FLASH IS DEAD. LET'S TALK ABOUT SHOCKWAVE/MACROMEDIA FLASH GAMES!

EDIT3: https://www.flashgamehistory.com/ - Really great summary describing why flash was so important with descriptions from notable games and sites (Thanks Darken!)

Flash is dying in 2020. Shockwave died back in 2019. Similar to Shockwave, Flash will cease to work in modern browsers after 2020. There are alternatives like Newgrounds flash player, that will allow flash to continue work within Newgrounds beyond 2020. But these internet plugins, were generally discontinued to close vulnerable security flaws in modern web browsers.

Today, I wanna talk about the games. I kind of grew up with Flash and Shockwave being this new multimedia experience for low end computers - if you were poor and say, didn't own a console like a PS2, Dreamcast or a high end PC with a graphics card, playing Flash/Shockwave games was kind of the next best thing. Most of these games were bad, people tend to associate Newgrounds with bad flash games. But I feel like people who say that, never really knew how great Flash was or knew where to look for the good stuff. I'd also argue Flash gaming, only really took off with Facebook, because there was finally an financial infrastructure there to support it, before devs quickly abandoned it in favor of mobile and smart phone gaming - but that's beside the point. Today, I just wanna talk about some of the games that came before that facebook period. There was some really great stuff in-and-outside of Newgrounds that a lot of people may have missed and I just wanna share some of my highlights.

If you have favourites feel free to share them in this thread.
Some of these games you can't play today, which I'll note.

Netbaby World. (you can no longer play these games,
unless you have a recent shockwave plugin installed before 2019)

(ft. BoatRace,15-Love,Whip-It, 16-Beat! and Hi-Jump)


Originally released in 1999. Netbaby World was probably the first bunch of flash games I played, with their 3D-renders and 2D pixel art, that actually felt like something you'd find on a portable console. To name a few: BoatRace was a decent Super Sprint/Off Road clone, Whip It was a nice arcade bowler, Hi-Jump was Track n' Field, 15Love was a cool Tennis game and 16Beat was an interesting Parappa clone - A great game which unfortunately is no longer playable was BurgerInn, a fast paced arcade style puzzle game that used playcom's own 3D graphics plugin, where you would flip burgers for customers till they were rare, medium or well done - The level of detail of the 3D was really impressive for it's ttime, because it was on the same level as something you'd see in an N64 game, but made for the early web.

Tune-Inn!(2000) requires ShockWave to run.

(This is just a sample of the first level. I apologize, I had to rush through this while recording.
I couldn't show the record/music combining that happens later when you get more complex customers.)

However, one of the stand out titles for me was the puzzle game, TuneInn. You had to manage a record store in order to earn enough money for Pekka and Moniq to buy a 2 seater bike. The game had 7 levels coinciding with the 7 days of the week, with each day culminating with a cutscene from your boss telling you you'll need to return to the store and earn more money, because he just raised the price for the bike (…what a jerk!). What was really cool about this game however, was how it was setup: The records you sold were color coded. Red was Guitar, Yellow was Drums and Bass was Blue. With the arrow keys, you would control Moniq to make the music and then switch to Pekka with the space bar to create and sell the records to customers downstairs. Later levels would have you combining colors to create new records for new customers, albino being the most rare and most difficult to deal with.

I played this game a lot in my video editing class during my formative years. Back then, because of school restrictions on portable devices, there wasn't really a whole lot of games you could play on campus. So playing NetBabyWorld was really the next best thing while waiting for your video rendering to be finish. What I really liked the most about this game though was how it incorporated the color theory and the music & computer stuff I was taking at the time - It's a shame these games were never released on consoles because I would've bought it in a heartbeat.

Early iterations of Netbabyworld required you to sign-in in order to register your high-score for various titles, but after Playcoms buyout in 2003, later revisions would do away with registration altogether. I honestly don't know much about the history of NetbabyWorld, all I know is that they had some really cool games.

EDIT: I plan to add more to this thread at some point, I just wanted to write about these games
cause Flash dying depresses the hell out of me; these are the games we're losing.
EDIT2: I'm also doing this cause I needed a quick break from working on the archive.

While writing this up, I forgot how hard it was to capture flash games. Yeah, I'll probably do a write up on Micheal Gibson and his Ambition and Negotiator series. He actually lives here in Toronto! I noticed this because one of the last games he made about highschool bulling, Sir Basel Pike Public School was actually "filmed" here in the Little Italy part of town.

I think my favorite game of his was "The Raise" where a mouse starts to give you hints only to tell you a woman is taking off her clothes behind you, lol! But yeah I'll definitely see if I can put something together it. Really interesting stuff.

author=Dyhalto
Ronin : Spirit of the Sword was always a favorite of mine too.

Holy shit yeah! I actually still have that somewhere! What a hidden gem! Ronin was like a first person, tile based samurai rpg game, kind of like doom/phantasy star but you'd get into random battles with ninjas, but you'd have to use your sword to block but also attack. It was kind of like the SNES game shien's revenge, but better cause it wasn't on rails. I didn't get too far in that one, but the tutorial was great and my friends and I were amazed with it.

I'll probably throw up a gif of it. Yeah dude Ronin: Spirit of The Sword was wicked!

EDIT: I vaguely remember Sim Girl. Because it was the first game I encountered that used rpgmaker sound effects, before I got my hands on rpgmaker.

It's really hard to remember because of my memories of flash games are actually just really bad knock offs of existing games, before I knew about emulation I was just looking for "Free megaman games" like megaman RPG.

Ahh! As always thanks for this great post Darken! I love the camera movement from the recoil in that one. Yeah a lot of games during this time we're trying to ape commercial games, like the one you showed in the video is totally almost Silent Scope, except you don't have to own an Xbox and the toy sniper rifle to play it on the home version ( I'm still cheesed you could only use a dualshock controller on PS2)

I remember coming across a Time Crisis clone years ago on newgrounds cause duck and cover games while shooting with the mouse were really popular at that time. There were three episodes, with cutscenes, but I can't remember the name of it at the moment.

I'll include Flashpoint and GlobFX in the top thread at some point. I remember Flashpoint being mentioned. It's good to hear because Newgrounds flash player only works on Newgrounds and there really should be some sort of alternative, like a legacy plugin that will work outside the site. I have stand alone flash 8 players, that I held onto from years ago, but the problem is that they only seem to work with flash movies, they don't work with stuff that's been made later and worse, they took away the ctrl+ arrow key option for frame advancing in later iterations - I used this function a lot for studying frames.

EDIT2: cursors.io is amazingly hard to put down, I didn't even know this game existed. I was chillin' in a maze waiting for someone to tap the switch so i can move onto the next level. One cursor suddenly comes in and starts writing a bad word and then another cursor comes in and immediately starts furiously scribbling out the bad word before both cursors disappear into the next level - This all happened in like 5 seconds - truly an online multiplayer experience unlike any other. Hahaha, great stuff!

author=Mirak
https://medium.com/@Amerinofu/the-viral-horror-of-exmortis-a1b73afd6f86https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/VideoGame/Exmortis

I'm gonna drop this article and tvtropes page of my favorite series of horror flash games, Exmortis.

Thanks Mirak!

Gonna link to Stinkoman20X6. They recently updated the game (Today!) to finally include level 10, the last level of the game. (Right before flash is dying!) They also included a new mode that adds 6 lives, easier checkpoints and instead of dying after falling into a pit, you just lose health instead, making the game infinitely easier (back in the day I couldn't even beat level one, I didn't have a patience for it.)

Definitely worth the wait! like everything homestarrunner, there's small homages and nods to the games that inspired it. It very much feels like an NES fan game in every sense of the word - it's still cheaply difficult and the "new mode" makes it easier to get through, but how they round it out on level 10, feels like they stole the best parts from popular nes games and put it into this one. Worth a playthrough if you got a few minutes to kill.

Loved it, the satire and commentary towards the games that inspired it, reminds me how much I love homestarrunner overall. (There's bits of Ninja Gaiden, Metroid and the automated electronic laugh you might hear from the Avengers arcade game from Data east?)
This was very cool, a highlight of 2020 and flash overall.
(I'm not trying to oversell it, go in with super low expectations, it's not great - but back in the day, a lot of my friends looked at flash as a digital stepping tool, over traditional methods: If you didn't have an animators table to make cartoons, or a heavy duty computer to make games with, Flash was the next best thing: this feels like an NES kids dream realized in every sense of the word)

As of today, you'll probably notice the above picture popup whenever you try to load flash in a modern browser now. Another solution popped up just recently. It's called Ruffle. it's a modern plugin that tries to emulate flash. Tom Fulp mentioned it in a recent post. Also The HomeStarRunner guys are using it. It's very easy to install this extension too.

It's far from perfect but it's a start:
-Click the "Chrome / Edge / Safari" link.
-Extract the downloaded zip file somewhere.
-Navigate to chrome://extensions/
-Turn on Developer mode in the top right corner.
-Click Load unpacked.
-Select the folder you extracted the extension to.
(more instructions for specific browsers can be found on the site)

https://bluemaxima.org/flashpoint/downloads/
Adding link to Flash point cause Waka/Awe mentioned it today on discord.
The raw unapologetic enthusiasm of his post, reawakened my love for this thread:

I still have plans for it, it's just 2021 got in the way.