Little ponies with BIG powers are coming to the Monster Taming Direct!

...But what even is that tho?

It's an annual indie games showcase focusing on Pokémon inspired projects where countless devs apply but only about 30 make the cut! And with tens of thousands of fresh gamer eyes on it, we're about to witness a livechat reaction to "P0niEs!?" harkening back to the 2010s MLP vs the Internet first-impressions era.

The event will be hosted by GymLeaderEd on YouTube, premiering this coming Labor Day morning, and we couldn't be more excited to share the Mares Mares Mares Mares Mania with the gaming world! Tune into the show and you should see BGP about 25 to 30 minutes in. It'll be a trailer with some big reveals and lots of fun stuff for Pony RPG enjoyers to see!

The first batch of PixelShy games by DracoBlair are now on the arcade! The new games are:

• Balloon Catcher - Control Fluttershy's little wings and catch as many balloons before the time runs out!
• Fashionista - Perfectly fill the given patterns with the pieces given to you!
• Pop Quiz - Test your knowledge of facts and MLP trivia with Cheerilee!
• Orchard Defender - Prevent the birds from eating all your fruit by shooting them down with seeds!

The PixelShy Series by DracoBlair was a Flash series of minigames featuring Fluttershy which were meant to culminate in a full game playing with and taking care of Fluttershy. The Flash End of Life may have had different plans for that, but archivists and Ruffle developers begged to differ, which is why in the upcoming days and weeks all of the (currently ruffle compatible) games will be rolled out to the arcade starting from tomorrow!

This is a wonderful gem of the past featuring 8 pony games and interactive experiences exuding raw 2012 energy. All of them are very short and sweet, but here is the rundown:

This is a very simple maze game made by the PonyDevs community featuring rarity trying to escape randomly generated mazes... which sometimes are invisible... or while being stalked by the Smooze... or both. Your goal is to guide rarity through the monochromatic labyrinth into the black void on the right.

That is pretty much it. Not much more to say. Though I always like myself a some mazes, so this is my best attempt so far at speed-mazing (I just made that term up right now!). Timing starts the frame the new maze loads in and ends on the frame the "You Escaped!" text appears. Try to beat my time!

Always nice to see an older pony game get a little love after all of this time! Unicorn Training is back on the scene, freed from Digital Purgatory after having been removed from the app store a few years back. There's been plenty of little tweaks and quality of life improvements made for this re-release, which you can read more about in the press release below the break!

In the spotlight this week we've got Zap Apple Buckin', a cute and simple little point and click by the talented pony pixel artist zztfox! Tap (or click!) on all of the ripe Zap Apples before they disappear to help Applejack harvest them, making sure to take great care to avoid the unripe ones. Harvest as many of them as you can within the time limit in order to get a high score and increase your rank, which give you greater and greater score multipliers the higher up you get!

Just a quick note! When a round ends, the screen will fade to black, then the results screen fades in, and then you go back to the title screen. Around level 20 or so, there's a bug wherein the screen will fade to black like normal, but won't fade back in again. The game is still going when this happens! Your progress is saved between rounds, so just listen for the title screen sounds and then refresh the page to continue playing. Happy harvesting!