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).

 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).

 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.

 After his latest game received negative reception from us a week ago, Bhaalspawn finally decided that it'd be a good time to fix up his game after letting it sit for several months, and has released a new patch for it that apparently addresses most of my complaints from the review. I haven't tested it out myself, but if you were disappointed with the previous version, now might be a good time to give it a second chance.

Release notes below the break.

 Last year I reviewed Doomsday Ascending, a 2D RPG adapted from a mediocre fanfic by the same name. The game's creator, Bhaalspawn, has made a point of telling his followers not to submit his various works to Equestria Daily or other fansites, so until today I was not aware that he had later created another My Little Pony RPG under the name "The Gates of Tartarus". The game seemed to be in a decent enough state (although still in an unfinished state), so I downloaded it in hopes that it would be better than its predecessor...

 Does Gates of Tartarus manage to overcome its predecessor's flaws and become a decent game in its own right? Find out in our review after the break.

 The Brony fandom has a distinct lack of visual novels, aside from that My Little Dashie demo and its sibling, Welcome to Ponyville, which is fairly surprising given the amount of talented artists and writers we have lying around, and how quickly these games can be scripted in a good engine such as Ren'Py. Sensing this void, the Zap Apple Project team hopes to fill it with their upcoming visual novel titled Starswirl Academy, and it stars some unrevealed colt in high school who befriends humanized versions of the mane 6. In other words, this is your stereotypical visual novel about schoolgirls and romance, and like many of its peers has seperate SFW/NSFW versions. At least it had good art going for it: I'd say that it already looks quite professional despite being in such an early state. Oh yeah, and since the developers went with a modified version of Ren'Py instead of writing their own engine like Filly Gamez the game runs on Mac OS X and Linux, and an Android port of the game is also planned.

Feel like playing a visual novel while you wait? Then I would suggest that you give Juniper's Knot a try. It is fairly short and lacks ponies (even humanized ones), but then again it's not like ponies automatically make everything better, right?

Alas, our wondrous fandom still lacketh a MOTHER-style RPG, but fear not! Project:Harmony is here, riding on its shining horse and repelling the forces of darkness with its stunning graphics, terrifying foes (just look at the size of that giganto robot!) and a cast of incredibly handsome Bronies who can love and tolerate the crap out of all haters, even not-so-invincible clumsy robots! For the first time ever I am going to rate a game based off of the trailer alone, and give it a ten out of-

Sorry, I can't keep this up. In case it somehow managed to escape you the above paragraph was a joke, and despite what you might expect Project:Harmony is an actual fangame. They're releasing an actual announcement and trailer for their game on November 21st (which also happens to be my birthday), but they made this silly teaser just for laughs and...I couldn't resist posting it. Sorry folks, but you'll have to wait a mite longer to find out what Project Harmony is actually about...

Yes folks, we just went though the trouble of putting together another of those trailers just to reveal who is attending Pon-E3. Why didn't we just put it in text like the other announcements? Because videos have been scientifically proven by totally reliable sources to be 20% cooler then plain text when used for announcements, that's why! And if you disagree with us, you can take it up with my cat (he's quite smart you know).

Anyhow, the event will start at 6:00am, PST on July 13, and end at 6:00pm, PST on the 14th. The entire thing will take place online and it won't cost you a cent to drop in. And in case you want a detailed schedule of the event you can find it at https://docs.google.com/document/d/1TlIHQqEOlpF_y5LGVekI8LizpRcU5Gq3NMgwnV8WcAE/edit?pli=1.

See you there!

Another video update of the Adventure of the Lunarbolts RPG has been released, and it's looking better then ever before. I'm no fan of it's combat system (somewhat bland in it's current state) and the tiles could really use a slight adjustment for an isometric perspective, but Adventure of the Lunarbolts is still shaping up to be a great MLP RPG.

Anyways, so the video is split into two parts, and you can find the second part after the break.