alt Hacker NewsFlashpoint Archive – Over 200k web games and animations preserved
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Interesting, they have one of my games[0], but somehow managed to misspell my username. There must have been a manual process, or even OCR somewhere?
0: https://flashpointproject.github.io/flashpoint-database/sear...
God bless the Ruffle project, but it's so frustrating that they've covered almost everything in AS3 except the NetConnection class (and the .connect() call).
Lots of wonderful single player games were made in Flash, and it's awesome that there's a way to play them again. But almost all of my work was multiplayer or relied on amfphp or other Flash versions of XHR to draw in data for levels, multiplayer, music or graphics after my engine loads. I still have all the server code... but all we can resurrect still are games that are entirely self-contained. That's still alright but it relegates Flash to a museum.
Was pleasantly surprised to find two of my games preserved here. Was over twenty years ago that I submitted them!
I sometimes watch (in horror) as my nephew uses his Dad's phone to play whatever shallow, glossy muck he finds in the play store. He spends as much time swatting ads, refusing to upgrade to the pro version and hitting 'back' to get out of the play store than playing the games. It's amazing to watch a 6 year old develop muscle memory on these things. I see him swat away an ad almost before I've even noticed that it wasn't part of the game. He has effectively learned to be an ad / upgrade swatting machine. That is the game. Because he has absolutely no "sticking power" with any game. It's the play store / game / ad version of doomscrolling.
I've realised that giving him a reduced hand-picked library of games, with no ads, no automatic prompts to try another game, might be a good idea. These flash games are easily as good as most of the junk I see him play anyway.
Greatest flash game of all time (if you hate yourself)
https://flashpointproject.github.io/flashpoint-database/sear...
Or you can play it here too https://archive.org/details/homerunderby_en
A shame that they require a special software download. Do we not have any web-based Flash renderers yet? Seems like WASM should be able to do anything.
I periodically check if Top Dog II (from teagames, now nonexistent) has been added as it was one of my favorite flash games, but it still isn't there. I admire the work and I really support preservation projects. Hope Top Dog II can be rescued one day, along with other teagames titles.
A bit sad not to find the whole collection of Larry Carlson's animations in there (only a few games.) Also, need full archive of Joe Cartoon!
Very disappointed that they don't have _Bembo's Zoo_
https://www.devicq.com/bembo-zoo/
https://soundeffects.fandom.com/wiki/Bembo%27s_Zoo_(Websites...
https://web.archive.org/web/20000816172409/http://www.bembos...
If there's a way to get it added, I'd be very glad of that (or if someone could figure out how to re-create it for the modern web)
Previous discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38850697
Can't tell if they have the entirety of Homestar Runner preserved, but I'm very glad to see they have some of it.
If you’re interested in legal torrenting but GNU/Linux images are too small for you, this is for you.
Thanks for the archive, but the site needs to be mobile-friendly.
Most of the good flash games later turned into something you could buy on steam. Great example of this was mud and blood, which has a proper steam based continuation.
You now hear Age of War soundtrack.
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Nice. Glad to see someone is doing this. Everyone on HN hates on things like Flash, but they were genuinely innovative technologies that showed the world what was possible online. And the content was unmatched. The Internet today can’t compare.
Test comment 1771158767 - Automated test
I haven't gone through the games they have, but it makes sense to preserve ALL games for future generations. I'd even go so far as to offer games in an original variant; but also in modified variants, aka one being mostly focused on fixing bugs and doing modest upgrades (simplifying playability and SLIGHT improvements to the user interface), as well as slightly more aggressive upgrades, including UI, making them visually beautiful but retaining the spirit of the game. For instance, of all the simcities, the first one was IMO the best. The graphics lateron were much better of course, but playability wise I found the first one the most addictive; similar with colonization, first one was quite good. The last 3 releases had better graphics, but playability wise it felt like 100 steps back.
What I would love to see is that we retain old flash games too. HTML5 was promoted as "making flash obsolete", but they never fulfilled that promise. Many flash-games simply died and there was no replacement in HTML; similar with some java applet games. Or at the least I could not find a replacement (that's also a problem - with google search having become nearly useless, finding things is super-hard; and of course old websites tend to die, that is also a problem).