The Elements of Gaming
is a My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic fanfic written by Ryden and Xephfyre.
The scientists of Canterlot develop an Xbox 360 and a PC, and Princess Celestia sends them to her loyal student Twilight Sparkle and her friends to beta test for them. Read as they try their hooves at everything from FPS to RTS to rhythm and more in the form of ponyfied real world titles.
This My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic Fan Fic contains examples of:
- Beware the Nice Ones: Fluttershy takes to The Darkness surprisingly well considering the pegasus' personality, and even names her Sim Jackie, the protagonist of The Darkness.
- Not to mention her rage while playing Team Fortress 2.
- Big "NO!": Spike gives one when he realizes his desire to play a game before the mane six is thwarted by the complexity of setting up the computer to play it.
- Bowel-Breaking Bricks: Pinkie's reaction to Twilight Sparkle playing Tetris flawlessly. INVISIBLE Tetris.
- Break the Haughty: Poor Rainbow can't seem to catch a break... she's the first to be annihilated playing Halo: Reach, thrashed in her moment of glory by Rarity in Command & Conquer: Generals (which she kind of had coming due to her ego at the time), shamed by Applejack and Pinkie in Rock Band, and is thrashed by Ditzy in Burnout, a game about speed, her special talent. She does do fairly well at Gears of War though.
- Brick Joke: The chainsaw bayonet kill from Gears of War disturbing everypony. Later on, the CMC find the game and are traumatized by it.
- After losing to Pinkie Pie in Command & Conquer: Generals, Twilight goes into bookworm-mode, dashing off to come up with a foolproof strategy. She isn't even mentioned again until the end of the chapter, where she finally perfects her strategy and challenges Pinkie again. It's the dead of night and everypony is long gone by this point.
- Butt-Monkey: Twilight gets this treatment at times.
- Marth Debuted in "Smash Bros.": Capcolt, in general, Debuted In Marevel Vs. Capcolt 3. The in-universe justification for a Mascot Fighter being around without half the mascots having debuted yet.
- Crouching Moron, Hidden Badass:
- Fluttershy proves a deft hoof at Halo: Reach and First-Person Shooter games in general, and Pinkie Pie gets 99% on Through The Fire and Flames on Rock Band on Expert.
- Applejack and Rainbow Dash both get trashed playing Burnout Revenge against Ditzy Doo!
- Dramatic Drop: Angel Bunny spends most of chapter 9 trying to get Fluttershy to play The Darkness. He drops the carrot he's eating in shock after Fluttershy shows just how terrifying she is playing a First-Person Shooter.
- The Dreaded: Downplayed: according to the Payday 2 chapter, the Mane Six can't really find a challenge in Team Fortress 2 while playing together because nopony is willing to go up against them.
- Fantasy Counterpart Culture: In the Rock Band chapter, Pinkie Pie's origins on a rock farm are likened to the Amish by Applejack, who regards them with a certain amount of awe and dread for their legendarily grim, depressing, fixated work ethic. The hard work on Sweet Apple Acres is apparently a "luxurious vacation" compared to working on a rock farm.
- Fatal Flaw: All six of the girls have one.Twilight: Her Perfectionism. She's a genius strategist, but has a very hard time 'winging it', meaning that an unexpected change in the battlefield can completely blindside her.Pinkie Pie: Her randomness. At absolute best, it can give her a distinct advantage of being completely impossible to predict, but oftentimes it's up there with Rainbow Dash's ego as the Spanner in the WorksFluttershy: Her performance anxiety. While she's almost unmatched in terms of First-Person Shooter games, she has a tough time with both being watched and going up against other living ponies in general, even over the internet.Rarity: Her flashy playstyle. Watching Rarity play is often a sight to behold, but unfortunately her desire to look good while playing hamstrings her performance at times.Applejack: Her stubbornness. She's got enough raw skill to muscle her way through most problems, but if she gets stuck she stays stuck, and her frustration only worsens it.Rainbow Dash: Her ego. She has a bad tendency to underestimate her opponents and overestimate her skills, making her throw caution to the wind and bite off more than she can chew.
- Imagine Spot: Scootaloo gets one where she gets her Cutie Mark commanding troops in Tiberium Wars.
- Jaw Drop: When someone turns out to be far better at a game than is expected, this is normally the reaction.
- Jerkass: Pinkie's behavior during the Gears of War section; behaving like a psychopath after the rest of the gang were already freaking out about the chainsaw-bayonet scene in the game when you chainsaw one of the locusts. She goes so far as to ambush Twilight with a fake chainsaw while she's in bed, an act which scares the unicorn so badly she hits Pinkie with a crowbar!
- Large Ham: Sweetie Belle seems to have taken after her sister.
- Leeroy Jenkins: Rainbow Dash in nearly every game, though she gradually gets more careful and stops choosing the hardest difficulty.
- Scootaloo follows in her hoofsteps.
- Let's Get Dangerous!: Rarity doesn't take the destruction of one of her Storm Columns well at all.
- Fluttershy in First-Person Shooter games tends to be this, typically being extremely lethal.
- Pinkie is bored at every single song in Rock Band's library...until she finds "Through the Fire and Flames".
- Mundane Made Awesome: The video games in general, due to being something completely new for ponies, come off as this, but special mention goes to Twilight playing Tetris.
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Nightmare Fuel: Gears of War's trademark chainsaw bayonette proves to be this for everyone except Pinkie Pie. - Nuke 'em: Pinkie Pie's strategy for Command & Conquer: Generals.
- The Power of Friendship: The Cutie Mark Crusaders get this Aesop after defeating a supervillain team in Marevel versus Coltcom III by working together to defeat them with their chosen characters, and then pulling off a Crossover Combinationnote on the last remaining opponent.
- Oh, Crap!: Happens several times through the fic, but special mention goes to Pinkie Pie playing against Twilight Sparkle on Command & Conquer: Generals, who manages TWO different Oh Crap moments with her Party Poppers and Super Party Poppers.
- Puppy-Dog Eyes: How the Cutie Mark Crusaders convince Twilight to let them play the video games...all three'.
- Roaring Rampage of Revenge: Fluttershy, of all ponies, when playing Team Fortress 2. In her attempt to stay out of the way and not kill any of her friends, she goes Engineer and builds herself machine companions (whom she promptly names). Rarity, fulfilling her role as a Spy, saps and destroys Fluttershy's machines. Fluttershy goes Sniper and proceeds to kill literally every enemy pony standing between her and Rarity.
- Slasher Smile: Pinkie Pie pulls one while playing Gears of War, terrifying the others.
- That One Player: Or Those Six Players when the Mane Six play Team Fortress 2: Deconstructed as it's left them pretty bored: nopony is willing to go up against them and they beat the ones who DO way too easily.
- Troll: Princess Celestia, who 'forgot' to include the Mature warning with Gears of War when she sent it to the mane six.
- Victory Is Boring: Pinkie feels this way about Rock Band because she's so good about it Hard Mode is too slow for her. It takes playing "Through the Fire and Flames" on Expert to challenge her at all.
- Vomit Indiscretion Shot: We get this when Rainbow vomits on Pinkie.
- Zerg Rush: Pinkie Pie takes this to such an extreme with Command And Conquer: Tiberium Wars that the computer breaks.
