DS Review: Pony Life

In times like these when shovelware runs rampant and it's easy to find at least a dozen games with the same exact premise, it can be a little daunting to know where to even start to try and find a decent game from any one of these overdone genres. Which is where I step in: to find the few rare gems amongst all the fodder.

Last weekend, I had a nasty cold that left me curled up in bed, not wanting to do much of anything, and had about the attention span of a goldfish, which left pretty much any game requiring any considerable amount of thought or concentration completely out of the running for what I should try next. So I perused through my extensive game collection and picked up this one that I'd never so much as really looked at before: Pony Life.

I'll admit, I didn't have very high hopes for this game - I mean, really, there's so many out there seemingly just like it, I figured I'd play it for 15 minutes, toss it aside, and never look at it again. Wrong... A week later, here I am... having wasted just about the entire week on the thing.

The graphics didn't originally strike me as being anything particularly special, given that this is a DS game and all and we've seen their history with how most 3D game graphics look. But even so, there's a painstaking amount of detail paid to almost everything in this game; from the ponies themselves to the scenery to just...well...everything! As the seasons progress and change, so do the settings of each scene. They're not new maps; they're exactly the same, but recreated to reflect the changing seasons. This is done SO very well that it left me feeling nostalgic for the days when I was growing up and really did own a pony, and went riding on the trails behind our property. My favorite of the seasons, without a doubt, had to be the winter season, where all the maps are blanketed in a coat of white Christmas snow. Ice crystals hang lazily, yet elegantly from the weeping willow tree in the pasture. The only location not kissed by winter is the beach...which I suppose makes sense, but at the same time, doesn't, as all the locations directly surrounding it were all snowy. Small continuity error, but I digress.

You have to do the daily upkeep, naturally, with each of your ponies - feeding them, brushing them, cleaning them, petting them... The one thing that I couldn't help but notice is that it conveniently leaves out the fact that if you own ponies, you'll need to clean up their poop. A LOT. Anyone who's ever owned a horse will tell you that this is one of the very first things that springs to mind when you think about horse care and upkeep, because they do so dang much of it. To leave it out altogether like this? It almost immediately disqualifies the game as being realistic in and of itself.

That said, there are other qualities that this game possesses that help win back points in the realism department. Each pony has its own distinct personality and temperament based on breed, and they also each have their own personal tastes with things such as the type of food that they're fed. One pony may love a certain kind, another may hate it. If you pet or brush them in sensitive spots, they're liable to freak out a little and buck. It's the little things like this that most other similar games tend to leave out but this one put in that I appreciate. You also get to choose from a number of different styles of saddle blankets, saddles, and bits to dress them up in... or mix and match them! (Another thing many similar games won't let you do.) You can also change your rider's styles like this, but I wish you could've customized her appearance as well. (I definitely wouldn't have picked a blonde if it had been up to me.)

Of course, this is by no means the entire game. (What sort of game would it be? Ah yeah...another typical horse simulator.) Well, this one's better than that: Each season that you return to the ranch, there's a new competition to train for and take part in. You've got typical rodeo type games (stuff like having to pop balloons on a course while riding, collecting flags and dropping them into the matching colored cones, gathering rings on a sword), show jumping, dressage (for those not in the equine world, NO, this has nothing to do with fashion :p), obstacle courses... There's so much to do. And with each game year that passes, your competition grows stronger. It will eventually reach the point where unless you get an absolutely perfect score, you'll be beaten by your competitor, and it will take another game year to get back around to that competition to try and win the title. A little daunting, sure, but it does make this a more lengthy game than it probably otherwise would have been.

My only other real gripe with this game is one point that'd probably be a selling point with really little girls is that, there is a magical forest area that, if you can complete the course, you're rewarded with either a golden feather or a magic mushroom. Upon equine ingestion of either, they will either sprout wings and become a pegasus, or they'll eat the mushroom and become a unicorn. Now, I don't know about you, but it seems like a pretty bad idea to me to put the thought into little girls' heads that if they feed their ponies feathers or mushrooms in real life, that they'll turn into one of these mythical creatures. Just my opinion, I could be wrong, seeing as not too many kids own ponies anymore.

Overall, the game's not terrible. It's better than most in this genre, so I'm going to go ahead and rate it a 7 out of 10 little ponies.