Die Reitakademie

Summary
The game puts you in the shoes of a young girl who gets offered a place at a riding academy. You will take theoretical and practical riding lessons (Jumping, Dressage and Western), take care of your school horse as well as follow a slice of life story about making friends and romance in the school.

Game Design
The game features 3D art, of course looking clunky and old today, but I remember it looked decent to me at the time I first played it. It features an open world with multiple areas, the academy grounds, where you start out, as well as a city area and some riding out areas, which you unlock over the course of the game.

Gameplay
The game has a strong concept of time, you play day by day with a weekly schedule, with weekdays having the first half of the day occupied with school (cutscene teaching you about horse things on days where you have theoretical riding lessons, timeskip otherwise). You have to go to bed by ten in the evening, at that point a pop-up appears and ends the day automatically.

Riding Mechanics
The most interesting and memorable aspect of this game for me are the riding mechanics: You give leg aids with WAD, weight aids with space and simulate the reins with mouse movements.

Horse Care
You have to muck out the stable of your horse once per in-game day. You also have to brush your horse, but it took several in-game days until it got dirty for the first time for me, not sure if that is normal, I remember having to do it way more often.

There are several different tools with which to clean different areas of your horse, you also have to use slightly different motions for them (at least it tells you to). The green arrow in the screenshot next to the cleanliness progress bar will turn yellow or red if you use the tool wrong.

The brush icon on the right shows up when your horse is dirty and needs brushing, a similar icon shows to let you know when the stable needs mucking out.

Riding Disciplines
You can (and I believe need to) train and compete in three different riding disciplines, even though at the start of the game you choose one of them as your specialization. I believe this has only influence on the theoretical lessons you will see during the school day parts in the mornings. For all three disciplines, you can go train them by going to the appropriate arena and talking to the trainer in the entry area. It doesn't matter if you have your horse with you, you can also just fasttravel to the arena with the appropriate F button without your horse, it will be there in the lesson and wherever you left it afterwards. You will unlock new lessons by repeatedly (very often) doing the ones available to you. It seems that you might only be able to unlock one new lesson (per discipline?) per in-game day, as sometimes when training for very long no second new lesson is unlocked and then when training again on the next day, a new lesson will unlock after doing the last one just once.

Western
For the western lessons, you train things like slalom, going over a bride, through an L... There are floating yellow arrows to follow through the parcours. It will tell you which gait to use and the little arrow at the top will turn yellow for the wrong gait, but not deduct any points. Scoring is just based on time to complete. Eventually, you unlock little parcours that use multiple of these exercise, which is also what the competitions are.

Dressage
For dressage, you also have to follow the arrows, each lesson is a real life riding figure. I think you can complete the lessons in any gait (TODO: Check this), but will be judged on accuracy of the figure (which can be quite hard to understand sometimes), so a slower gait can be easier. The first lesson is just riding on the rail, it takes what feels like an eternity to unlock the next one, but I promise it gets a little better!

Jumping
For jumping, you need to complete some jumps. The jumping mechanic is pressing space when a little marker is in the green area of the jump bar (which appears as you near a jump). You can only jump over obstacles, not just freely anywhere as in some other games, but some objects out in the world are marked as jumpable obstacles with little flags, so you can practice this outside of lessons. As the difficulty of the jumps increases, the correct timing for the jump will get tighter (i.e. the green area on the bar smaller). Jumping is judged on time and you get points deducted for falling off your horse / your horse refusing a jump. TODO: SCREENSHOT SORELY NEEDED HERE

Trivia
You can only mount your horse if you approach it from the left, the mount interaction option does not appear when standing on the horses right.

Differences between Releases
No idea if the Nintendo version is close in gameplay, I just found pictures of it featuring the same box art. Do not own it.

System Requirements & Compatibility
Minimal Requirements: WIN 98SE / ME / 2000 / XP CPU 1,2 GHz 256 MB RAM Graphics card: GeForce 2 600 MB free disk space DirectX compatible sound card 20x CD-ROM drive, keyboard, mouse

Recommended: WIN 98SE / ME / 2000 / XP CPU 2 GHz 512 MB RAM Graphics card: GeForce 4 600 MB free disk space DirectX compatible sound card 20x CD-ROM drive, keyboard, mouse

Compatibility: Unfortunately, I have not managed to get this to run again on either a Win7 or Win10 (both 64 bit) system. It gives an "error loading x64 driver. did you forget to reboot?" message, that according to various threads where people asked about other games indicates that you are doomed if you don't have a 32 bit system. I inquired with tech support at Pferd&Pony whether there is a patch, but got a reply stating that it is not possible to run it on current windows systems. Running inside a 32 bit XP VM threw a Runtime Error on startup. It runs fine on a proper XP machine, even without a dedicated soundcard and just some onboard sound. Did have some crash issues before installing the sound drivers of the mainboard though.