https://flashpointproject.github.io/flashpoint-database/sear...
Or you can play it here too https://archive.org/details/homerunderby_en
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)
It’s staggering to imagine that beginners, novices and experts all built these things in the same interface. No stack, build processes, or more.
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.
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).
0: https://flashpointproject.github.io/flashpoint-database/sear...
Some games didn't mind running locally from an .swf file, but some others had a "URL protection", presumably to prevent people from embedding their flash games at other websites, and they didn't make an exception for localhost.
Long time ago I've fixed hundreds of such flash games using RABCDAsm and made them work in standalone Flash Player.
Took a brief look at Flashpoint Archive, it seems their way to fix URL check is to spin up a web server to present an address the game expects.
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.
Now thanks to https://f-droid.org/es/packages/rs.ruffle/ (it has high % compatibility but it is ok) another we have again a handful flash games in the phone.
That game was fun and had some really nice music
We've gained a lot since then in terms of what's technically possible in the browser, but we've lost that simplicity of creation-to-audience pipeline. The closest modern equivalent might be itch.io for games, but even that requires more technical overhead than dragging frames onto a Flash timeline.
200k preserved items is a staggering number. Each one represents someone who sat down and made something because the barrier was low enough that they could. That's the real loss when a platform dies — not just the content, but the ecosystem that made it easy to create.
0: https://flashpointproject.github.io/flashpoint-database/sear...
However with the source code and server code it seems like a perfect task to set an AI agent (IE. Please patch out these API's and replace them with websockets on both client and server, then recompile)
iirc support is generally good, but some versions of flash/actionscript have issues (at least last time I checked).
Half the strategy was digging out an underground bunker to shield yourself from your enemy's 500m vertical drop attacks. It was an incredible feat of programming for the time.
The game unfortunately is in that final tiny percentage of AS3 games with missing features and thus does not work with ruffle yet, I suspect because the game was so cutting edge.
0: https://flashpointproject.github.io/flashpoint-database/sear...
* Sonny 2 (really in-depth turn based RPG)
* Fancy Pants Adventures 1-3 (2D platformer)
* Larry and the Gnomes (Beat 'em up)
* Interactive Buddy 2 (Fun simulator toy)
* Final Ninja Zero (2D platformer)
* Bubble Tanks 2 (Twinstick shooter)
These really take me back...
* N - https://archive.org/details/nv-12
* Ball Revamped - https://archive.org/details/1100_ballrevampedv2
* Mind Fcuk - https://archive.org/details/tf_20210127
* World's hardest game - https://archive.org/details/the-worlds-hardest-game_202310
* Canabalt - https://archive.org/details/canabalt_202012
* (If you're from one of the commonwealth countries) Stick Cricket - https://archive.org/details/stickcricket_flash
There's honestly a ton more, you can download the archive and go through the various community lists in there. I've spent a few evenings just having a few drinks and playing some old games! :D
Love them when they're either getting out of the way of my content or used to make a great game.
I don't think I've seen people hating the content created with it.
That's clearly not true. Is that a rhetoric expression? Because I just wrote about Flash games being great - and I wasn't the only one doing so either.
Great way of reviving a game. Because it's those small things that make it hard to go back to older games. Old graphics I can live with, but it often looks weird if made for crt. And the interface breaking on bigger screens etc is hard. But mainly it's often the nicer mechanics and QoL things one miss.
There was an official plugin by Adobe on Android but it was awful, I remember watching them showcase it at a conference it was tragic even with their handpicked and simple example.
Then there was a transpiler that produced native apps from Flash, this was actually pretty good but Apple then banned transpiling which killed its viability entirely, six months later they un-banned transpiling but the damage was done.
But on the plus side, Apple got to monopolize transaction fees in Flash games like Farmville for nearly two decades!
I used sockets in some of my multiplayer games, but that's not where I ran into problems with Ruffle. Since those games only upgraded to sockets after an initial HTTPS connection, I haven't even gotten to the point of trying sockets yet. I mainly just used NetConnection.connect() for routine API calls, not to open a socket. AFAIK .connect() didn't open a socket, although I guess it had some two-way capabilities with Flash Media Server, but that's not how I used it. I just used it to initialize the NetConnection instance with the URI of a server endpoint that could receive AMF messages (usually translated on the backend with AMFPHP). I don't think it really left any sort of connection open. After that, you'd just make RESTful calls over that connection using netconnection.call(...args), and could send complex objects - even SQL result sets - back and forth without going through JSON or XML. But it was just a bunch of HTTP calls sending that data in Flash's own serialized format. You'd listen for NetStatusEvent or SecurityEvent to handle the results or errors. No sockets were involved. In conjunction with AMFPHP it was basically like a URLRequest without any structuring or destructuring needed to parse the results into AS3-friendly data types.
It would be amazing if only the RESTful kinds of NC connections and calls could work again through Ruffle, I think it might be all that's stopping my old games from running!
Swift Playgrounds was (is?) ad-free and teaches programming. There are music studio apps that let him compose his own music. Plenty of apps let kids create things actively instead of just playing games. There are also all sorts of non-electronic activities that could occupy his time more fruitfully, but I'll skip over that.
But, the kid wants to play games, not build something.
You can get entertained by both, but doing only one of those things is boring.
And that works until they have 1 conversation with other kids, in school or whatever.
What's odd is the apparent chasm between those games and the earliest flash games, but really it's just a few years. That's just a trick of the mind. When you're a kid, turning into a young adult, a few short years feel like a lifetime. Man, it speeds up after that...