Awards

See those three thingies in the lower-right corner? Those are your rank indicators. The more ponies you blast and the more trick shots you pull off, the higher your rank, and the more cool stuff you can get.

The first is for bonuses. The more bonuses you get, the faster you get additional stars. When you go past four stars, it starts over with silver, and then gold, and finally ruby. The second is for hits, and the third is for points. The more ponies you blow up, the more wedges you get, and the more points you score, the more bars you get.

When you achieve three increases in any or all of the ranks, you get an award of some kind. This can be a better weapon, a bonus round, and more. You can see the awards you’ve managed to achieve by hitting the ‘A’ key when the high scores are showing.

You can either play it in your Dashboard with the widget, or you can download the stand-alone version. Both are essentially the same, though the stand-alone is spiffed up a bit and may run a little more smoothly on some systems, plus it has more display options. If you don’t already have the Unity plug-in, or if you have an older version, there will be an additional one-time download for the widget.

Scoring

You get points for every pony you blast. Lots of things can make that number go up, though. At the most basic, how many points a pony is worth depends on how fast it’s going.

One example of a score modifier is the rocket launcher you start out with. It’s pretty wimpy, so you only get 95% of the point values you would otherwise. The first weapon upgrade gets you a better rocket launcher, which (among other things) makes the points a full 100%.

This is the basic, bog-standard flying pony. No fancy powers (aside from the flying thing of course). No surprises, either. The slowest ponies are worth 100 points and the fastest are worth 500 points. Most will be somewhere in between.

This is a tough pony. It takes two hits from the standard rocket launcher to blow it up. You’ll eventually get a weapon that can kill it with one shot, though. For your trouble they’re worth 175% of the base value of normal ponies. They won’t show up right away.

A super-tough pony! (That’s why they’re green. You know, like The Hulk.) It takes three hits from the standard rocket launcher to blow it up. However, headshots or splash damage will get them with one shot. They’re fairly rare, and worth 200% of the base value.

Weaving ponies bob up and down as they fly. Are they trying to avoid your rockets or are they just drunk? You decide! Anyway, they’re worth 125% of the base value. This is on top of the point bonus if they’re tough or super-tough. It takes a little while before they show up.

Inviso-ponies fade in and out of sight. Because they’re kinda hard to see, they’re worth 200% normal value on top of other point bonuses they might have. It takes quite a while before they start appearing. Watch for their non-invisible trail of sparkles, which gives them away!

Eventually, the ponies get tired of being shot at, and some of them might start firing back. Of course, being magical cute mostly harmless ponies, their glowing bolts just make happy things like stars, flowers, candy, and so on get smeared in a sticky mess on your screen, which doesn’t hurt you at all. It does make it hard to see for a bit though. Ponies start to charge up for a few seconds before firing, so if you can hit one during the charge-up period when it’s glowing, you’ll get a nice 2000 point Glow Bonus and avoid the whole ordeal of getting shot.

Mega ponies are not like the others, in more than one way. For one thing, they go really fast because they’re super-charged with magic powers (or something). For another thing, because of suffering from such an overload of magicalness, the other ponies are miffed at them, and have declared them outcasts. In other words, it doesn’t matter if any of them escape. They don’t count. So if you think you might miss, don’t bother firing. On the other hand, if you do hit one, their super-overcharged-magicness makes one heck of a bang! You can think of it as a miniature purple nuclear explosion, which will take out every pony on the screen and then some. Plus they’re worth 300% points.

Ah, the mystery ponies. What do they look like? How many points are they worth? You’ll have to be really good to find out! But you’ll definitely know one when you see it, and you can rest assured that they’re worth more than a few points.

Controls

Point. Click. What more do you need to know? Well, you can press ‘P’ to pause the game, in case you need to catch your breath. (Yeah, OK, that’s just hype...the game’s not really that fast-paced or anything!) The goal is to blast the flying ponies out of the sky. Why? Who knows — maybe they’re evil or something. Or maybe it’s magic pink pony hunting season. It doesn’t matter. Just blast them! Also, prevent any from escaping. If ten ponies get past you, game over. (Though you can get extended play by achieving awards; see below.) Other keyboard controls:

F: Full-screen mode (widget only)
Esc: Leave full-screen mode (widget only)
Command-F: Toggle full-screen mode (stand-alone only)
E: End game — in case you get off to a bad start and want to give up early
L: Toggle locked mouse cursor (stand-alone only) — prevents mouse cursor from leaving window
-/+: Decrease/increase mouse sensitivity (stand-alone only, locked cursor mode only)

Bonuses

The usual way to get bonuses is by not missing. If you hit two ponies in a row, you’ll get a 2X bonus, which makes whatever points you would have scored worth twice as much. Plus it counts toward increasing your bonus rank. Three hits in a row gets you 3X, and so on. You have to start over again if 1) you miss 2) a pony escapes or 3) more than 5 seconds pass between hits.

(There are a few exceptions to this...if something good happens which would make more than 5 seconds pass between hits, like a bonus round or hitting a mega pony, then the timer is put on hold until the game resumes normal play. That way if you’re on a roll, your hitting streak won’t be unfairly interrupted. So don’t worry — yes, the game is fair! Mostly!)

Another way to get bonuses is by knocking nearby ponies out of the air with the force of explosions. This makes them go into an unrecoverable dive and you get a crash bonus. Any additional crashes within 3 seconds make the bonus go up. Since crash bonuses are more rare, they go up by 2 each time. Your initial rocket launcher, as mentioned, is pretty wimpy, so it doesn’t do much splash damage, but better weapons have rockets with a bigger blast radius.

You can also get special bonuses for certain actions:

Rapidfire: Hit two ponies within 1 second of each other for a 5000 point bonus!

Last-second: Hit a pony just before it escapes for a 2X bonus! This is on top of every other bonus you get, so potentially this can mean big points. But careful not to let them escape!

Headshot: If you can hit a pony right in the head, you get a 1.5X bonus! Plus this makes it crash instead of blowing up, so you get the crash bonus too.

Hindshot: Like a headshot, except the other end! In addition to the headshot stuff, you get 500 extra points since it’s harder to do.

Wingshot: Similar to the above, but the wings must be close to the maximum upward flap. Since this is the hardest, you get 1500 extra points.

Midair: If you can manage to hit a pony in midair after it’s been knocked out of the sky with splash damage, you get a huge 25,000 point bonus because this is not easy at all!

Bonus rounds

As mentioned, some of the awards are bonus rounds. The regular game is suspended, your weapon is changed ... get ready to rock! Don’t worry about ponies escaping here — they’re rogue ponies, so they don’t count. But you get 10,000 points for each kill and a big bonus if you can get every one of them. These points aren’t added until the end of the game though, so they don’t increase your score rank.

Guide to getting ridiculously high scores and world fame

1. •Don’t miss! Obviously. Try to get your bonus multiplier as high as possible. Aside from increasing your bonus rank this also increases your score rank.
   

2. •Try for the other bonuses. They don’t increase your bonus rank, but they do help your score rank a lot. With some practice it’s not that hard to get Rapidfire bonuses. In particular you might try for Last-Second bonuses, since they double whatever score you get. For example, If you’re racking up a nice 25X bonus and you pull off a Last-Second bonus, well, that’s a whopping load of points right there! That’s pretty risky though, so this is best done with slow-moving ponies.
   

3. •Careful about going for mega ponies if your bonus multiplier is high. Yes, you get a bunch of nice crash bonuses, but only try if you’re pretty sure you’re gonna hit. Otherwise a miss will reset your bonus multiplier, and remember, mega ponies can escape without penalty.
   

4. •Increase your rank and get those awards — better weapons make your score go up faster. Any three rank increases get you an award, so even if (for example) you’re not good at getting bonuses and lots of points, you can still get awards by increasing your hit rank three times. The ranks max out at 4 ruby, though, so to get all the awards you have to be good at everything.
   

Wow, you made it all the way down here? Why not click on the nifty Starscene Software logo below, which will magically take you back to the top? Or you could check out Inside Mac Games, which is where this whole silly thing originated. Thanks to all the various IMG members for suggestions, testing, etc.! No magical flying pink ponies were harmed in the production of this video game.