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First, the amount of hover usage in flash isn't that great. There are tons of completely static animations that don't have any interaction of any sort. And there are plenty games that just require clicking in place. A lot of flash content that gets passed around is stuff like the Kenya and Magical Trevor animations.

Second, the lack of hover is simply a lack of imagination on Apple's part. On my N900 for instance, I can have a pointer that works for flash by starting to drag from the border of the screen. Now, it's not 100% perfect and could be done better, but it works, and I played Winter Bells quite successfully on my N900.

Or flash games? Really? There's no keyboard or mouse to play them, assuming that flash performance is going to be worthwhile anyway. How many flash games are there that are completely playable via clicking?

You, good sir, are talking out of your ass. Obviously you haven't been playing Flash games. Mouse-only Flash games used to be the predominant form of Flash games and they still consist a significant portion of them. Just do a simple Google search on the top Flash games of the past decade and look at the lists. Example. Be sure to also check out Ferry Halim's Orisinal. These would have no problems running on a 1024x768 tablet.

This isn't a huge loss, and more than made up for in app store games.

There are more and better fun flash games on the browser than there are App store games. The wealth of flash games is just incredible. The App Store does not more than make up for this and not all App Store games are free.

The same is true for iPhone games. Further, the overwhelming majority of Flash games will be unplayable on a multitouch device. They just aren't designed to be played by nothing more than clicking the mouse.

Huh? You obviously haven't been playing much Flash games, have you? Mouse-only Flash games have been around since forever. They constitute quite a significant portion of Flash games and would have no problems running on a stylus/tablet device. Try visiting Ferry Halim's awards-winning Orisinal games. Tapping on touch devices/tablets is no problem too since those are just normal mouse calls on Flash. No problem with em running on multi-touch too since since the upcoming Flash Player 10.1 (coming out on both desktop and mobile devices) has multi-touch support.

Regarding Mac performance, from what I know, there's an certain class & method needed by Adobe engineers to do certain acceleration on OSX, but access isn't being given by Apple's APIs. With Linux acceleration (Flash has now been using the GPU for acceleration for a while), there's quite a number of complications like incompatibility with Compiz Fusion enabled (See this entry by Penguin.swf, one of the lead Flash engineers working on Linux -> http://blogs.adobe.com/penguin.swf/2008/05/flash_uses_the_gpu.html.

Check out John Gruber's excellent post at http://daringfireball.net/2010/01/apple_adobe_flash:
I've been hard on Flash Player for Mac OS X, but this performance situation is not entirely in Adobe's hands. On Windows, Flash makes use of hardware decoding for H.264, if available. On Mac OS X, it does not. This is one reason why Flash video playback performs better on Windows than Mac OS X, and also why H.264 playback on Mac OS X is better through QuickTime (which does use hardware decoding).

According to Adobe, though, this is because they can't. Heres an entry from their Flash Player FAQ:

Q. Why is hardware decoding of H.264 only supported on the Windows platform?

A. In Flash Player 10.1, H.264 hardware acceleration is not supported under Linux and Mac OS. Linux currently lacks a developed standard API that supports H.264 hardware video decoding, and Mac OS X does not expose access to the required APIs. We will continue to evaluate when to support this feature on Mac and Linux platforms in future releases.

Adobe platform evangelist Lee Brimelow posted a weblog entry addressing this:

But let's talk more about the Flash Player on the Mac. If it is not 100% on par with the Windows player people assume that it is all our fault. The facts show that this is simply not the case. Let's take for example the question of hardware acceleration for H.264 video that we released with Flash Player 10.1. Here you can see some published results for how much the situation has improved on Windows. Unfortunately we could not add this acceleration to the Mac player because Apple does not provide a public API to make this happen. You can easily verify that by asking Apple. Im happy to say that we still made some improvements for the Mac player when it comes to video playback, but we simply could not implement the hardware acceleration. This is but one example of stumbling blocks we face when it comes to Apple.

http://www.ferryhalim.com/orisinal/

I reread your post. I would probably put in a small picture of yourself or something you like, even a nice picture of trees or something or ...whatever... and then maybe a short horizontal rule line under it with some subtle links to find you on other places on the web. I would not put a bunch of crap on it. Any future employer finding a personal domain filled with crappy apps will likely be turned off. Ferry Halim has a nice page at http://www.ferryhalim.com/main.htm that shows a subtle way you could have a web presence without leaving it completely blank. You don't have to do what HE does, though. Just some simple graphics and text and contact info is probably best. Good luck!

put a bootable linux distro on it, add a startup script that opens a fun christmas flash game, maybe something from http://www.ferryhalim.com/orisinal/ , i recommend winterbells.

It fits a christmas theme, but i'm not sure how ya could fit it into the post-apocalyptic fallout3 story. Maybe santa became disgruntled and delivered a tiny thermonuclear device in everyone's stocking?

I'm reminded of Ferry Halim, who seems to produce small web-based games just to test out specific game mechanics. Some good games there, also some lousy ones.

Plagiarism is the sincerest form of flattery.

If that's the case then several other people should feel "flattered". What I haven't seen posted anywhere is that this isn't some kind of isolated coincidental instance of theft. The creator of Snow Day has a blog entry in which he talks about the theft and points out that several (original) other (original) games have been stolen from others. They can all be found on the Olympics Fun Page. How many others besides these three are rip-offs?

(As an aside, the stolen games are all significantly inferiors to the originals. You'd think if they were going to go to the effort of taking another person's game they would at least improve it. That said, I personally found Winter Bells' graphics and music strangely addictive. My high score right now is around 120,000. Anyone else? :)

Normally this wouldn't wouldn't amount to all that much as I'm sure this kind of "borrowing" happens on a regular basis, however the hypocrisy in this astounds me. As others have pointed out, the Beijing Olympics committee has been merciless over infringement of their trademarked/copyrighted materials (including the name Olympics). Ironically they even have a form where you can snitch on people that are guilty of infringement. I urge all of Slashdot to go there and give them an earful.

Plagiarism is the sincerest form of flattery.

If that's the case then several other people should feel "flattered". What I haven't seen posted anywhere is that this isn't some kind of isolated coincidental instance of theft. The creator of Snow Day has a blog entry in which he talks about the theft and points out that several (original) other (original) games have been stolen from others. They can all be found on the Olympics Fun Page. How many others besides these three are rip-offs?

(As an aside, the stolen games are all significantly inferiors to the originals. You'd think if they were going to go to the effort of taking another person's game they would at least improve it. That said, I personally found Winter Bells' graphics and music strangely addictive. My high score right now is around 120,000. Anyone else? :)

Normally this wouldn't wouldn't amount to all that much as I'm sure this kind of "borrowing" happens on a regular basis, however the hypocrisy in this astounds me. As others have pointed out, the Beijing Olympics committee has been merciless over infringement of their trademarked/copyrighted materials (including the name Olympics). Ironically they even have a form where you can snitch on people that are guilty of infringement. I urge all of Slashdot to go there and give them an earful.

Plagiarism is the sincerest form of flattery.

If that's the case then several other people should feel "flattered". What I haven't seen posted anywhere is that this isn't some kind of isolated coincidental instance of theft. The creator of Snow Day has a blog entry in which he talks about the theft and points out that several (original) other (original) games have been stolen from others. They can all be found on the Olympics Fun Page. How many others besides these three are rip-offs?

(As an aside, the stolen games are all significantly inferiors to the originals. You'd think if they were going to go to the effort of taking another person's game they would at least improve it. That said, I personally found Winter Bells' graphics and music strangely addictive. My high score right now is around 120,000. Anyone else? :)

Normally this wouldn't wouldn't amount to all that much as I'm sure this kind of "borrowing" happens on a regular basis, however the hypocrisy in this astounds me. As others have pointed out, the Beijing Olympics committee has been merciless over infringement of their trademarked/copyrighted materials (including the name Olympics). Ironically they even have a form where you can snitch on people that are guilty of infringement. I urge all of Slashdot to go there and give them an earful.

Plagiarism is the sincerest form of flattery.

If that's the case then several other people should feel "flattered". What I haven't seen posted anywhere is that this isn't some kind of isolated coincidental instance of theft. The creator of Snow Day has a blog entry in which he talks about the theft and points out that several (original) other (original) games have been stolen from others. They can all be found on the Olympics Fun Page. How many others besides these three are rip-offs?

(As an aside, the stolen games are all significantly inferiors to the originals. You'd think if they were going to go to the effort of taking another person's game they would at least improve it. That said, I personally found Winter Bells' graphics and music strangely addictive. My high score right now is around 120,000. Anyone else? :)

Normally this wouldn't wouldn't amount to all that much as I'm sure this kind of "borrowing" happens on a regular basis, however the hypocrisy in this astounds me. As others have pointed out, the Beijing Olympics committee has been merciless over infringement of their trademarked/copyrighted materials (including the name Olympics). Ironically they even have a form where you can snitch on people that are guilty of infringement. I urge all of Slashdot to go there and give them an earful.

I've always found games without music pretty boring. Especially on some of the simple flash games. Check out Orisinal. Half the fun comes from the catchy tunes the guy uses.

JellyBattle - A wierd turn-based multiplayer pvp strategy game. Probably the best flash game I have played

Tanks! - multiplayer pvp tank game

Insaniquarium Singleplayer but fun

Winterbells There's something very cute and appealing about this game, and it makes a nice xmas-time diversion. All of the orisinal stuff is worth taking a look at.

Great for a lonely/drunk Friday evening, when complex games are too mentally exhausting.

I checked out the link "http://www.csszengarden.com/".

Question: have they ever heard of contrast?

I swear if a publisher sold me a book where the gray text blended with the white page I would never buy a book from them again.

Quality is about usability and when you need to read text you need contrast. This isn't artwork. It's text. To be read.

I have a LCD and CRT color tuned very nicely btw.

Here is another site with unreadable text, but very playable artistic games: http://www.ferryhalim.com/orisinal/

Here is a readable site with nice text contrast: http://www.w3.org/

Text != Art

Also those guys who use double spacing... yeah. It's annoying.

Ask and you shall receive. Warning, they are a LOT more addictive that they seem. :)

It seems like of the games listed, the majority are straight clones of existing games, and three are heavily genre pieces.

Indie games have to be bastions of originality! We need you guys to incubate the weird and wonderful ideas, like Facade, Dada, stagnation in blue, and most everything this guy does. Heck, subspace is still an original indie game, even though it spawned a ton of clones and fell into obscurity. Puzzle Pirates was a risky original take, and it rakes in the dough.

'come on, guys! If you think it is hard now, try creating original ideas and gameplay with a 100 toothbrush salesmen and bankers breathing down your neck. This is your time to shine. This is your proving grounds. Sure, Ambrosia has seen success through polish over originality, but where is the soul in that?*

*Note: I actually really like Ambrosia. I still think Chiral is one of the best puzzle games ever made.

I gave the two linked-to websites a look -- hey, I'll grant that at least theoretically, Flash could be useful. It's just that my experience with it in the real world has been pretty universally negative.

I tried this ferryhalim place, and saw a penguin game. I like Tux, so I decided to try that one. I think that the point of it is to put the mouse cursor in the middle of the screen and click as fast as you can. I mean, I'll grant that I *have* played minigames in commercial videogames that simply measured how quickly you could smack a button, so I can't claim that this sort of thing has never been done, but it just doesn't come off as that impressive or fun to me.

I'm willing to grant that maybe some of the games there are better than others, but there's a huge grid of games -- I don't want to dig through all of them.

As for the fcukstar.com place -- I opened it up, and almost immediately didn't like it. Forget my dad reading it -- *I* can't read the page. It consists of miniscule lines of light gray text on a dark gray background, with red highlighted text that's even slightly more difficult to read. I can read 9 point fixed gray75 on black in my xterms, but this is simply not legible.

Since I'm using xorg at the moment, I kicked into 640x480 zoom mode (Ctrl-Alt-KP+), and while it's still more difficult to read than my xterms, I can at least understand it. It has the fake scrollbars without arrows that I don't like much, and when I opened the "2oo5" list, they became sluggish. The popup menu is slow and plays the interface sounds that I complained about (there's a reason that Apple and MS and GNOME and KDE don't default to playing sounds when you, say, bring up a menu). Clicking on the arrow portion of the popup menu pops up that menu -- which I would expect from my use of many windowing GUIs -- but clicking on the textual part does nothing (and since the textual area was a larger target, that is what I first tried clicking on). I guess I just don't see what this website does that a simple Slashdot-like page with description and links would have also done.

This site has the same distracting animated Flash advertisements that I dislike (which cause CPU spikes on my computer -- granted, you could complain that Firefox simply does a poor job of handling this and should run Flash in a low-priority thread). Initially, Flashblock prevented them from coming up, but I figured that I should get a similar experience to a typical user viewing the page. These ads do not have sound, though, so they aren't as bad as the worst that I've seen. I don't actually know who the ad is for -- a strange logo appears on the left, two arrows move for a while, and then this huge brown blob comes flying straight at me. Then the ad cycles.

I guess that maybe the websites linked to were where I was supposed to go and be impressed, but when I clicked on them, nothing happened. When I middle-clicked (hoping that I'd get them in a new tab) nothing happened. When I right-clicked a link and chose "open in new window" nothing happened. Granted, I *do* have Flashblock installed, and maybe it could be some sort of interaction between the two -- but given how frusteratingly awful enabling either of the above two options is almost all the time (even if these websites are *really* good), I'm not willing to enable them.

There's a star with an "fs" in the upper left-hand-corner. It wiggles when I move my mouse over it, but clicking on it doesn't seem to do anything. There's what appears to be a little button in the top left hand corner of each section reading "fs", but clicking on it doesn't seem to do anything either.

I'm also going to comment on the design. I'm not a designer, so I am speaking outside my area of expertise (and it's easy to claim that this is intended to be artsy and experimental or simply subjective). However, this page does not fit with the majority of page layout rules that I'm familiar with. There a

There's lots of terrific Flash content. You just have to look for it.

Really good games: http://www.ferryhalim.com/orisinal/ (say what you like, I can play these for hours). Brilliant design and animation, follow many of the links here: http://www.fcukstar.com/post2005/index.html (or any one of a jillion other awards sites). And do I even need to mention YouTube?

For that matter, I use Flash constantly to develop technical demonstrations for the profs at the university where I work. If you can allow that animation is at all useful, you have to admit that Flash is a pretty decent animation tool.

If you only ever come to the web looking for raw information, Flash can be a pain. But then, if information is all you are interested in, we may as well go back to Archie and FTP. In the hands of a skilled and thoughtful developer -- as with any other tool -- Flash can be used to create really neat stuff. And I don't know about you, but neat stuff was what drew me to the Web in the first place.

Caveat: I have a lot of problems with the Flash development environment and I do wish that SWF was an open format so we could get some competing tools.

not strictly one button (mouse and spacebar in many cases) but check
this out.

I think the guy is a game design genius. My favorite is the frog pond game.

I don't mean to be inflammatory here, but that'll probably be the result...

I'm just wondering if you've found any DS games that are still innovative when compared to Java/Shockwave webpage games and those available on PDAs? When it first launched, that's what it looked like they got their innovation from. I wanted to root for the DS, but I just didn't see anything new there.

Anyway, here are some web games to illustrate... and just for fun. :p

My wife likes playing games like the ones on orisinal
What she doesn't like is me playing endless hours of FPS on my own. So to spend time together we play team deathmatch games.
Good enough for me.

this flash animation is origionaly from another site iirc . i cant remember who made it though origionaly .Nice to ahve the mirror but we should give credit to the origional author(if this is the origional then i appoligise i just havnt come acros that yet)

I think you mean Orisinal.

games.yahoo.com is pretty good, and unless things have changed significantly in the past year most of the site is free.

I've heard things about zone.msn.com also, though I haven't tried it.

Orisinal doesn't have multiple players at once, but they have some of the most original, relaxing games I've ever played.

And, of course, for the hardcore there is the Kiseido Go Server.

There are a lot of game collection sites out there. What is it you're looking for?

im a 29 year old gamer with 2 degrees and a crappy helpdesk job.. though it doesnt qualify me anymore than you to speak on behalf of 16-30's (thats one fuck of a range by the way... most 16 year old i consider "kids") I love to play the pig stacking game on the web.. just stacking pigs to nice music.

so whilst you are representatvie of you, i am representative of me..

and as my nan likes to say... "It takes all kinds to make a world"

While lots of people designing stuff in Flash are wannabe graphics artists, some of them are digging into the ActionScript and are learning some programming skills. There are a few sites out there with countless little flash apps that are nothing more than simple programming exercises and simple little games. Check out Orisinal, although the art is as good as the programming in this case.

Here:

http://www.ferryhalim.com/orisinal/

www.orisinal.com not the most educational, but lots of easy/fun/good looking games

Try any one of these methadone-based, browser games

In-browser games are easy to hide and are good for short-term distractions that won't totally kill your "productivity".

Multiplayer Mini-Golf
NetbabyWorld (not Mozilla-friendly)
Orisinal (little Flash games)
Spaced Penguin! (fun with gravity)

...at least they're better than solitaire.

Just wish there was more out there.