Crystal’s Pony Tale is a Sega Mega Drive/Genesis adventure platform game developed by Artech Studios and published by Sega. Released exclusively in the United States in October 1994 under Sega’s child-friendly Sega Club label, it was one of the company’s earliest female-targeted games, and featured input from the Sega Girls Task Force during production.

Gameplay

In Crystal’s Pony Tale you control Crystal the pony who needs to save her seven pony friends from the evil Storm Witch. To do this, you must collect seven magic crystals spread across Pony land, and bring them to places where Crystal’s friends are trapped. Along the way, you collect Horseshoes and keys, to pass through Horseshoe Gates and open treasure chests, respectively.

The game only uses two buttons: “action” and “jump”, the former used to interact with the environment, and the latter for limited platforming segments. You can also change the colours of your pony in the options menu.

It is impossible to die in Crystal’s Pony Tale, but enemies cause her to lose Horseshoes, which can prevent progress until more are collected.

Changes In This Patch

Since this game only released in the USA it is originally region locked and won’t play on a PAL Mega Drive or a Japanese NTSC Mega Drive, I simply removed that annoying barrier and made the game boot on any PAL Mega Drive, or NTSC Mega Drive and will still run like normal on an NTSC Genesis. The checksum is also fixed and configured before patching. The music runs slower on a PAL console but that’s expected 50% of the time.

It may be an obscure game on the system and arguably (not a very good one) but I felt it had to be done as it’s another case of the PAL regions getting the short end of the stick and missing out on many more games that USA got to play because of a lack of publishers.

Instructions

Inside the ZIP file you’ll find the IPS patch, it is in Lunar IPS format and simply needs to be patched to the USA version of ”Crystal’s Pony Tale”.

Happy gaming.