Friday, September 13, 2013

Have Some Pony Stuff to Keep You Busy Over the Weekend

It's been a while since I did a non-fanfic compilation post, hasn't it?  I used to put these up every now and again when I didn't have a review ready to go... not that I don't have a review ready to go!  It's, uh, right over here.  No, you can't see it.  Right now it's sleeping.  Maybe on Monday.

However, I do have a few links for you to peruse as you idle away your weekend (what are weekends for, if not idling?).  Click down below the break for some pony gameage, blogage, and me-age to keep you busy.



Gameage:  The Pony Roguelike

I'm not much for the more complicated (or at least, more involved) roguelikes*, like Nethax or (god forbid) Dwarf Fortress.  I do enjoy some of the simpler, more straightforward iterations of the genre though--Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup is one I've played more than a bit of.

PonyRL is a very short, very simple roguelike.  The controls are intuitive and everything you need to know is clearly spelled out in the tutorial, individual levels generally take 10 minutes or less to complete, and despite being in beta, there are already four races, four classes, and fourteen achievements to unlock.  For fans of the game style who are looking for something easy to dip into, this game shows a lot of promise.

Also, I finally unlocked the "Almost a Princess" achievement a few days ago, so I'm still pretty pumped about that.  Anyway, check this one out if you're looking for a low-graphics, high-strategy, high-variance game that's easy to pick up and put down.



Blogage:  Ask the Equestria Games Inspector

Ask blogs are, on the whole, one of those things I just don't "get."  So many of them seem to be either one joke endlessly repeated, comics which have been co-opted by a misguided desire for interactivity, or both.  But every now and then, you find one which uses the question-response format in a way conducive to story telling, rather than treating it as an impediment (or forgoing storytelling altogether).  And every once in a great while, I find one such blog that happens to actually appeal to me, personally.

Well, here it is.

Ask the Equestria Games Inspector is written by Skywriter, and uses the International Equestria Games Committee's attempts to provide an "avenue for transparency" to showcase Miss Harshwhinny, aka the (real) games inspector from Games Ponies Play.  The whole blog is full of wonderful tidbits of worldbuilding humor, delicious snark, and other lovely things.  Plus, it's got a button you can click to read the posts in chronological order!  I don't know why so many tumblr sites are aggressively hostile to archive-bingeing, but whatever; this one isn't (aggressively hostile to archive-bingeing, that is).  Read it from the start, and enjoy.



Me-age:  The latest blog post on my FiMFic page

If you really can't get through the weekend without some Chris-y goodness, head over there.  There's a thing going around FiMFic these days, in the vein of "quote a passage from one of my stories at me, and I'll give you author commentary about it."  Self-aggrandizing, I know, but if that's the sort of thing you'd be interested in seeing, or if there's a passage from one of my stories you want to know more about, feel free to head over there.

Anyway, I hope that at least one of those three holds some interest to you!





*Roguelike: games in the style of Rogue.  Key features include ASCII graphics or simple tilesets, random game layouts, high replayability due to the same, and permanent character death

6 comments:

  1. I love roguelikes, but I think I'll wait till it's out of beta. Something to look forward to at least, I guess!

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    1. Would you believe I've never played Rogue? Closest thing I have played would be Fatal Labyrinth, which was pretty fun. I couldn't really get into this pony one, though it's rare that I can enjoy video games either claiming to be RPGs or are obviously inspired by them. In the former case, I almost always decide they've missed the point and don't feel like an RPG, and in the latter I can't help but compare them to an RPG and thus hold them to unfair expectations. I should mention I don't care much for modern tabletop RPGs either, though, especially those from the Forge community

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  2. Hi Chuck, I have a friend that's starting a mlp crossover collab fanfic and is having diffaculty finding people interested in joining. If you know anybody that's interested in working on a collab project could you let them know about this?

    Thanks.

    Here's a link to her profile and the information about the collab.

    http://www.fanfiction.net/u/826624/Tucker-s-Mayflower

    -Summerset Banjo

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    Replies
    1. I meant to type Chris. Sorry. Also please don't think I'm trying to spam you. I just want to get the word out for my friend's project.

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  3. The Miss Harshwhinny is Best Pony group on FimFiction (also ran by Skywriter) is always a reliable source of hilarity for me. And now you say there's an ask tumbler about it too?
    Hot diggidy!

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  4. Twice now I've considered skipping a Roundup due to EqD's new look, and both times I've changed my mind only to discover something by someone here. First time was a video by Present, and now I find a two year old comment by Chris! Actually, two, both are songs for that old Luna and the Glass Harp game. I got a good chuckle out of that 4'33" one, Chris

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