What were/are your favorite flash/browser games?
Flash is gonna die for good in a few days (dec 31st) so I felt this is a good time to ask this question. (Although obviously, there have been large efforts to preserve these when the developers did not. And even then, HTML5 means browser games will continue to exist, even though mobile games have mostly replaced browser games anyway.)
Mine personally were (taking away some of the more well-known ones):
Basically a game of celestial golfball. Had a level editor, which was quite fun.
Bonk.io (although this one has a sequel that's not in flash)
Pretty popular for a flash game made in 2016. Basically a game where balls need to "bonk" eachother out of the playing field.
Effing meteors (Definitely one of the games that I probably remember being better than it is.)
Basically a game where you clump up small meteors into bigger meteors to destroy stuff.
A game where a rabbit and frog are fused together and need to bounce like a pogo to the end.
A mountain climbing platforming game.
A game where you need to eat sushis quickly. Also has cutscenes.
An aesthetic racing game? Not entirely sure.
A game where you drill through the planet enough times to move to the next level (man, I had some weird gameplay preferences.)
A game where you need to time your descents to pick up speed in the hills and fly.
An 8 bit game where you as a dinosaur need to outrun extinction.
A power-up racing game I remember playing quite a bit. Definitely designed for children, even if that's not very surprising.
My favourite, I seem to remember, were a few BMX simulators on a defunct site called TeaGames, as well as LineRider. The original N was a hoot, too. I think it ran on Flash, but I'm not sure. Same with Armadillo Run.
Here's a shortlist of my favorites.
Oh my god, I didn't even think about the Impossible Quiz! Is there a ported version of that anywhere? I used to play that for HOURS in middle school but I could never actually beat it.
Robot Unicorn Attack was my first experience with what became the endless runner genre, and I don't think it was ever really surpassed.
Yeah, it is (tagging @moocow1452). There's a graphical artifact with the dashing but aside from that it works great. Takes me back…
I loved all of the GROW games.
Fortunately, the author has begun porting (at least GROW Planet and GROW Cube) them to HTML5 (http://www.eyezmaze.com/sp/).
Curveball
Unbelievably simple, yet incredibly addictive. It's just Pong, but in 3D, and you can put spin on the ball if your paddle is moving at the time of contact.
I wrote a clone of it in PyGame for a college class, more than 10 years ago. I think I may still have the source code somewhere...
I tend to enjoy the simpler flash games. The two that come to mind immediately for me are Solipskier and Canabalt (although the latter is apparently now available on Steam).
Canabalt is available on every platform now (iOS, Android, etc)
StickWars and SkyWire, and Bloons/BloonsTD (which have since migrated).
Edmund McMillen's flash games were really ahead of almost everything else back in the day, no wonder he eventually grew some of those into indie hits. Most of them can be found in the Basement collection. My favorite is probably Aether.
I'm surprised nobody has bought up Pico 8. A psuedo gameboy style fantasy console with restrictions on what can be displayed on screen but not necessarily the cart size.
You'll find so many well done games for the Pico 8 that at times it could rival games that have released in recent years.
Some of my favourites:
Definitely Hannah and the Pirate Caves, although the only way I know of to play it these days is through Flashpoint. The level editor allows for an unbelievable amount of design creativity in custom-built caves: that forum I linked has a database of around 2700 levels—many of which are freakishly complex, like "...Imperio!" and thousands of others.
You Have to Burn the Rope, a send up of Portal, in that you have to follow directions to complete the game, and then a little song would play at the end. Naturally, it was a hit.
Also of note, the most excellent Robot Dinosaurs That Shoot Beams When They Roar about these Robot Dinosaurs that whenever they Roar, they shoot Beams. It's a rather novel concept, imo.
Slime volleyball was the flash GOAT. It has been ported to html5 but the AI isn’t the same so it’s not as good.
Old Spice made a flash game called "Dikembe Mutombo's 4 1/2 Weeks to Save the World" for a marketing campaign. Unfortunately, the later stages of the game can not be found in preserved versions of the game.
Help a layman understand: so Jan 1st any and all Flash content, either on the web or on my HDD, will just suddenly not function anymore like a light switch got flipped?
What about the original Binding of Issac on Steam? Isn’t that Flash-based? That’s gone too?
I believe a distributed flash game will contain the engine to run standalone, so a lack of support on the browser is not an issue.
From their announcement:
Tldr: Flash will stop updating very soon (in a few hours?). Most browsers will stop letting you use Flash at this "very soon" time. 12 days from now, Flash themselves won't let you use Flash Player.
Back in the day I would play the shit out of Kitten Cannon. I’m sure it’s still around but I haven’t seen it in a while.
I love Ultimate Assassin. A fun minimalistic stealth/action game.
Canabalt was so great I even bought it for my phone.
All of the Nitrome games, they were incredibly polished compared to any other flash games at the time and fun to play. I'd guess the bright graphics were also really attractive to child myself too.