Gallop & Ride

As I started playing Gallop and Ride, I wondered how my character got his/her hands on such good property - a large home, stables, huge fields to ride about in and nobody around except for horses.<br>But I digress; Gallop and Ride is about riding horses, taking care of the business of riding horses and caring for the horses you do ride.<br>You start off with 300 credits and one horse. To make more credits, you have to ride about the first of three areas, jumping over every fence and wall section you come across. This builds up your horse's skill.<br>Get enough skill points and you can participate in jumping competitions every Wednesday and Sunday for credits.<br>You also get credits by opening up a place to train up to 3 foals a day by making the foal go to a marked spot on screen.<br>As you accumulate credits, you open up a guest house and rent out rooms and horses to guests, build a breeding grounds where you can breed your horses with others for a stud fee, get a therapy place to massage clients' horses for more credits, and buy the other two fields so you can take on more jumping competitions. There's a lot of things to do here.<br>You also have to keep the horses fed, healthy and clean. Keeping them fed; no problem. Just make sure you buy food, feed them, and clean the stables (Pooper scooper, anyone?)<br>Keeping them clean is different; you do that by playing minigames - brushing or hosing off dirt, brushing and scraping off dirt from the horses hooves and massaging horses (after you've built the therapy center.)<br>All this works if the controls work well. Cleaning and massaging the horses are easy to pull off, though you have to do them many times over.<br>Where this game goes wrong - very wrong - is in riding horses and training of the foals. The controls here are very clunky and almost non responsive. The biggest problem is getting the horse to gallop fast; sometimes it just stood there, other times it just trotted.<br>Horse lovers: rent this game, others skip it.