Back in March a visual novel-type game was announced named Welcome to Ponyville, and for some reason people got really excited about it. Most would expect that the sudden explosion in popularity had something to do with that desire many Bronies have to visit Equestria, but eventually it turned out that most of you sickos just wanted to get your hands on the romance portion of the game and ship yourselves with Lyra Heartstrings. To be honest I wish that they had downplayed the romance portion of the game, but either way Welcome to Ponyville should be a rather interesting game.

As this post's title should have indicated to you the first act of Welcome to Ponyville was released earlier this morning. The 1.14 gigabyte download (which they foolishly refused to compress) is enormous for what essentially amounts to a demo for a visual novel, although from the looks of it most of the space is taken up by audio files. We'll give you a review of the game and guides to running the game in Wine once we have finished downloading and playing it, but hopefully Act 1 is worth the 1.14GBs of hard drive space that it has taken away from me.

Also, for downloads we recommend that you use the torrent over at http://kat.ph/welcome-to-ponyville-act-1-t6676897.html for faster downloads. If you can then we would really appreciate it if you seed the torrent after downloading; after all nopony wants this torrent to be dead by the end of this day, right?

I'm not really the singing type, but I know that there are plenty of Bronies that would like nothing more to sing along to songs from My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic and get points for it. If you happen to be that type, then today is your lucky day! My Little Karaoke, a massive song pack for various karaoke games (such as UltraStar Deluxe, Performous, and Vocaluxe), has seen its first release and features various songs both from the show and from our glorious fandom. I haven't played it myself since it happened to share its release date with Black Mesa (which I spent all of last night downloading) but I hear that it's really great, so why don't you give it a shot, eh?

The vast majority of our fandom's fangames are in 2D, and for good reason. Ponies in general look much better when drawn in two dimensions then in three unless some performance-taxing cell shaders are applied. Even then they don't look quite as good as some would hope, but alas, some game types are nigh impossible to create without 3D graphics. Is Questria one of these games? No. Many a hack 'n slash RPG has been made with hand-drawn sprites but this game refuses to use anything but 3D. Does it work? As you can see from the above trailer...not really. The ponies look rather unconvincing up close but thankfully the game's top-down perspective hides this most of the time. Questria still needs a lot of work, but if all goes well it shall hopefully develop into a wonderful little multiplayer RPG to play with your friends.

We saved the actual gameplay video for the space after the break to scam more pageviews out of you. Aren't we mean?