Since Hasbro released Falcon 4 and then did the old good news - bad news routine on the programming staff, I decided to evaluate another Hasbro simulation for the group.

I am not the only sim lover in the family, my 2 and a half year old daughter made an investment in Hasbro's "My Little Pony" simulation.

Installation:

Wrapper and front end music were not up to the standards of Falcon 4, instead of my pilot name ( Fang, Killer or some other tag) I had to name my pony and select it's colors. This is my first problem with this sim.

In all my checking I could not find any pony which in real life has a blue mane and green hide. This is not realistic and should not be part of a high end simulation.

Flight model:

Let me begin by emphasizing that I do not operate a Pony in my day to day life, Perhaps one of the professional Pony operators can chime in if I make an error. ( Sean, Robey, Hornit...)

After creating my pony I began a mission, er...whatever.

There is a long delay, about the same as waiting for Gilman to get a brief and mounted up in the F-4 clock. I immedialy noticed that my Pony was not very responsive to pitch inputs, will attempt to recalibrate my stick later and report back.

The Pony did not seem to operate in realistic manner, not a true 6 degrees of freedom flight model. I could not get the Pony to climb straight up or spin. I have read that real Ponies can climb if they have the PW 220, Hasbor must have simulated an earlier version.

I think we should all complain till this is fixed.

The stall did not break cleanly and recovered way too easy.

Frame rate and graphics:

My system is mid ranged ( PIII 750, 256 meg Ram, 32 meg Geforce)

: )

With all graphics items maxed out the frame rate dropped to about 3 frames per second when action got busy, ( other ponies, apple treats or attempting to jump gates).

Voodoo is not supported, I will upgrade to the newest untested beta drivers and see if this fixes problem.

Papadoc, can you construct a standard mission so we can compare frame rates from a common point?

The pony artwork is not realistic and I want to ask Eric and his crew at GTT if they could clean this up a bit. A wide angle redraw of the reins and mane would allow more of a sense of immersion.

Multiplayer:

Not supported, maybe iBeta can do a Hex edit.

Overall impression:

Back to Babb....er Wal Mart!!!!!

I am going to send a letter to Hasbro and suggest they hire the Falcon 4 programmers to come in and make the expansion pack for this sim since they continue to support it over Falcon 4.

I will post back with a more detailed review in the near future.

Sincerely (not really)

Chris Mixon