Showing posts with label top-down. Show all posts
Showing posts with label top-down. Show all posts

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!

Ponies Vs Changelings - Release Trailer

The changelings have invaded Ponyville in this fast-paced "Plants Vs Zombies" parody game, and the only thing that can stop them are the mane 6 and their clones! With the mane 6's attacks ranging from a zappy lazer thingie to apul, our heroines must use all of their power to destroy everything that crosses their path. Each attack is most effective under certain conditions, so you'll need to think fast and constantly place your poners to stop the onslaught of changelings in their tracks.
Download this game today to save Equestria and show the Changelings where they can stick their invasion attempts!

Review: Pony Club (alpha 1.5.4)

Pony Club is an interactive chat room evolved from the PonyDreamMaker app, developed by the (apparently) russian team ManeQuest Project. However, the developers intend to eventually build a full Pony-themed RPG, towards which PonyDreamMaker and Pony Club are the first and second steps. They’ve got a Patreon page if you wish to give them your support, which they most certainly could use.

D'lirium - Steam Early Access



After putting years of love and effort into it, B52 Development Team is proud to present D'lirium, a top town action adventure game with horror elements. It has a neat retro artstyle with great music and ambiance and many unique environments to explore. Recently it has been released on steam as early access and with the game already having so much content and the promise of further expansions and updates, it's well worth your purchase!

Description:
A powerful unicorn, whose soul had been consumed by the Darkness, dooms the world to the endless suffering. The main character sets off for the journey, his goal is to find a Pandemoniun - the place where the greatest of all evils resides. He must stop the unicorn and banish the Darkness back to Hell.
D'lirium is an experimental 2D-shooter with the elements of a horror game. The game brings together some mechanics back from 90s classics, such as a search for the keys, non-linear levels and a lot of other things. Moreover, the game contains a lot of experimental tricks, such as random events, non-traditional controls for a shooter game, etc.
 Please note that the default control scheme is quite buggy, I highly suggest you change it to shooter mode for the best experience

Pony Town

Ponytown is a recent viral affair, that has been buzzing around tumblr and the imageboards in recent months.
Ponytown is a social HTML5 experience. I hesitate to say game, as there are not anything outside of walking around the green fields and socializing with other players. There are an extensive amount of customization around the pony you walk around as, from gender and mane styles, to accessories and all the different colours you could wish for.
It's hard to recommend it for its sheer gameplay value, but in the case of socialization, it is an entertaining little thing. You can switch the tiled playing field between grass and dirt by clicking, but I wouldn't say that counts as gameplay. This is usually where the viral or memetic twist snuck its way in, with people having found their own forms of entertainment, drawing whatevers in the grass for people to behold.
As it is, it's still very much in an alpha stage, constantly getting updated and getting new stuff and features added as we speak. Trees and rocks here and there, a new login system, all small additions towards the right direction.
As mentioned, it is an HTML5 endeavour, so it should work in every major browser. Take it for a spin if you are curious, have some friends to hang out with. I've even seen people use it as a virtual meet-up spot, so that's a very possible option as well. There are both a safe and an unregulated server, so I'd assume it is suitable for all ages.

Canterlot Siege 3: Inversion


 Hot off the queue of things that have lingered in our inbox for a depressingly long time, Canterlot Siege 3: Inversion is the latest entry in the line of Flash-powered tower defense games by futzi01 starring characters from the MLP universe. The main difference in this one is that now you're playing as the villains, trying to stop the good guys from reclaiming their home. Gameplay-wise, notable additions include the ability to place boss characters - fully upgraded attackers with special attack patterns - and additional variety in the level choices, going from the old design philosophy of different paths in a grassy field to levels with some actual variety in them, even if only visually. The game does get difficult fast - as someone not well-versed in tower defense games, I struggled to make it very far my first few rounds - but it becomes more manageable with practice.

 At this point I mostly post these things to keep a log of them. Most of the people interested in this game probably follow the author and played it months ago.
- RedEnchilada

Robin Steele the Waifu Thief


 Created in 48 hours for the Crystal Games Challenge (which either nobody told us about or we lost in our email inbox somewhere), Robin Steele the Waifu Thief is a small game by Pix3M about a villainous Original Character Donut Steel™ barging into Canterlot Castle and claiming Twilight Sparkle as his waifu, whoever he has to take down to get there. Naturally, you play as the villain. Randomly generated floors and a massive difficulty help to somewhat increase the playability of this rather short game, and it's definitely worth a couple plays for the beautiful sprite work, but once you've experienced the ending, there isn't much to come back to.
- RedEnchilada

Review: BFS

A load of horse crap.

 As his previous efforts have shown us, Vanni is determined to redefine the way we see RPGs, and to accomplish his vision he has even gone so far as to program it from scratch in C instead of going about the usual route of whipping up crap in RPG Maker like a mere commoner. This may prove he's no scrub, sure, but even the best of developers can slip up sometimes, so is this an example of such?

Pony fans will definitely want to check this one out, so read on below the break for my thoughts on it.

EquestriaBound

Gameplay screenshot of EquestriaBound.
EquestriaBound

 Given the current popularity of both Earthbound and My Little Pony, it was inevitable that eventually someone would mod ponies into the former, and now the deed has finally been done. I'm not sure about the mod's quality, but at least it should give you folks something to play while you wait for Curse of the Lost Kingdom's first part to be released on April 30th.

So sit back, patch your Earthbound ROM and enjoy the ride!
- Tuxxy

Review: Super Lesbian Horse RPG

A gameplay screenshot of Super Lesbian Horse RPG
Super Lesbian Horse RPG

 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.

Super Lesbian Horse RPG is Released

Super Lesbian Horse RPG

 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.
- Tuxxy

MLP RPG (Fighting the Unknown) Update


 So the MLP RPG has been updated, you know, the one with the ponies. There's apparently lots of new stuff in it, but since I haven't been able to find a detailed changelog I have no idea as to what Harvard Han added this time. I probably won't be able to review it anyways until it leaves the beta stage either, so in the meantime you might as well give it a shot.

...Enjoy, I guess?
- Tuxxy

A Release Date for Super Lesbian Horse RPG



 Apparently Super Lesbian Horse RPG is coming out on Christmas Day (Wednesday, in case you haven't checked your calendars yet). Since I just got from watching The Desolation of Smaug and am rather tired, let's just say that words cannot fully describe my excitement so I can get this over with and listen to the Electric Light Orchestra, maybe see if a friend of mine is online at this hour.

Good night!
- Tuxxy

Breach of Harmony


 Not too long ago somebody decided that what the My Little Pony fan community really needed the most was an online PvP arena game, and thus Breach of Harmony was born. It features everything you'd expect from this type of game: multiple player classes, gratuitous amounts of colourful horses and an unintentionally cheesy plot involving a secret society of rich ponies who apparently get a kick out of paying the lower classes to fight each other. I could dissect it further based on the preview video, but since it's still in the pre-alpha stage I shall refrain from doing so for the time being (given that most of the problems I have with it are related to the animations and will most likely be resolved in the near future).

You can find more detailed information about the game at breachofharmony.com.

Super Pony Wars Demo

A gameplay screenshot for Super Pony Wars
Super Pony Wars

 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.

Elemental Reaction

A gameplay screenshot of Elemental Reaction.
Elemental Reaction

 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.
- Tuxxy

Curse of the Lost Kingdom: Old Demo

 If you were here back in July of '12, you might remember us posting about a promising RPG known as The Lost Kingdom, along with an assurance that a demo for the game was "almost complete". However, as time went on that demo became increasingly out of date when compared to the actual game, and Super Writer forgot about it entirely...until two days ago, when he decided to put it online for all to enjoy, as an extremely pleasant surprise. It may be old and nowhere nearly as polished as the game is in its current state, but it's still a fun diversion that should be well worth a playthrough or two.

Also, some players (myself included) are unable to run the game without first installing RPG Maker 2003, which you can conveniently find on the demo's download page.
- Tuxxy

Review: War of Harmony IV

War of Harmony IV title screen.
(Download)
The game does contain some grimdark content, in case that bothers you.
 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.

Super Lesbian Horse RPG Update


 For those of you who don't follow Bobby Schroeder's tumblr, you may be wondering how SLHRPG is coming along, so he created this Youtube video to give you folks some incentive to visit it more often. Most of the progress updates are too short to be posted here (for example, a recent series detailed his work on a particular rock sitting in the forest), but at least Bobby is being fairly open about the development process when compared to most of the other fangames I've seen which get this far, since they tend to be relatively silent for the most part.

So...yeah. You can follow Super Lesbian Horse RPG's development here.

Review: Moonstuck Part 2

The Moonstuck title screen
Moonstuck Part 2

 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.