Flashpoint Archive – Over 200k web games and animations preserved(flashpointarchive.org)
101 pointsby helloplanets5 hours ago14 comments
  • mollerhoj11 minutes ago
    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...

  • shevy-java2 hours ago
    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).

    • matsemann2 hours ago
      Just an aside, but I've recently taken up Age of Empires 2: Definitive Edition. To a large extent it's the same game I played as a kid. But with lots of quality-of-life improvements. Like better queuing of actions. But also modernized with better graphics, animations, matchmaking where the original servers of course are gone etc. But under the hood, it's the same engine and game, not just a reimplementation that's similar.

      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.

      • mnahkies39 minutes ago
        I think the interface breaking on newer screens is a key point - AOE2 definite edition looks great on a 4k screen now, but when I tried one of the other variants beforehand the UI didn't scale properly and so all the elements were tiny to the point of being unplayable without adjusting the resolution
    • mikestaas2 hours ago
      Open source flash player emulator: https://ruffle.rs/
  • Wowfunhappy8 minutes ago
    Can anyone recommend sone Flash games to try out?
  • noduerme2 hours ago
    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.

    • londons_explore2 hours ago
      I assume this is because web API's don't allow such connections.

      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)

  • raffraffraffan hour ago
    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.

    • willis93633 minutes ago
      I really like flashpoint but I wish there was a plugin for curation / recommendation. I have an index of games in my head from my childhood and so does my SO. Together we can play the games we know, but have little ability to discriminate between trash and gem. There are simply too many to reasonably pick at random. The old flash sites offered some curation.
  • integricho2 hours ago
    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.
  • tornato73 hours ago
    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.
    • TechSquidTV3 hours ago
      I thought the same. But it is necessary for the vast majority of games. It is not just an emulator for the .swf (and other formats) content you need, you often need bespoke proxy servers and server emulators to bypass some of the old DRM.
    • tovej3 hours ago
      There's ruffle: https://ruffle.rs/

      iirc support is generally good, but some versions of flash/actionscript have issues (at least last time I checked).

  • blackhaz3 hours ago
    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!
    • stevekemp28 minutes ago
      I had the same thought, and similar disappointment when I couldn't find anything referencing Trogdor and his burninating ways.
  • rmunn3 hours ago
    Can't tell if they have the entirety of Homestar Runner preserved, but I'm very glad to see they have some of it.
  • Der_Einzige33 minutes ago
    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.
    • oceansky32 minutes ago
      I wouldn't say most, but a good chunk yes.
  • trvz3 hours ago
    If you’re interested in legal torrenting but GNU/Linux images are too small for you, this is for you.
    • vlovich1233 hours ago
      Wouldn’t this still be technically a copyright violation? It seems unlikely this is all public domain stuff.
  • dvh19 minutes ago
    You now hear Age of War soundtrack.
  • SilverElfin4 hours ago
    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.
    • oceansky25 minutes ago
      I think people hate(d) working with it and the security flaws it had.

      I don't think I've seen people hating the content created with it.

    • nottorp2 hours ago
      I hate html, wasm, css, javascript as much as flash when they're used to waste my battery, cpu and ram with pointless effects when I'm browsing.

      Love them when they're either getting out of the way of my content or used to make a great game.

    • shevy-java2 hours ago
      > Everyone on HN hates on things like Flash

      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.