After some teasing and speculation via a Livestream the past weekend, the official Pokemon YouTube Channel has announced a new creature for Pokémon Shield: Galarian Ponyta.
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Six Ages: Ride Like The Wind is a story-driven strategy game where you lead a clan of horse riders. The game is out on iOS already and will be released on Steam in October 2019.
I’ve had Six Ages on my list of games to review ever since The Mane Quest was launched, because the developers offered me a review copy early on. I’ve finally had a look and realized that I won’t be able to give this game a fair review after all.
Outside of the genre of “horse games”, there are plenty of games in which one or multiple horses are a secondary feature. The horses in games like The Witcher, The Legend of Zelda, Assassin’s Creed or Red Dead Redemption have varying depths of gameplay and serve purposes such as being a means of transport, an important Non-Playable Character or one of many collectible items. Broadly speaking, most implementations of horses in video games fit into one of two categories: Companion Horses and Collectible Horses.
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If you’ve been following TMQ for a while, you’ll know that good horse animation is hard to find, and for those of us more gifted in game design or coding than in art, a sprite pack like this can be an incredible ressource.
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Horse Isle 3: Infinite Wilds has officially gone live on August 25th, after several months of open beta testing.
Unlike its predecessors, Horse Isle 3 is fully 3D, with the exact looks of horses being determined by their stats and genetics. “No two horses look or behave alike!” claims the game’s website.
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Star Stable Online is a massively multiplayer online role playing game or MMORPG that has been out for almost 8 years. Despite the often underestimated target audience of teenage female PC players, the game is a huge success and continues to grow and improve.
The Mane Quest spoke to SSO Product Owner Nika Bender about the work she and her team do behind the scenes of what is probably the most successful horse game of all time.
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Dash Society is a horse-themed MMO with an ambitious take on artificial horse intelligence. Solo developer UnknownHero writes about his work on the game’s dev blog, with the most recent entry dreaming big about what could be done for horse AI in games.
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Hundreds of people search for terms like “best horse games 2019” and “horse games pc”. I dearly wish I could give these people any wholehearted recommendation where I can call something a genuinely good horse games without caveats about its quality. While I still consider the entire genre in dire need of some innovation and respectable implementation, here is an overview of what is available on each platform:
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Tivola has been making and publishing games since 1995. While their portfolio has always been family-friendly, they have recently put more focus on horse-themed games in particular.
Product Manager Inga Panten invited me to visit Tivola’s offices in Hamburg for a day to get a look behind the scenes.
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Ostwind is a franchise of horse themed books, movies and video games. At their center stand teenage girl Mika and the stallion Ostwind, who form a deep friendship and supernatural bond.
At a glance, Ostwind quickly looks like having the highest production value of any horse game ever made, with its highly detailed environments and promises of a big open world. Does that impression remain after a closer? Find out below.
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The Unity Asset Store offers everything from code toolsets, over individually animated character models to complete game projects. The quality of these assets varies drastically, with many being created by hobbyists.
In the case of one particular Horse Animset Pro however, the assets popularity has lead to several games having the same problem: the walk animation is completely wrong.
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Many horse games set the wrong priorities and get the most basic things wrong about horses. By stark contrast, watching the social media updates of Equestrian The Game has been an absolute delight. The Mane Quest reached out to developer Kavalri Games and found a kindred spirit in the team’s Vice President and Co-Founder Molly Ericson.
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I spontaneously tried Horse Riding Tales after someone pointed it out to me as a new Steam release. Since I get instantly excited whenever I see anything that might turn out to be a good horse game on PC, I decided to give it a go.
At the time of writing I’ve played the game for about an hour and don’t much intend to return to it.
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I am convinced that putting the focus on horses as a theme and setting and making a solid, well-executed game are not mutually exclusive. Or at least, they shouldn’t be. And while I would do many things for a good stable management game, that is far from the only genre in which a good horse game could be made.
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My Time At Portia is not a game about horses. To be perfectly honest, it doesn’t have particularly beautiful or well-animated horses, they occasionally glitch around a little and there’s not even really all that much to do with them. Despite all this, Portia still manages to be among the better choices for “a good horse game”, simply because there are horses in it and it is very much a good game.
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