I am victorious!

You play as one of the Young Six

This is a most unaccustomed feeling for me. I never complete games. I'm renowned for being a really, really useless gamer. Yet here I am, receiving the congratulations of Princess Twilight Sparkle herself. I have to say, I've had more fun with Pocket Ponies than with any mobile game for a long time. Even the required grinding (assuming you don't want to pay) isn't as ridiculous as with most similar titles.

It's possible I'll get round to writing a proper (albeit probably quite short) review of Pocket Ponies at some point, but for now you just get me bouncing around with happiness. I'm still playing, though, as I still haven't managed to get Fluttershy as one of my mystery box ponies!

"Young Six" it is, then

No, no, this was a totally random choice...

I've been playing the Pocket Ponies game on my phone quite a bit, now it's finally appeared on Android. It's freemium, but not (yet?) as onboxiously so as the Gameloft MLP game. It takes a lot of grinding to buy powerful ponies, but the numbers aren't completely impossible. The art style is really pretty cute, which helps. (See picture above.) I expect I'll get bored with it eventually, but that hasn't happened yet.

The other point of this post is that the game uses the term "Young 6" to refer to the students. I don't quite know why it's with the numeral, given that the same game uses "Mane Six" with the number written out as a word. With that in mind, though, I'm going to shift over from "Student Six" to "Young Six" from now on. It's not actually show canon (yet?) but it's clearly now extended canon. Not using the numeral, though!

Chase the Ace, Worcester style

At nearly every Worcester ponymeet, we play a simple card game called Chase the Ace. It's basically the game that Wikipedia describes under the name of Ranter-Go-Round, but we have one or two house rules. So, for the benefit of newcomers and (as The Descendant used to say) interested passers-by here's how we play the game.

This goes on a bit, so have a page break.

My Little Karaoke

( Text link )

I don't think I've ever done a post specifically about My Little Karaoke, so here's a quick one. For the six people in the fandom who don't know, this is a ponified version of the Singstar clone UltraStar Deluxe. It comes with pretty much every official song (newer ones are usually made available fairly quickly) and a whole bunch of community tracks as well. Even if you haven't played it yourself, you've almost certainly seen it at a convention or in a video... like the one embedded above. ;)

If you enjoy singing pony songs, as an awful lot of us do, MLK is enormous fun. It can be a tiny bit fiddly in places (to delete a playlist, you first have to open it!) but the basics are simple enough. The program is free and is available on the official site for Windows, macOS and Linux. It's a pretty chunky download, though, so a decently fast internet connection is advisable – though the game itself is fully offline unless you use the basic online leaderboard system.

In brief? My Little Karaoke is fantastic. Get it now!

Playing Tails of Equestria

Sadly the art inside is just stock vectors and show screenshots

On Saturday, I went to the twice-monthly Worcester meet. Patrick had brought along his copy of the newish Tails of Equestria RPG, and four of us (three players and Patrick as GM) created characters and started out on the sample adventure in the book. Apparently character creation was supposed to take about half an hour. This is where anyone who's ever played an RPG does the hollow laughter thing. (But not the hollow voice thing. "Plugh" doesn't work here!)

My character, Ripple, has a special talent for finding water but a "quirk" of short-sightedness. This means that in the wilds, I may well find water by falling into it! I'm a unicorn, and so my Mind attribute is slightly enhanced; the other two are Body and Charm. Earth ponies get a slight Body advantage; pegasi don't get a Charm advantage but of course they can fly. And no, you are absolutely not allowed to play an alicorn character!

Anyway, I won't spoil the adventure's plot in case any of you might play it sometime, but it's fair to say it was far more fun than I was expecting – even if I did roll 1 suspiciously often when trying to achieve some useful task. Admittedly much of the amusement was provided by our earth pony character, whose main trait was a feeling that every problem could be solved by kicking it. We also had a pegasus in the party, so we hoped the balance would work.

As I write this, we're about halfway through the adventure after an hour or so's play, and we're intending to complete it at the next meet in a fortnight. I'm not sure I'd want to play ToE at every meet – there are almost too many gaming meets already – but I think I'd be up for occasional sessions in the future, as Patrick suggested. At any rate, if you can find the set for a reasonable price, and as long as you have a few like-minded friends, I think I'd recommend it. :)

A belated comment on Fighting is Magic

There's a simple reason why I haven't said anything before about Mane6 and their ceased-and-desisted Fighting is Magic game, and that's that I'm one of the (minority of?) fans who was never all that interested it in the first place. Don't get me wrong: what I saw of it in videos and so on was very impressive, and it's a great shame that Hasbro's actions came so very close to the end of the development process. But I didn't bother playing the leaked alpha. I just don't find fighting games very interesting, and never have. Driving games, yes. Fighting games, no.

Lauren Faust is, of course, a fantastic person for offering to work with the Mane6 team to turn the game into an original-IP product with some of her own characters. I hope that whatever's eventually released will be a success, assuming it plays as well as Fighting is Magic looked. But will I play it? Frankly, no I won't. If I were a fighting-game fan, I probably would, especially given Faust's involvement. But I'm not, and the MLP angle was the only reason I'd have been interested in playing Fighting is Magic.

All right, so what about Hasbro? Well, they had the right to do this; nobody with a brain can question that. It's their IP. Whether they had to do it is another matter. I'm not sufficiently familiar with these things to say, but if common sense had anything to do with the law (I know, ha ha) they'd have left it alone. This was bad PR for Hasbro, no question. There's actually a case for saying that their worst offence was not doing something about it earlier, since I simply don't believe nobody at the company knew about Fighting is Magic until just recently.

We all know, Hasbro included, that the brony fandom would not exist in anything like its current form and size had Hasbro cracked right down on YouTube, in particular, from the start. They have the legal right to do so; MLP:FiM is their intellectual property. They also calculate, I think correctly, that only a small minority of bronies will do the dreaded "leaving the fandom" thing over this. So it's probably a business decision as much as anything else... and Hasbro is, undoubtedly, a business.