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While the Flash/HTML5 debate has been focused on video, we are forgetting about animation/games/etc. that are coded in flash. Don't say Flash is completely useless. If HTML5 could be done for Super Mario Crossover http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/534416 then I won't complain anymore.

Have you played some of the Flash games on websites like Newgrounds? Some of them are truly amazing games -- visually, stylistically, and from gameplay perspectives. Back when Adobe was doing their Flash compiler beta testing, developers of some of those games actually ported them to the iPhone and sold them, such as Canabalt (Newgrounds, iTunes store). (I'm surprised its still on the iTunes store, actually. Apple never has been consistent about implementing their rules, though...)

These sort of ports are what is being lost. Creating a 'spam app' with Objective-C is nearly as easy -- creating a work of gaming art, like some high-quality Flash games, is not.

Mine is Tuper Tario Tros.

I'm sure you'll be more than happy with your new robotic overlords, too.

Mod this up! The problem is not in the programmer side, it's in the designer/animator side. A programmer may have adequate tools without the Flash application, but the same cannot be said about the others.

Not only that, but often HTML5 apps don't work properly across browsers, and I'm not talking about IE. Flash is a plataform that works the same in any browser.

Most people who say flash should be killed probably never saw a good flash animation or game and should take a look in the Best of All Time section in the Newgrounds Portal. I recommend watching some animations from Adam Philips.

Flash shouldn't be overused, but it shouldn't be killed either.

Mod this up! The problem is not in the programmer side, it's in the designer/animator side. A programmer may have adequate tools without the Flash application, but the same cannot be said about the others.

Not only that, but often HTML5 apps don't work properly across browsers, and I'm not talking about IE. Flash is a plataform that works the same in any browser.

Most people who say flash should be killed probably never saw a good flash animation or game and should take a look in the Best of All Time section in the Newgrounds Portal. I recommend watching some animations from Adam Philips.

Flash shouldn't be overused, but it shouldn't be killed either.

This 8x8 version almost looks like a combination of Super Mario and Tetris

Hmmm... I wonder what that would be like . o O http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/522276

This 8x8 version almost looks like a combination of Super Mario and Tetris.

You mean like this?

Chainsaw the Children

No, I don't think it should be banned.

What happen!!

I prefer this version.

http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/299838

Reminds me of this famous forum post.

Perhaps it is the simplicity of the graphics and sound - all those DOS games didn't use more than a handful of commands to interact with the screen (draw points, draw lines, draw circles/eliipses, fill circles/ellipses, paste pixelmap), and the sound command (which directly set the frequency of the speaker).

You might just find that PC's still have the speaker built in - I found out that when keeping the [Shift] key pressed for more than eight seconds, then there was a Frogger type sound and something called Speed-Keys popped up.

Take away the Dolby surround sound, the 24-bit HD framebuffer with motion-capture character animation and most games would probably have the same gameplay as these DOS games. Though, there are better Flash games

Super Mario 63 is a Flash version of the Super Mario platform games.

Crazy Planets is a missile type game based on the curvature of a planet, rather than a simple grid

Actually, there have been flash games based on this concept for ages. But apparently they aren't "proper" games...

See http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/439647 for a good example.

Some friendly competition from the bogeymen:

http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/470460 [Doom/Hexen in Flash]
http://www.innoveware.com/ql3/QuakeLight.html [Quake in Silverlight]

In case no one has mentioned it yet:
http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/404612
Very nice and fun to play.

Seen the animation a while ago, but it still gives a good view of what forced smiling could end up to when placed in the wrong hands...

http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/165898

Flash video of this without the words. http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/165898

In the game, Madagascar has a single port and a jumpy health department; the latter will close the former as soon as the news about yourself becomes reasonably widespread. The trick therefore is to be a less deadly virus with a long incubation period, and after you manage to infect Mad. you can mutate into something a lot more deadly.

http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/448950

http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/185588 This is how I got the talk :( No wonder I'm on /.

You may get it earlier than you had imagined! Behold the Watchmen Saturday morning cartoon!

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

Direct link to the original Flash animation:

http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/485797

There's a flash game called Raid Gaza!. Player is Israel. Object: have highest palestinian death: israeli death ratio.

Interesting and quite sickening. Any idea who made it? Could be an Israeli or Israeli supporter who is clearly sick in the head. Or could be made by a Palestinian supporter for propaganda purposes to make out that the Israelis are really fucked up. You can't be sure.

There's a flash game called Raid Gaza!. Player is Israel. Object: have highest palestinian death: israeli death ratio. Includes some nasty quotes by Israeli leaders.

It makes its point well; a minute into the game I found it more sickening than sarcastically funny.

There are games that plausibly serve some sort of editorializing function, and then there are games that just reference recent events, usually as a gimmick. Many of the recent Bush-shoe-throwing games are of the second sort---there is no real editorial commentary going on, it's just a generic arcade game that's been skinned with Bush and shoes. There were similarly content-free games that came out after 9/11, mostly based around revenge fantasies where you got to punch bin Laden or something.

There are some good examples of games that actually use the gameplay to make some sort of editorial point, though. From a right-wing perspective, in Al Quaidamon, you can treat a terrorist prisoner well or poorly, and a meter shows his current status. The political point is made in the balance: unless you coddle him continuously, you fall below the levels market as Geneva Convention standards (which are, incidentally, depicted as being above average U.S. living standards). From a more left-wing perspective, Airport Security satirizes the post-9/11 airport security measures through its gameplay, by depicting the changing standards of what's banned this week as absurd and impossible to follow.

(I got both of those examples from this list.)

Murlocs are great!

Play the RPG!

I'm sorry, but that's got to be one of the most naive things I've ever heard. Considering all polymers, there are arbitrarily many different permutations of the known elements available in a pure substance and then considering all mixtures thereof we have more different concoctions than can be enumerated. While certainly the properties of many of these have been well-understood or could be inferred from known experiment, there are many that await only someone with imagination to discover and apply.

Case in point: http://www.popsci.com/scitech/article/2005-11/11-year-quest-create-disappearing-colored-bubbles

Reading your analogy about games, http://www.newgrounds.com/ might also be an eye-opener. Many of those games are whipped up by talented hobbyists but still get a lot of play.

~Ben

All your base has already been on crack. http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/16427

Braid: Simple, pleasant music-box style music, which would change in tempo and direction as you move back and forth in time. Really awesome.

Super Mario RPG: Huge variety, I liked how some characters tend to have their own theme. Some music related puzzles, and they do a good job of pronouncing perfect silence during some of the more intensive puzzles (omitting music is sometimes the best way to use it).

Music Catch: A great game with a nice melody, the gameplay forces you to actively listen to the music, in anticipation. Really a great example of how games could better use music. Really check it out.

Wario Ware: This pretty much goes for any version of Wario Ware, especially where music-related puzzles are concerned.

http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/437054

After seeing all of the mac ads, and mac ad parodies, ones with or without linux, ones that try to paint the PC-guy as being really cool, this is the only one I've ever really liked, and probably the truest one, too.

My first question is what web pages define their average? I just fired up vanilla versions of both IE8, Chrome, and Process Explorer and opened the same two tabs: the Facebook login page and Wikipedia (English).

Process Explorer tells me IE8 is using 389652 KB of memory. Chrome is using 260668 KB of memory. Both have three processing running.

What the heck, I'll try again. I fully restart both browsers and open up Slashdot and Newgrounds. IE8 with three processes, 465348 KB; Chrome with four processes, 358128 KB.

Now I upped the ante to 9 tabs, which for brevity, I won't list. IE8 with 6 processes was using 958524 KB and Chrome with 11 processes was using 783840 KB.

Admittedly, this is a small test to find an average, but what do I need to do to see the difference TFS[ummary] speaks of?

You know what else never ends? A hamster wheel. The inability to win, beat the game, or just finish is the reason MMOs never interested me.

Nor SimCity, I take it. Does Spore end? See also Awesome Crossing (SWF))

Thanks for the recommendation, I just beat it :-)

The story was alright, but the puzzles were definitely better than the originals, I almost beat it Monday night, but had to call it quits at 6am,

btw, I should mention that real flash version is what got me to buy portal to begin with. If you haven't played it, you should, it's alot of fun as well.

Portal: The Flash Version

Check out http://varriastudios.com/ for a site that illustrates what I'm talking about.

The Flash Movie was originally called The Ultimate Showdown, but I couldn't find that specific version.
http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/330027# is the next best thing.

There are a lot of good games they didn't mention. Someone already mentioned Portal Flash Edition, and I already mentioned Key to Adventure. A few others are:

NewGrounds Rumble (Wii Version - For that Super Smash Bros. fix while waiting for SSBB.

Fancy Pants Adventures - Kind of like classic Sonic, but with its own appeal.

Unreal Flash - Sort of like Portal Flash Edition. Except that it's an Unreal Shoot'em Up rather than a platform/puzzle game.

Artillery Live - Simple, yet amazingly fun multiplayer take on Scorched Earth.

There are a lot of good games they didn't mention. Someone already mentioned Portal Flash Edition, and I already mentioned Key to Adventure. A few others are:

NewGrounds Rumble (Wii Version - For that Super Smash Bros. fix while waiting for SSBB.

Fancy Pants Adventures - Kind of like classic Sonic, but with its own appeal.

Unreal Flash - Sort of like Portal Flash Edition. Except that it's an Unreal Shoot'em Up rather than a platform/puzzle game.

Artillery Live - Simple, yet amazingly fun multiplayer take on Scorched Earth.

There are a lot of good games they didn't mention. Someone already mentioned Portal Flash Edition, and I already mentioned Key to Adventure. A few others are:

NewGrounds Rumble (Wii Version - For that Super Smash Bros. fix while waiting for SSBB.

Fancy Pants Adventures - Kind of like classic Sonic, but with its own appeal.

Unreal Flash - Sort of like Portal Flash Edition. Except that it's an Unreal Shoot'em Up rather than a platform/puzzle game.

Artillery Live - Simple, yet amazingly fun multiplayer take on Scorched Earth.

To add a disclaimer to my post, I am associated with WiiCade, so take my post with a grain of salt. That being said, the game really is good. Feel free to check out the NewGrounds reviews (I am NOT associated with them) or just play the game for yourself. :-)

One of the best Flash games released this season is Key to Adventure. It's playable on the PC or Wii over on WiiCade, and currently holds a front-page spot over on NewGrounds. Perhaps even more interesting is the fact that WiiCade sponsored the game, meaning that it's now possible to get paid for creating Flash games for the Wii.

*In the voice of that BS Billy Graham book advert*
Have you ever wondered why God never allowed for you to have the rich fullfilling life you think deserve? Are you tired of waiting for the rapture for God to smite democrats, Catholics, Muslims, people who hate George Bush, teachers who teach Darwinism, the Internet, and everyone else except for you and all your elitist God-fearing friends?
Introducing the Billy Graham Jesus Cyborg.
The Jesus Cyborg has been programmed using Bible technology by scientist who reject Darwinism and embrace Kirk Cameron's Banana ideology. Impress your friends. Forcible convert non-believers to your beliefs. Had enough with UN diplomacy? Send it to the Middle East to blow up Israeli-hating hethens! Use it to protest homosexuality at military funerals. Wherever your need to assert your crazy fundamental religious ideologies, or find the TV remote to watch Fox News, the Jesus Cyborg is there with the good book in one hand, a metal claw in the other, and a 12 gauge shotgun strapped to it back. Best of all It "walks" on water!. You can have your very own Jesus Cyborg for an annual donation to the Crystal Cathedral of $1000

Warning! The Jesus Cyborg may have grand dillutions of what faith is. Keep indoors at all time and do not let it out side for any reason. Children should be supervised when using Jesus Cyborg as should small animals and the invalid. Jesus Cyborg runs on a combination of batteries and old peoples medication. Jesus Cyborg will generally try to escape the house once a month and try to solicit religious propoganda to the neighbors. If he escapes, contact them immediately and tell them to turn off all the lights. Made in China, so beware of lead paint.

http://www.newgrounds.com/audio

For those that are into techno (while there are other artists, theres few decent ones that arent techno)

Enough of this Fantasia crap! Will this retarded talking point please just die already?

To start with, a president's baseline approval rating is about 50%, whereas by default everyone hates the "other half" of Congress so it's baseline is more like 25%. Second, it's rather meaningless to compare the approval ratings of an executive and a composite of 535 men and women in any condition; Congressional Democrats have an approval rating 10-15% higher than congressional Republicans on average, and people's view of their particular senators and representative is generally quite positive. More importantly, people are angry at Congress because it isn't doing enough to fight the Bush administration's all-out attack on civil liberties and the Constitution (which is a subset of its all-out effort to protect itself from criminal prosecution for violating said liberties and document). You may recall that the majority of the public now supports the impeachment of Cheney, contrary to the apparent belief of Nancy "off the table" Pelosi.

And why, if the Democrats are so unpopular, are they poised to pick up a great many seats if the election were held now?

How could anyone forget ROFLattack? http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/172015

I remember when this first came out as Tactics Core, a sweet flash game. http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/84042

Recently I was looking around, and found a newer version, Tactics 100. http://gamebrew.com/info-tactics-100-live Newer, more options.

It will give you a taste of the game before needing an account or login or giving in money. :D

The purpose of the article is Flash Games in specific. So your examples are neither here nor there. Personally, I'm amazed that no one has mentioned Newgrounds Rumble, one of the best brawlers of all time! It was one of the highest rated games over on Newgrounds, and hung around for AGES. More recently, it was ported to WiiCade so that you could play against your friends on the WiiMote controller. (Which is a lot more fun than trying to share a keyboard, let me tell you.)

Actually, I should probably expand on that a bit more. One of the nice things about the Wii is that you can have multiplayer flash games. Games like Wiimote Wars 2 and Slipstream are simply amazing when you get the chance to play against your friends and family members. Much, much, much better than playing single-player games. Which is good, because there isn't much in the way of online-multiplayer flash games.

Of course (DISCLAIMER!), I both have a family to play these games with and I have connections to WiiCade. So feel free to take what I'm saying with a grain of salt.

This 2D version will give you an idea how Portal works. After that, get the 3D version. :)

Parent's link to Portal: The Flash Version is slashdotted.

Here's the same hosted on newgrounds: http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/404612

Perhaps you prefer the Smilies from SmileyCentral.com. (SAY SOMETHING!)

On the other hand those are annoying.