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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".
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!
Adventure Clone for PC
http://www.naildrivin5.com/davec
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.
Experts agree: everything is fine.
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).
Experts agree: everything is fine.