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I do suppose you know the game "Achievement Unlocked"?
http://armorgames.com/play/2893/achievement-unlocked

http://armorgames.com/play/1716/gemcraft

I've played through it a couple of times and slight variations in shade can make a rather large difference when you're throwing gems at an immune...

You're kidding, right? Please tell me you are...

Flash certainly is popular, but I would not describe it as "fast". Its power comes from how easy it is to create flash stuff. Not from having a great backend.

Problems with Flash:
-Huge memory leaks
-Shitty scripting performance
-Mediocre rendering performance of rasterized graphics
-Poorly designed input handling (makes it unsuitable for games - ironically)

Problems with Java:
-Slow start time
-No easy to work with vectorized graphics
-Java is "Java", and thus is bad (because java is bad)

Here's the proof.

Claim 1: Flash rendering performance is very poor.
http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/408513

Most flash game designs do silly stuff like putting a semi-transparent invisible square over the screen to manage fading. Those alpha-shades every rendering operation on the CPU, and precludes all hardware acceleration.

This game has very poor performance on a 2.2ghz Athlon XP w/ 1GB RAM + 7800GS. It uses many final-fantasy-style sprites/graphics, in addition to vectorized graphics for dialog and the interface.

In Java, even in an applet, simple sprite blits like that would run fine on a 300mhz P2. However, character portraits and the interface would have to be rasterized to work in Java.

Verdict: Both have negatives. Flash runs (very) slow, but is fast to create. Java runs fast(er), but is (very) slow to create.

Claim 2: Flash input handling makes it unsuitable for most games.
http://armorgames.com/play/2893/achievement-unlocked
http://bugs.adobe.com/jira/browse/FP-542

When a flash "movie" tries to run at a high framerate... Flash allows it. And then it fails.

Flash rendering slows down, but input does not. This means that if a game wants 200fps, but the computer can only render 20fps, input can lag up to ~10 seconds because of how the flash input handling works. It buffers input, but doesn't skip any slots in the buffer. You get 200 slots per second at 200fps, but if it takes 10 seconds to clear the buffer, oh well. Once the buffer is clear, it accepts another second of input, then waits for it to clear again.

This makes playing flash games on slower computers (such as netbooks) quite challenging.

It's worth noting that flash also interferes with general IO. While the input buffer is overflowing (the time between the first second of receiving input until the buffer is clear) it garbages your keyboard presses and mouse movement/clicks, and also does something that screws up other IO on your system.

It has been reported that flash messes up monitoring software like SpeedFan, MBM, etc.; it's like it gets caught in an endless loop saturating all IO. I've seen systems reboot because they thought they were overheating, because of a flash movie not playing at 100% speed.

Adobe is ignoring these issues.

Verdict: It falls to the developer to pick a framerate that will run on slower systems.

Claim 3: Flash data handling makes it unsuitable for most games.
http://www.thewayoftheninja.org/n.html

Remarkable game. Unfortunately, your saved games may be cleared upon upgrading your flash player. Also, there's the insane input lag on slower systems.

Frequently I go to a website after upgrading my flash player, and all my old scores are gone. Oh well? I guess that may be a good thing - it also means every flash tracking cookie vanishes at the same time.

Verdict: Flash needs a second kind of storage - persistent storage - which is guaranteed not to be cleared at random intervals, or by upgrading the player.

Claim 4: Flash leaks like a bitch.
http://www.warpfire.com/
http

You're kidding, right? Please tell me you are...

Flash certainly is popular, but I would not describe it as "fast". Its power comes from how easy it is to create flash stuff. Not from having a great backend.

Problems with Flash:
-Huge memory leaks
-Shitty scripting performance
-Mediocre rendering performance of rasterized graphics
-Poorly designed input handling (makes it unsuitable for games - ironically)

Problems with Java:
-Slow start time
-No easy to work with vectorized graphics
-Java is "Java", and thus is bad (because java is bad)

Here's the proof.

Claim 1: Flash rendering performance is very poor.
http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/408513

Most flash game designs do silly stuff like putting a semi-transparent invisible square over the screen to manage fading. Those alpha-shades every rendering operation on the CPU, and precludes all hardware acceleration.

This game has very poor performance on a 2.2ghz Athlon XP w/ 1GB RAM + 7800GS. It uses many final-fantasy-style sprites/graphics, in addition to vectorized graphics for dialog and the interface.

In Java, even in an applet, simple sprite blits like that would run fine on a 300mhz P2. However, character portraits and the interface would have to be rasterized to work in Java.

Verdict: Both have negatives. Flash runs (very) slow, but is fast to create. Java runs fast(er), but is (very) slow to create.

Claim 2: Flash input handling makes it unsuitable for most games.
http://armorgames.com/play/2893/achievement-unlocked
http://bugs.adobe.com/jira/browse/FP-542

When a flash "movie" tries to run at a high framerate... Flash allows it. And then it fails.

Flash rendering slows down, but input does not. This means that if a game wants 200fps, but the computer can only render 20fps, input can lag up to ~10 seconds because of how the flash input handling works. It buffers input, but doesn't skip any slots in the buffer. You get 200 slots per second at 200fps, but if it takes 10 seconds to clear the buffer, oh well. Once the buffer is clear, it accepts another second of input, then waits for it to clear again.

This makes playing flash games on slower computers (such as netbooks) quite challenging.

It's worth noting that flash also interferes with general IO. While the input buffer is overflowing (the time between the first second of receiving input until the buffer is clear) it garbages your keyboard presses and mouse movement/clicks, and also does something that screws up other IO on your system.

It has been reported that flash messes up monitoring software like SpeedFan, MBM, etc.; it's like it gets caught in an endless loop saturating all IO. I've seen systems reboot because they thought they were overheating, because of a flash movie not playing at 100% speed.

Adobe is ignoring these issues.

Verdict: It falls to the developer to pick a framerate that will run on slower systems.

Claim 3: Flash data handling makes it unsuitable for most games.
http://www.thewayoftheninja.org/n.html

Remarkable game. Unfortunately, your saved games may be cleared upon upgrading your flash player. Also, there's the insane input lag on slower systems.

Frequently I go to a website after upgrading my flash player, and all my old scores are gone. Oh well? I guess that may be a good thing - it also means every flash tracking cookie vanishes at the same time.

Verdict: Flash needs a second kind of storage - persistent storage - which is guaranteed not to be cleared at random intervals, or by upgrading the player.

Claim 4: Flash leaks like a bitch.
http://www.warpfire.com/
http

Maybe not a frog, but what about a hedgehog?

I'm impressed that Armadillo Aerospace has claimed that they are making a profit. The big question of course is *how*? Are they selling a lot of t-shirts? Or are they raking in the cash from rocket racing investors?

I actually think they'll be able to pull it off this year. The big question is whether they can beat Paragon Labs. I'm hoping that there will be more than one successful run this year.

It's easy, they're taking advantage of prior art...

with a budget of $50 and use a hedgehog as a proof of concept to secure further funding.

You want flash games? YOU GOT 'EM!
I have probably a gig of flash games I've downloaded to my computer. A lot of it is crap, actually. But there are several that are quite addictive and I thought I would share.

Most of these you can grab and save locally. Since I had most of these saved, I just Googled for the game names and linked the first or second or third result that came up. Most I checked to make sure the site would load without popups and teh game was still there and would load. I included the name in case the result doesn't work as it should (such as a site getting slashdotted! - I could have used coral cache [.nyud.net] on these, but I was unsure if it'd work with the flash files as well. So, if one doesn't work, you can always Google the name. :p

Also, if you saved the flash files locally, you can also download a standalone flash player, courtesy of Adobe, so that you can play the games on your home PC as well. Standalone debug versions are apparently available for Mac, Linux and Windows.

Below is a list of some games I thought I'd share with y'all. Some have probably been mentioned (n, dice wars), but those that were in the main article (portal flash version) I've skipped.

Unreal - http://www.armorgames.com/games/unrealflash_popup.html

Unreal 2007 (Newer version of above) - http://www.addictinggames.com/unrealflash2007.html

Tactics Core (isometric turn-based rpg fighter) - http://www.ugoplayer.com//games/tacticscore.html

Tactics 100 (Newer version of above) - http://www.gamebrew.com/games/blogs/tactics100/play.php

The Batman: Cobblepot Captor (side scroller) - http://www.unoriginal.co.uk/batman.html

Batman: Mystery of the Batwoman (side scroller) - http://www.arcadestreet.com/play-batman-mystery-of-the-batwoman.htm

Russian Affairs (side scroller) - http://russian-affairs.freeonlinegames.com/
Space Bounty (side scroller) - http://www.diggygames.com/play-4434-Space_Bounty.html
The Professionals II (side scroller) - http://www.flasharcade.com/shooting-games/the-professionals-ii-game.html

http://neave.com/games/ (which includes cool old school games like Space Invaders, Tetris, Asteroids, Snake, Frogger, Simon Says, Tic-tac-toe, and... Hexxagon ? )

Tetris (Kind of like Tetris Grand Master, from what I can tell) - http://www.gdward.plus.com/site/flash/tetris/

Bubble Shooter - http://absolutist.com/online/bubbles/

PacXon - http://www.addictinggames.com/pacxon.html

Deal or No Deal - http://www.nbc.com/Deal_or_No_Deal/game/flash.shtml

Plumber - http://www.2flashgames.com/f/f-1082.htm

Bunch - http://www.miniclip.com/games/bunch/en/

Tanks - http://www.2dplay.com/tanks/tanks-play.htm

n game - http://www.harveycartel.org/metanet/n.html

Dice Wars (Risk) - http://www.gamedesign.jp/flash/dice/dice.html

you will love you some oroboros

http://www.armorgames.com/games/oroboros.html