Rock, Paper, Shotgun

By John Walker on March 19th, 2010 at 12:30 pm.

There’s a trailer out for Free Realms, showing off their ponies, both walking and flying. I’m posting it first, because it made me think of I’m On A Boat. And second, because it made me think of I Love Horses. And believe me, they’re below. But then I went to the game’s site to check stuff out, and it sort of needed me to be a NEW USER to continue, and then it had me create a character, and by that point sticking an email and password in didn’t seem a big deal, by which point it was downloading the game for me, because… because the squirrel kept telling me to.

Fortunately this smooth process that was drawing me into playing the free MMO was somewhat waylaid by my having to pretend to read and tick about sixty-seven different EULAs, and interest rapidly waned. When the application eventually starts it’s a series of dull menus, mostly asking me to pay money, and then into a super-cutesy world where I’m instantly being asked to adopt pets. I don’t want to adopt pets. I’m 32. What am I doing? Oh yes – I’m posting videos that have nothing to do with this game. A game which looks like a nice, safe environment for people to play, with sensible parental controls, and the like. Unlike this post.

So here’s the video (link for Chrome users who can’t see GT vids at the moment) showing off the horsies. The warning before hand suggests there’s “crude humour”. Either my petal-like mind is too pure to spot it, or it’s a strange warning:

Right, so first, here’s I’m On A Boat, just in case you missed it (this has an awful lot of naughty swears in it):

But perhaps more importantly, here’s I Love Horses. This is the original, the pure version. The version former PC Gamer editor Ross Atherton and I discovered, DISCOVERED, ourselves, after shopping for snacks one lunchtime and finding the magazine, I Love Horses, sporting a free plastic horse gift on the cover. Being two mature men of pithy wit, we inferred far more meaning from the name “I Love Horses” than perhaps the magazine had attempted to imply. We giggled. We got back to the PCG office and found the website. We heard the song. We knew we had found something important. We told everyone else on the whole of Planet Earth. And so I, John Walker, stake joint claim to have been the beginning of that meme. I care not for protests to the contrary. It was Ross Atherton and me. Please sing the following song to your friends:

EDIT: Oh my goodness, thanks to Mr_Day in the comments for linking to this. Yeah, it’s an advert. But hell, it’s a funny one that brings this all neatly together: