Flash Version of Adventure

chefmonkey writes "Of course, everyone remembers the old Atari 2600 game "Adventure." While you've been able to play it on a wide variety of emulators for a while, now playing in your web browser is just one click away. Yes, that's right, someone has gone and created a flash version of Adventure." I haven't checked it yet to see if you can get the "dot".

Comments

Copyright?

[badasscat]

Er, I know we're all pro fair-use, anti-DRM and whatnot, but isn't this about the same as linking to a copyrighted MP3 file for the world to download? Seems like we're crossing a line here - Infogrames does own the copyright to this game, and I doubt they gave this guy permission to use it.

I'm all about beating down the RIAA and MPAA and such, but I'm a little uncomfortable at such a blatant disrespect for copyright law that's been around for far longer than the Internet.

No, you can't get the dot

[ChuckMaster]

You can't get the dot. Worse, there's no sprite flicker. The sprite flicker made it possible to get to the secret room. Since atari games only could display 1-2 sprites at a time, sprites would flicker if you had more than 2.

Also, the green and yellow dragon speeds are switched. The line wall don't change to the color of the object you're carrying. And you can't switch to the harder levels, such as the one with the white castle.

You can tell I spent WAAAAAAAAAAYYYYY too much time playing adventure as a kid. Hey, it was 20 years before counterstrike!

Yes but this is **ADVENTURE**

[pcx]

It's arguably the first RPG in the universe, the first game with a bonified easter egg, and it's retro.

Slashdot is news for nerds and this is...

1] eclectic
2] stuff we did before nerds became "cool"
3] just plain fun!

This counts as news in my book -- it counts as a bookmark too ;-)

For a COMPLETE remake, check out

[GusherJizmac]

the clone I did for PC, including the DOT and including two new levels (which feature extra items and an extra dragon). Source is available. Only for Windows 95, 98, and 2k tho :( (possibly XP)

Adventure Clone for PC

Re:Adventure?

[tigertigr]

Yeah, I thought it was that Adventure as well. At least we have the 404 Error version of Zork.

Zork 404

[ssafarik]

There's also "Zork" as a 404 error page: Zork

Re:Finally.....

[silhouette]

As someone who has played around with Flash long enough to know just about all of its limits, I can tell you that creating versions of ancient, 8-bit-or-less games (like Adventure) is probably the most useful application of Flash (in the gaming area).

This is mostly because the performance of Flash scripting is just so incredibly poor that you're pretty much constrained to make games that would have been state of the art 10+ years ago.

Atari 2600 games are great candidates for Flash games, but once you move forward in time to the 8-bit nintendo and, god forbid, the 16-bit super nintendo, you have a really difficult time trying to even muster up even enough processing power to replicate those.

For kicks I spent some time trying to write a Flash port of the original Legend of Zelda (8-bit), and ran into all kinds of performance issues. I've pretty much given that up - partially because of no time to work on it, but mostly because trying to replicate someone else's work (including the idiosyncratic bugs) got boring.

Lastly, don't take my comment to mean that great games can't be made in Flash - they certainly can, but it takes a great deal of cleverness to get around the constraints of the environment.

sonic the hedgehog flash

[\\]

funny you mention trying to port the legend of zelda; someone ported a little tiny bit of sonic the hedgehog to flash. it's pretty choppy, and not many moving sprites on the screen at once, but not TOO too bad.

not sure how possible it would be to make something nice out of it, though.

Re:sonic the hedgehog flash

[silhouette]

Yes! - That's a great example of what I'm talking about. You can notice the tell-tale signs of a Flash game:

1) Not many moving sprites/creatures on the screen at once. In the sonic game, I think there was you (Sonic) and pretty much one other autonomous enemy on the screen at any given time. Flash has a lot of trouble handling many moving objects at once, because it needs to run behavior/movement code for each one. In contrast, it can draw lots of objects like there's no tomorrow.

2) The collision / tile code usually isn't quite right. Flash has some built-in collision methods, but they're not very robust and can suck up lots of the available processor very quickly. Doing a tile-based game is tricky because Flash doesn't really give much support for tiles and tile collisions. In the Sonic game you can jump up on a platform and walk on it, but the Sonic sprite is actually 1/2-1 tile below the ledge. I've seen that kind of thing a lot. It's very hard to do.

Re:Finally.....

[silhouette]

Yes, those are wonderful - but appear to be relatively small in scope (great graphics though). Flash programmers who use all of the environment's strengths and avoid its weaknesses have a very powerful tool. I was also thinking of:

- Andries's isometric car game

- Stuart's Polar Rescue: an excellent engine by the master of the Flash physics engine

- Roadies: Very fun lemmings-like game, though when lots of Roadies are on the screen at once you'll take a big performance hit.

I consider all of the above to be triumphs in Flash games. (I just wish I had more time to work on my own personal isometric tile-based rpg engine with a-star pathfinding - a mostly functional work-in-progress).