Legends of Equestria

How's everyone doing today? It's me, Enigma Sage, coming to you live from the swirling, primordial mists of the Equestria Gaming of yesteryear, and I'm here to bring you some fresh LoE news.

For those of you headed to Bronycon this weekend, the team behind the ever-popular MMO Legends of Equestria will be there to showcase the game's latest developments in their panel on August 7. In addition, the team will be hosting one of their trademark Open Server Weekends August 14-16 so you can test out these additions for yourself. For more info, head on over to their website, or check out their announcement after the break.

 Last night, the team behind My Little Karaoke - an UltraStar song pack chock-full of brony music and other things, and pretty much the only thing in our karaoke tag - released a new update. Unlike previous updates, this one contains no new songs, but instead is focused on the game itself, moving to a brand-new launcher and engine with support for things like online leaderboards, duet songs, and a system to facilitate quicker song releases. Check their release post for more information.

 Hey, remember that HorseGame thing we posted about earlier? Well, the team at EquiDev has now released the demo for public consumption, which can be downloaded from their site. It contains one playable area with a variety of enemies, collectibles and spells to entertain oneself with. I've already said all about the game that I can in the last article, so I'll cut straight to the chase and post their announcement below the break.

After around a year and a half of development, the team at Equidev (formerly SprakleDev) finally has a new update concerning a new public demo of their project, HorseGame. For those unaware, HorseGame is a 3D platformer inspired by games like Ratchet and Clank, wherein you play as an unnamed unicorn and fight off enemies with various attacks and spells.

 While the demo itself isn't quite out yet, the dev team did send us this trailer to post, as well as an announcement to share, which I've placed just past the page break. Read on for more about the project and the demo!

 For the third time in a row, the My Little Karaoke team has released a new batch of songs for aspiring horsefamous singers to destroy their vocal cords to. If you've seen this project before, you'll know what to expect; if you haven't, it shouldn't be hard to guess. Like always, the new pack can be downloaded from the project's official site, and the listing of new tracks will be copied below the break.

 This one's been sitting in the inbox for a little bit while some preparations were made for the post. Poképon, made by Silverweed91, is a Pokémon-styled battle simulator featuring various ponies and other characters from the FiM universe. The current early release is a little barebones and unstable, but battling and teambuilding over the internet are fully supported. The game takes inspiration from Pokémon Showdown in its presentation and layout, for an easy transition for anyone used to that interface.

 A download link is available on the game's site, and the source code is located at the game's GitHub repository. Since there's no official game server running, I've set one up on my VPS; to connect, set the IP to lyrawearspants.com and the port to its default. There may not be anyone ready to battle when you connect; in that case, simply wait around for someone to show up.

 The development team behind Horse Game, a 3D game about... something, will be hosting a panel at BronyCAN 2014 next weekend. The Horse Game panel begins at 3PM on Saturday, and will feature the developers as they (as described in the press release) showcase gameplay, detail the development process, and explain their goals for where this project will lead.

 Pre-registration for the event closes tonight at midnight, for those interested in attending. Other games present include Twilight Sparkle's Secret Shipfic Folder, which will be on sale in the dealers' hall, and Legends of Equestria.

 We already posted about this when the announcement was made, but Legends of Equestria, the most well known horse MMO in the fandom, is hosting an open server this weekend to live out all of your romping around and boundary-escaping fantasies in. They've now put the client up for download, and the servers will be going up soon if they aren't already. Check out their news post for more information, or read the important bits mirrored below the break (as their site servers always seem to go down often during open servers).

 Since I'm guessing that most of you people have already participated in one of Legends of Equestria's many open server weekends and pretty much know what to expect, there's not much for me to say aside from that it'll begin at 12:01 AM EST on August 8th and end at 11:59 PM on the 10th, and that you will need an account on their forums in order to participate in the usual mixture of general chat, roleplay, and enterprising young chaps finding increasingly convoluted ways to leave the confines of the map. Not the sort of thing that I usually enjoy, but it's not like I really have much for friends to play LoE with, so I usually just run around as a lowly mudpony and quit shortly after reaching that one really high spot just outside the lawyer-friendly city of Cantermore.

In case you wish to read the original announcement for whatever reason, you may do so at http://forum.legendsofequestria.com/index.php?topic=11989.0

Last week, the crew behind My Little Karaoke - a song pack and modification for UltraStar for singing along with various pony songs - released a new content disc. The expansion provides a total of over 90 new songs according to the developers, including foreign language versions of a few official songs for you to improvise nonsensical lyrics over, as well as a bunch of brony music of... varying quality. (I liked a couple of them, anyway.) The update also comes with a new visual identity for the project.

You can find the download here, although the individual ZIP downloads of songs are no longer available, leaving the only option to download the entire 2GB ISO (which they seem insistent on using, as opposed to other, more sane archive formats for digital downloads like this) and extract the songs you want. The prior downloads have to be installed for an automatic installation to work, although nothing's stopping you from pulling the songs themselves into a custom UltraStar installation.

Read past the break for the list of new songs in this release.

 For various reasons, the Legends of Equestria development team decided to release a Babscon trailer showcasing the game minus the apparently quite awesome dragon invasion they held near the open server weekend's end, which I find somewhat disappointing. Ah well, at least it's a nice preview for those of you who want a sample of the LoE experience without waiting for another open server weekend or the lines of people sitting on that one rooftop and general goofiness typically found in private servers, the latter of which I wouldn't consider a downside to visiting a private server at all.

 And on another note, tux3 released his LoE private server build on GitHub a couple days ago, which you can grab at https://github.com/tux3/LoE-PrivateServer/releases for whenever those go live.

 Back in March we posted about an upcoming Legends of Equestria open server weekend from April 18 to 20, and now that the 18th has finally been reached we are pleased to announce that the event has begun on time. You can download a copy of the game here, and don't worry about login issues; apparently the team has resolved those so we probably won't have more horror stories of people literally waiting for several hours to get in.

 If you aren't able to play this weekend for whatever reason, I'd suggest downloading the client anyways since Tux3 will probably release another private server for it after the event is done. We've also copypasted a guide to the game below, which you can also find at http://forum.legendsofequestria.com/index.php?topic=10677.

After a long time in development, with almost no word on progress from the team until recently, Equestrian Dreamers finally released the first case in their point-and-click adventure game, My Little Investigations, titled True Blue Scootaloo. While the game has received its fair share of attention and hype, does the first substantial fruit of the team's labor live up to expectations? Well, that's what this post is for. Check out some rambling opinions on the game across the break.

Note: This review contains spoilers for the case. Read on with caution if you want to experience the game blind.