Another tést/en

Summary
From the back of case - PlayStation 2 (UK):

Congratulations your're the owner of a new horse farm called Silver Buckle Stables! Choose your horse, pick out your riding outfits and even accessorise your horse with saddles, ribbons and more. The competitions are tough, but practice hard at the corral to perfect your riding technique and you'll make it to the Equestrian Center where you can show off your skills to win blue ribbons and buckles!


 * Create the horse of your dreams from hundreds of combinations of coats, manes, saddles, bridles, blankets and more!
 * Personalise your character by picking out your clothes, boots, hair color and hat.
 * Take a leisurely stroll through the fields, woods and streams of Silver Buckle Stables and play mini adventures!
 * Head to the practise corral to prepare you and your horse for your big barrel racing competition.
 * Rise from an unranked rider all the way to a AAA riding professional!

Game Design


3D environment, a very small open world map you can ride through to explore or to get to competitions, but most things can more easily be accessed with fast travel.

Controls are mostly keyboard (clearly ported from consoles), but menus can also be operated with mouse.

Horse Model
The horse is kind of cute in most of its idle animation, but there's one where it's snorting and it looks like it's about to murder you. Any animations including teeth in this game are scary.

When moving, the turns in gallop are more tilting than actually turning.

Tutorial
There is a tutorial walking you through the care and riding mechanics, which you can skip when starting a new game, and get back to anytime via the menu!

Rider Customization
You can play as a boy or girl, which affects which outfits and hairstyles you can choose from. The game offers a surprising variety for customizing the rider's facial features. There are sliders with 50 settings for head size, head shape (those two sliders don't seem to make much of a visual difference though except oddly distorting the face), eye size, eye thickness/shape, nose width, nose size, mouth length and width, chin length and width. There are 7 hair colors, 5 skin tones (fair, olive, tan, pale, brown - brown looks actually Black!), and 10 eye colors.

Boys get 5 hairstyles (all short), girls get only 2 hairstyles (ponytail, high ponytail). Both genders get a choice of 10 shirts, 10 pants, 10 boots, different for boys and girls. Boys can pick from 8 cowboy hats (or none), girls can pick from 4 cowboy hats and one riding helmet (why?!?).

Your gender determines the style of your bedroom, too – brown wooden tones vs pastel pink...

Horse Customization
Each base coat can be combined with any mane/tail color: Black (looks kinda brown), Dark Brown, Brown, Flaxen, Sorrel, Gray, Cream, White. Manes can be long, middle, or cropped; tails can be long, short, or braided with or without a colorful bow in it.

Eye colors are: Black, Dark Brown, Brown, Blue, Hazel, Violet.

Tack: There are 6 saddles (2 at the start, others only unlock after competitions), 8 blankets, 6 bridles.

When you've won a blue ribbon in every single competition, you will unlock a special accessoire:

Gameplay
The game is centered around competitions. You need to care for your horse between competitions (and during) by petting, giving treats, and grooming your horse. You start out owning one horse, and can unlock 3 more stalls by progressing in the competitions.

Barn / Horse Care
There are three stats to take care of if you want your horse to move at full speed (which you will need to beat the AAA competitions!).

Care: There is a grooming minigame the usual way. Brush until clean-looking and hope it's actually considered clean. No hoof picking! Care also rises when petting the horse or giving treats. If you do the latter enough, the horse will not get dirty at all!

Food: Walk to the feeding area in the stable and grab a feed bucket. If left alone for long enough, the horse will walk up to the food and consume it. If you walk into the stall, it will awkwardly walk backwards and stop eating!

Water: Pick up the empty bucket in the stall, fill it up at the sink and bring it back. Same as with food.

All three stats rise with treats, so you can technically replace all care work with treats. You can only hold up to three treats though, then you will have to pick up three more from the feeding area in the stable (meaning that during a competition, you can only boost your horse's speed 3 times). There are 6 different treats to pick from (this is literally just flavor).

In the stable, you can also access the tack area to customize your horses (full customization with all horse coats and tack unlocked at your level).

Open World
When leaving the barn, you can ride your horse directly into the trailer in front to go to a competition (or just use the shortcut from the barn door instead of loading the map). You can also ride off your property and across the map, which is mostly nature, but has 6 hidden competitions (only 4 are marked on the map). There is also a practice area where you can train for competitions.



Bedroom
In the bedroom menu, you can customize your rider (outfit, facial features, hairstyle, and skin color) and look at the ribbons you've won. You can access the bedroom menu via a shortcut from the menu or by walking / riding up to the house.

Riding Mechanics
Riding with arrow keys as usually.

With |QWERTY keyboard only.

Rewards and unlockable Content


With every competition mastered, you get the ribbons for each part of the competition, and a buckle for successfully competing in all of them in one go. Those are displayed on your bedroom wall. When winning a buckle, your horse will also earn one heart (up to a total of 5) which increases its speed. When winning a competition for the first time, you will unlock different tack and horse coats, as well as additional stalls (up to 4 in total). Winning every last one of them will unlock a very special horse coat, and there's a special piece of tack unlocked when you've completed your ribbon collection by coming in first in every single one (not in one go) so you win a blue ribbon.

Differences between Releases
Afaik, the Steam re-release has not made any changes to the original game.

Trivia
The PC version is also included in the bundles |Ultimate Games for Girls 4 and |Ultimate Games for Girls 5.

Original CD
There is little difficulty running this game on modern systems, although it is advised to install outside of Program Files as the save files are kept within the installation folder.

Accessibility
Keyboard Mapping is technically fully possible, but i had issues with it actually applying what i changed? -- |Sartorial Dragon