on the War Thunder Mobile website for more details!

Introducing My Little Longplays!


Over the past 14 years, there's been a whole heck of a lot of pony games that have come and gone. While there are plenty we remember fondly, and some that are still going strong to this day, the vast majority have been forgotten. Flash and HTML5 games, being browser based, are easy enough to preserve and keep in the public eye... but what of the countless ancient PC pony games that have long since faded from memory?
Welcome to My Little Longplays, a new site feature dedicated to full playthroughs of all of the fantastic pony games that time forgot! To start things off, we're heading back to the magnificent, far-off year of 2013 and having an intense battle against Fluttershy for the title of "Shhh!" World Champion in this game developed by Vanni. Who will win? You'll just have to watch and find out!

Cloud_Citadel

Cloud_Citadel, made by a Russian developer of the same name, is a tiny little pony platforming game where you dash to the finish as quickly as possible. There’s only one screen, so it’s incredibly short, but it’s fun to see how low of a time you can get!
If you’ve got a minute or two to kill, give it a whirl. My lowest time is 3.991 seconds, I’m sure one of y’all out there can beat that!

Arcade Spotlight: Explore Ponyville by drud14

This week's Spotlight is coming to you live from scenic Ponyville, courtesy of drud14! Explore Ponyville is an adorable compilation of minigames and small scenes wherein the player hangs out all over town with the Mane Six. Released in the far-flung year of 2013, it comes surprisingly close at times to passing for an official game, though one or two parts have a some quirks to them that break that immersion! Sure, I could elaborate, but maybe you should just play it for yourself to find out what I mean!

Lyra's List 3.0!

In Olden Pony Times™, Equestria Gaming featured a recurring series of posts titled Lyra's List. The idea behind it all was simple: help the development of pony fan games along at every stage of development, from concept to completion. Originally, it was a list of game design documents for projects in their earliest phases, but would later include signal boosts from developers in need of a helping hand, and a list of folks of all creative stripes that projects in need could get in touch with.
A wonderful idea, right? Absolutely! Unfortunately though, it suffered from a pretty major design flaw: it was a monthly feature with zero hold-overs between posts. It made sense to do it that way at the height of the pony craze in 2012, when the absolute torrent of new projects and volunteers ready to join them coming in every month would've eventually made Lyra's Lists hilariously long without things rolling over. In the years since, though? Well, things are just the tiniest bit slower, to say the least! When we tried bringing Lyra's List back in 2017, we failed to take that into account and make the necessary changes, and ultimately things didn't get very far due to low submissions.
Seven years later but hey, who's counting, right? certainly not me!, we're giving Lyra's List another go! This time, we've decided to tweak the format a little bit to (finally!) compensate for the times. Starting now, Lyra's List will now take the form of a dedicated page (use the link above or the much cuter link in the navbar!), and all submissions will remain on the list for a period of one year, unless a shorter duration or removal are requested. We're hoping that these changes will (again, finally) make Lyra's List the resource it was always intended to be, even if it's better late than never.
If you're reading this, submissions are officially open, and we hope to hear from y'all soon!

Arcade Spotlight: Sweet Apple Cider by kevinsano

For this week's Spotlight, which just so happens to fall on St. Patrick's Day, there's no game in our library that meets the moment better than kevinsano's Sweet Apple Cider. Released on February 3rd, 2013, this ponified version of the arcade classic Tapper quickly made a real game out of what was originally a simple title screen animation posted to kevinsano's channel just one week prior!
It wasn't long after the release of Sweet Apple Cider that kevinsano made five additional mockup title screens based off of different Season 2 episodes... though unfortunately none of them became actual games, and were just used as t-shirt designs. I don't know about you, but man I sure wish we could've gotten to play Marzipan Mascarpone Meringue Madness! Honestly, if any of y'all out there have any ideas for what the other games would've been like had they been made, I'd love to hear them!

Arcade Spotlight: Canterlot Defender by futzi01

This week, we're spotlighting Canterlot Defender by the insanely prolific futzi01! Perhaps not the most popular game of theirs with the word "Canterlot" in the title, but this is a fun little game nonetheless. Another title based on the events of A Canterlot Wedding, the player, as Twilight Sparkle, must try to survive as long as possible while defending Canterlot from an endless swarm of invading Changelings. It's about as simple as it sounds, really. Go give it a shot! get it?? because you're shooting down changelings?? anyone??? please laugh

Arcade Spotlight: Mine Escape by CertaintyPrinciple

Welcome to the very first Arcade Spotlight, a series of weekly posts dedicated to giving a random arcade game a little time in the sun! I've noticed over the years that, with the sheer amount of titles we have, there are more than a few with... less-than-stellar view counts. Let's see if we can't fix that!
Mine Escape, the penultimate pony project of developer CertaintyPrinciple, was originally posted to DeviantArt on July 5th, 2012, making its way to our arcade that same day. A point-and-click puzzle game based on the events of A Canterlot Wedding - Part 2, it features Twilight Sparkle solving a series of puzzles in order to free herself and the real Princess Cadance from the depths of the Canterlot gem mines so they can put a stop to the impending Changeling invasion.
This is quite possibly my favorite game out of all of the ones we have, so I'm super stoked that it came up first. Give it a go and let us know what your final time is! I remember it taking me a... uh, little while to get through, my first time. Won't be hard for y'all to do better than me! i'm dumb and bad at puzzles lmao

Ergosphere

Ergosphere, developed by SingularMJ, is an neat 3D third-person hack n' slash/platformer, in which you are following the unicorn Horizon, a self-proclaimed researcher as she explores the ruins of an ancient civilization in search of powerful ancient artifacts.

Or at least that's what she planned to do. As she moves deeper into the ruins, she meets her eventual companion Ashes, a phoenix who serves as something of a guardian of the place. Ashes explains the history of her society -- including the existence of Trials, important events meant to test the mettle of any who rose to the challenge, and what led their civilization to ruin... having fallen at the hooves of the Trial's most celebrated and capable champion.
Tempted by greed and the promise of power by a force referred to as the Shadows, under the champion's rule the land, and most of those in it, were overrun by the evil creatures created by this force. Ashes manages to seal herself, the most powerful of the artefacts, and the spreading corruption away... until the seal unexpectedly breaks just in time for Horizon to come along. As a new Trial begins, Horizon will have to hack, slash, explore and dash her way through the ruins, collect the artifacts and (hopefully once she's done getting a good look at them!) stop the spread of the corruption once and for all.

One of the more interesting aspects of this game, next to the magically-infused combo-heavy combat system, is that large parts of the ruins are procedurally generated! A good example of it in action is actually right at the beginning of the game, which has a somewhat long platforming sequence that is completely different every time. Certainly keeps things interesting after losing all your lives!

If this sounds like it'd be up your alley, check out the game's itch.io page linked above!

Dream Studio's "Fallout Equestria: The Rise of Heroes" Animation


The seemingly endless Fallout: Equestria content train is still running strong! Dream Studios, a group from the Chinese-speaking side of the fandom, recently dropped this awesome looking trailer for an ongoing series of FO:E videos. If post-apocalyptic ponies are your thing, check it out above!
Also worth mentioning: this upload of the trailer comes courtesy of the channel Cosmia’s Stash, which is dedicated to republishing content from the Chinese fandom on YouTube. Y’all should definitely give some of the stuff there a look too!

The Adventure into Resurrecting Adventure Ponies

A journey into fiddling with old flash files
Greetings! The resident code Kirin and web master of the site here to report on a little adventure, anecdotal as it might be.
Some of you might have noticed our recent attempts to give the site a little kick, as hard to see as it might be, and s far that has mainly included going through the good old Arcade. Games added, and revised, as well as the main addition of getting Ruffle properly integrated into the site with scripts, so none of you need to install any browser plugins! As well as Ruffle works, the games should work right out of the box for you!
With the overview out of the way, one of the major issues are the ways some of the games were put together a decade ago, when flash was still alive and no one thought of the day the Adobe would drop it. Adventure Ponies, for one, the official cute little pair of games, officially made and hosted by Hasbro and The Hub, back in 2012 and 2013. It's a classic... and it doesn't work. We wanted to fix that.