The folks running the Finnish Crystal Fair 2014 brony convention are organizing a Team Fortress 2 tournament named Crystal Gaming (unrelated to the Crystal Games Challenge we covered a few days ago), aimed at players of all skill levels. The tournament, designed as a promotion for the convention, is taking signups through the end of the month. They've got some TF2-related prizes for the top teams, and are also accepting item donations to add to the prize pool, if you've grown bored of hat collect-a-thons and want to offload your inventory or something like that. Read past the break for their press release, with more info and some useful links. (Or you could just read it on their site, if you'd rather.)

This game from Okamikurainya is a fairly standard pony platformer starring Daring Do (who would've guessed?), with its fair share of barely-visible jumps and doodads floating around waiting to be collected. The lack of any temporary invincibility after a hit leads to many situations where one hit leads to more that can't be avoided. The boss is unusually clever for these kinds of fangames, though, and manages to be pretty fun when you're not getting backed into a wall and killed instantly. There's some potential for a fun game here if the developer works to add some variety to future levels.

 Last year there was some event called the Crystal Games Challenge, and unsurprisingly they're holding another one this year from June 13 to 15. That's really all I know, aside from their plans to feature the entries on a convention panel somewhere like they previously did at Everfree Northwest.

They have an exclamation-plagued announcement at http://www.thegamingcolts.com/2014/01/15/announcing-the-crystal-games-challenge-2014/

 Despite the name leading us to believe that it'll feature gameplay similar to the Age of Empires series, Hopeabandoner is evidently aiming for his RTS to be more like the Starcraft series, which kind of disappointed me since I'm rather fond of the former. There's also some plans for "original elements", which probably have something to do with unit customization (something that's been available since 1999 in Warzone 2100, along with a crapton of other RTS games). Even so, the pony fandom doesn't have enough real time strategy games and it would be nice to actually see one get finished for once, so...

Follow the tumblr, I guess?