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00:00:01
S2 Ep63: Flash Games
87 Plays6 years ago
Join Dave and Jake as they relive games that require enabling browser vulnerabilities to play now!
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Thoughts? Comments? Requests for new episodes? Feel free to email them in!
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Transcript
00:00:16
Speaker
to us.
00:00:35
Speaker
How's it going, everyone?
Welcome and Slang Jokes
00:00:36
Speaker
Welcome to another episode of Soap Zone. My name is Jake. I'm joined by my co-host, as always, Dave. How's it going, right, Dave? Delightful. Oh, that's, that's just, well, you know, it's pretty good. It's, uh, pretty Gucci. Hmm. I should learn more slang because I feel like I arranged between good, awesome. Okay. Or I just have a long pause and like.
00:01:00
Speaker
Yep. You just got to go back to the early 2000s where people said things like rad and cool. Maybe not rad. What would be sick? Sick was one. Sick, I can see. Bazinga would have been later 2000s. Right. That was much later. But that doesn't really have much meaning. No.
00:01:21
Speaker
Tubular hmm, possibly that's so wizard. Mm-hmm. Yeah, that's so Raven. We're going further back into No the real Raven My favorite it's a good name. Yeah another good name things from the past like flash games
00:01:41
Speaker
Which is we got to work in our second. Yeah It's kind of more of like a 90 degree angle immediately into the topic. You're just like, oh, this is a nice pleasant drive and then just right into a tree. I've fallen off my second. Ah, my knee. Oh man. But yeah,
Nostalgia for Flash Games
00:02:02
Speaker
flash games. We picked that to be today's topic. We're running out of ideas. Please write in. I feel like Mike Rowe, um,
00:02:11
Speaker
But yeah, this was entirely my experience before anything else. You just had like, hey, I'm at the library and there's fuck all else to do. But I have access to the internet and a couple of unblocked sites. So you find these little doodads, these little flash games, which are very simple in nature, but took up a surprising amount of my formative years.
00:02:35
Speaker
Yeah, it's kind of an interesting premise that sort of like they still exist. People still make flash games, right? But I feel like they're nowhere near as popular now or at least as prevalent as they were back then. But there was this whole like we've talked about all these different types of ways that people like produce games. Like do they make them as a service? Is it like?
00:02:56
Speaker
Single release and they try to sell it is a share where that your friends to buy this was not a financially Sustainable idea. Yeah, you're just this was I think just people's passion projects. Yeah people like oh we can put stuff on the internet and Then videos and games and their terrible songs came out. Yeah, but some of them were like really fucking dope and
00:03:17
Speaker
It's like you think about stream or steam green light and how they like pump out like all of these games and they were pretty much all trash, except some of them were kind of good. And then you can apply that directly to flash games. They pumped out so many games and most of them were complete trash and some of them were good.
00:03:35
Speaker
But the ones that were good were especially impressive because, like you said, no financial motivation whatsoever, really. It was just Tom Fulton, some random stranger. He made money, though. Yes, for different reasons, though.
00:03:54
Speaker
Prostitution that's really what we're here to expose Say what you want. But uh, tom's a good lay worth the price. Oh Man, but yeah So we in doing our research for this a little bit I know we were that one night we were floating ideas about like what flash games you played and like what flash games I played every fucking one I mentioned like oh you remember this? Yeah, I have no I didn't play that one. I was like, how did you not play these? I
00:04:20
Speaker
Yeah, we at least agreed on line writer line writer. Yeah, which is uh one of the classics. I feel like Probably statistically there's a chance that one of our listeners may have played this one as compared to everything else We will soon cover
00:04:35
Speaker
That was a perfect dicking around at the library type game. Yeah, and it we had 40 minute I guess 42 minute periods the perfect number in high school, right? I knew it four minutes to like walk to next class which sucked if you were across
00:04:50
Speaker
People know how high school worked while I'm explaining that. The American school system. But it wasn't uncommon for us to spend the whole period designing like a dumb, like he's gonna go down the slope and he's gonna keep going down for a good 10 minutes and that's gonna slowly curve and you draw like these gradient lines very slowly and then he's gonna have this awesome jump and then he's gonna catch something and then you make this increasingly elaborate thing that
00:05:17
Speaker
goes away because you don't have that computer anymore, you don't have access to that browser. You could export them though, right? Couldn't you export a code? I don't think we were that smart. I remember being able to export the code so other people could import the level. I didn't really know other people as a kid.
00:05:38
Speaker
I just played the levels I made but but it was like it was a cool collaborative feature that kind of You would see more in like arcade games or other like full games But it was more rare to see that kind of like multiplayer sort of interaction pseudo multiplayer interaction in a flash game Which is just like hmm
00:05:58
Speaker
Yeah, I feel like that game was probably also a precursor to what is it like trials fusion and things like that where you're two-dimensional on a bike I would say in a somewhat unrelated way, but definitely because a lot of things
00:06:16
Speaker
The technology wasn't necessarily there yet. Yeah, so they're like 2d things a platformer I'll design my own platforms line Rider. Yeah Okay, I'd first let's go from left to right instead of jumping like in Mario or Mega Man They have to precariously work with this shitty physics engine I made Which has like two or three rules at best. Yeah, and you just gotta wing it. It's got go and gravity I
00:06:43
Speaker
Um, I was, uh, increasingly terrible at those. Like I was never good at like the early, was it still trials back then?
00:06:52
Speaker
Yeah, I don't I don't know when it officially got the name to be honest. I haven't played a lot of those games But it reminded me of it. I was fine with excite bike. Yeah, we just go straight but as soon as like you're trying to ramp up stuff at certain angles, it was Precarious for me that sounds like the least excite bike if it's just go straight I
00:07:15
Speaker
Oh, well, but yeah, that was a line writer. Um, another one that I introduced Dave here was, uh, pretty, pretty brief, but I thought it was hilarious, uh, called you have to burn the rope off of new grounds. That's not the full title. There's not that you have to burn the rope off of new grounds, comma on new grounds, on new grounds. Yes. Um, and that was just a two dimensional, uh,
00:07:43
Speaker
Platformer I guess you go down a hallway. You're forced to pick up a torch You burn the rope which drops a chandelier on an enemy the grinning Colossus, yeah
00:07:57
Speaker
And then the game is done. Yep. And then there's outro credits and amusement. And this one is actually, it's kind of funny because yours, your game actually had content. Mine had no game, essentially. Yes. It was very, very brief, but I remember playing it back and playing it in quotes back in the day. I was like, huh, you know, this is a well reviewed, you know, a lot of good reviews.
00:08:23
Speaker
and then like two minutes in i beat the game and uh like lost my mind when the intro music came in it's like um
00:08:31
Speaker
Usually flash games have really crappy production value like their nature of being flash games And the outer music was a complete subversion of that for me, which I I quite appreciated Also, it didn't waste my time like say what you will about like a lot of games And I play a lot of open world games that waste my time like to some extent or another This game did not waste my time. It was two minutes and it cost nothing. It was infinite value
00:09:03
Speaker
Yeah, it's worth it check out I guess it'll take you
00:09:10
Speaker
A minute, maybe two. Once you figure out how to re-enable Flash, that's most of the time that goes into this one. Usually your browser will be like, hey, do you want to do this thing? And you're like, yeah, it'll be fine. Yeah. It is funny also that we both kind of come from tech backgrounds to some extent or another. And we're advocating people go out and play Flash games, which has probably never been as much of a security concern as it is right now.
00:09:35
Speaker
Yeah, I would like to preface by saying do not go to albino black sheep calm Nothing is good. They're all out of black sheep Yeah, it's just that was One of my early sites before I mean obviously Newgrounds was always a big thing. Yeah, I
Creative Mechanics and Game Design
00:09:53
Speaker
But back in the days of Zenga, Albino Black Sheep was still cruising and banging. Um, a lot of these sites would like rip content from each other. Yes. Yeah. But I would find like the occasional Homestar Runner video there or just these like dumb, simple ass games.
00:10:13
Speaker
Yeah, I remember albino black sheep in particular for um Like we don't have like flash videos here, but I remember a lot of flash videos from albino black sheep newgrounds had videos as well, but uh, what was the uh There's like the llama song or something like that Uh, I don't know if remember the llama i'm thinking of like 55 Uh, this is the earth around
00:10:45
Speaker
Yeah, I'm making the classical blunder of trying to originally think of something I experienced back when I was a young teen in the middle of a live podcast recording without results from actually consulting notes. What was that thing? I don't know. Let's wait 10 minutes while I think of it. Yeah, it's surprisingly hard. Llama llama duck is basically what I remember. You know what I'm talking about?
00:11:10
Speaker
I don't. I remember the name. Yeah, that song. You guys know what we're talking about, obviously. This is just us talking to each other and occasionally people's job is basically how this works. Another one that I had here was, and I really subjected Dave to this, but he, he, you remembered this as well, if I remember correctly, but Defender Castle. Actual classic.
00:11:39
Speaker
Yeah, like I spent a lot of time on this as a kid And then I tried to spend time on it as an adult. No and man, this game is stupid So for people who have not googled it yet
00:11:55
Speaker
It was an old like a stick man flash thing when like stick people were the height of like all flash videos and games. Yes. Uh-huh. You have this castle and stick man would come from the left side over to the right side and they'll start beating on your shit. And your only means of defense is to grab them, click on them with the mouse and like throw them up in the air and hope that gravity gives you the coup de gras. Yeah. And actually you can like upgrade your castle and have like turrets and stuff to help you out.
00:12:24
Speaker
But that early shit's a fucking grind fest, and it hurts. It actually hurts your wrist, and they have a link like, hey, does your wrist hurt? It's probably like, hey, buy these arches early. Well, what it was is I actually remember this, because the link's broken now, because it doesn't complete anymore. The redirect doesn't work from the flash game, so it doesn't do anything.
00:12:45
Speaker
But I remember back when I played the game as a kid, if you click that link, it like took you to a website to buy like a wrist support or something like that. It was the stupidest nonsense. And the real frustrating thing is you can't just pick up the guys and then drop them immediately. You have to fling them like they have to go high enough that they'll fall and die for you to get currency. And I don't like what I screwed up with on my more recent play through, but like
00:13:10
Speaker
I just got overwhelmed by enemies. I didn't get to the point where I could use the late game upgrades and buildings. Sucks to suck, who just lost. I'm like, wow, I injured my wrist and I lost the game. What's the point? That one did not hold up as well.
00:13:28
Speaker
Still like some interesting premise and I think that's that's kind of the whole point of the flash game It's like we have this one simple idea that we can theoretically do in Flash and they just put it up there and see what sticks. Yeah, like
00:13:43
Speaker
alien hominid fucking took off. And that was just a fairly simple, uh, platformer side scrolling shooter. But people are like, Oh, it's actually good. Like some efforts put into this and that became its own standalone game. Right. Which is crazy.
00:14:00
Speaker
I think that's really where Flash games, I didn't have this kind of analytical outlook on it as a kid, but I think that's really what their contribution was to the gaming scene. You can think about all these different types of games and genres and how they impact the games industry. Flash games were just a flash in the pan, so to speak, of inspiration or disposable gameplay.
00:14:25
Speaker
So it was either it had a core feature or mechanic that really made people come back and play it and kind of like get addicted to it or something really engaging or maybe like an irrational amount of plot and effort into like a game that someone was making no money off of or it was just trash and people like forgot it immediately.
00:14:47
Speaker
Um, and whether it succeeded or failed, it happened really, really fast with flash games. Cause there was no barrier to entry. You don't have to like, you do technically download it, but they're all like tiny, you know, a couple of megabytes. Super tiny. But you just hop on a site, like what things are new. Yeah. And then you try these things and then you tell your friends because that's how you communicate information. You'd be on.
00:15:12
Speaker
The phone or, and my son or aim. Yeah. Hey, check it out this thing. And then like you, you play it and like your downtime in high school or sometimes you'd be over a friend's house. Like we should play the impossible quiz. Yeah. And then you see how far you can get as a team. Yeah. Which I played immediately prior to this recording, actually. Really? I got to like question 26 or 27, 28, something like that.
00:15:38
Speaker
It's uh, it's a really dumb looking back. It's really dumb some of the things I was like, oh, that's kind of clever and other things i'm like You're just being like yeah, that's the worst possible option. It's technically just one. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah It has some like unique ideas and it's kind of indicative of maybe not unique ideas It has things indicative of flash games as a whole um, I remember one of the one of the questions was like
00:16:05
Speaker
Hey, just move your mouse over here. Yeah. And then it's like, now don't touch any of the blue space and you have to get to the other side of like the flash window. Um, so the solution spoilers, I guess for the impossible quiz is, uh, you move the mouse outside of the flash window and then come back in on the opposite side. So it doesn't detect your mouse. And I remember using that as a cheat and like so many games.
00:16:27
Speaker
oh you mean like spank the monkey yeah where it's like oh it's gonna realize the mouse is over here which is a flash game by the way yeah it counts um oh you're clarifying it's not yeah
00:16:42
Speaker
Yeah, it would be like, well, their mouse was here, but their mouse is here now. Yes. And it took them this much time. Oh, uh, the mouse went this fast. Yeah. And you just have these insane game breaking things. Yeah. Because it's just like checks out and math checks out.
00:17:01
Speaker
Or some games would pause if you had right-clicked them or did something else like that. There's a lot of ways you can manipulate the state of it. And eventually, people started putting in cheater protections so they would kick you back to the start of the level if you clicked outside the window or something. But it was all kind of in that ecosystem, which was really cool. And the quiz itself was like, back to the impossible quiz, it's like,
00:17:31
Speaker
So many of the questions are just really, really stupid. But then there's a couple like witty logic puzzles or riddles and things like that, which I'm a fan of. Like I enjoyed that, but too much repetition for me to play it like at the elderly age of 28.
00:17:49
Speaker
Yeah, and it didn't necessarily have the best music and sound effects to engage me as much as perturb me. Yeah. It's kind of like a budget budget version of a budget version of like Jackbox or something like that.
00:18:05
Speaker
Jackbox is so good and witty though Like this is why there's yeah, we removed budget for they know their their audience. They have a good sense of humor. It's very Casual and playful at the same time. Um, I remember playing a fuck ton of launcher games. I
00:18:21
Speaker
Yeah. Where you just have something that you kick off or explode or hit with a bat. Yeah. In a way. But usually the goal is like you wanted to get X amount of distance. And sometimes you just had to hope for like RNG of like getting something else and propel you forward. Right.
00:18:44
Speaker
Buying upgrades like oh, I went this far. I got this much currency. I can now get a Little bit of a jetpack boost. Yeah Progressions like a recurring theme in a lot of these games something to keep you Since so many flash games use levels Because they're kind of based off that old arcade sort of structure They required some variance in the gameplay between levels to like help you deal with the increasing difficulty And other mechanics are being added
00:19:13
Speaker
So like you have for I think this is what I mean by launcher game. The Bloons is up here. Bloons was not a launcher. What did you mean by launcher? I guess then.
00:19:25
Speaker
so like an old old class it was warthog launcher okay where you kind of choose the angle and the power which you launch the warthog and it would go off to one side of the screen um it went with land you'd hope it would land on a land mine so that continued to propel it forward is this the the halo warthog yes okay i thought you were just talking about the animal it's that thing that's not exactly a pig that i decided to name in our podcast
00:19:53
Speaker
Gotcha. Yeah, okay Another one was um, the bloody pingu launcher. Hmm where you were the abominable snowman you had a club with spikes and then The iconic character of pingu would drop from above you. Mm-hmm, and then you would hit it therefore Decapitating it and the head would kind of launch off right? Mm-hmm
00:20:15
Speaker
And like spewing this very flashy over the top comic blood. Yeah. Everywhere. And again, you're going for distance and high score. Yeah. And that was essentially it, but it would still eat up my time. Cause I'm like, I can fucking beat that. Right. Yeah. Anything like I've grown more disillusioned with it as time goes on, but anything with a score system or something you can improve upon. Like that got you a lot of replay value in flash games.
00:20:43
Speaker
I mean that was the you played against yourself metric. I was this standard. It's like Mm-hmm What was your scoring guitar hero or how far would you doing this? Right? It's like you weren't there You just have to relay the story and you only had like a number to kind of be like who's this? Yeah Yeah, I can send you a print screen if you want It's just like a camera picture taken with your Kodak Whatever Super blurry
00:21:11
Speaker
There's another one you put on here, which I played pretty recently. And I think it's indicative of the genre that kind of developed. I don't know if it developed before or after this, but Flash Element TD.
Tower Defense Origins and Influence
00:21:26
Speaker
The amount of fucking precursor work you had to that sentence was oof. Yeah. Well, I gotta, I have to place this in history. So if you look back this game, people were like, what games are you talking about? But yeah, flush L and TD was one of the earliest, if not the first again, I don't ever research, but a tower defense games. Yeah. Where it was off of a Warcraft three playing as humans.
00:21:51
Speaker
And you would drop like an arrow tower and then it would spawn things in a lane and you had to kill them before they ran through. And if they ran through, you lost lives. But that was like a really simple thing.
00:22:03
Speaker
And correct me if I'm wrong, uh, Justin, if you're actually ever listening to this, I believe our friend, Justin, not work. Justin actually wrote like a little script to optimize a placement. And we're like, um, so you remember like the robot class in Java?
00:22:22
Speaker
Yeah, we can emulate keyboard and mouse movement. He would essentially do things on a timer for like, oh, now put this here after this much time to try and optimize and see how far he could. That's hecka nerdy.
00:22:38
Speaker
He's a hecka nerdy dude. That's true. Um, but that's just something I've always enjoyed is a good tower defense game. And that again has had a million fucking variations, some of which are amazing. Yeah. And other ones, which are kind of just. Yeah. Yeah. I was looking at it like, and I think it came out like 2003, or at least it was on that site in 2003. And, um, like that's crazy. That's like.
00:23:04
Speaker
very long, that's 16 years ago as of this recording and the tower defense, the genre has, um, like exploded. Obviously there's been so many games in the tower defense space. Um, someone argue too many games with the tower defense space, but there's been a lot of like takes on it too. You know, we play things like dungeon defenders played like all of that. I really enjoy those variations more. What was the other one? Not dungeon defenders, but, uh, destroy all it works now.
00:23:34
Speaker
Destroy. Oh, uh, all orcs must die, I think. All right. Or my things must die. Orcs must die. Yeah. I'm confusing this with like, destroy all aliens and humans must die. Yeah. But you still have like the, I'm placing these fixed structures, but it also allows you to like run around and like do some other stuff. You have like the hero unit. Yes. Yeah. But that just feels like a simple idea is.
00:23:59
Speaker
It's such a dumb, simple idea, but it's a really good idea and it has such good replay value. Throw some multiplayer in there. You like let people like get loot, things like that. They're like, there's all these other mechanics that got pushed into that genre, but it really enriches it and it makes it a pretty fun time. Um, not quite progenitor though.
00:24:22
Speaker
I mean, if you go back and look in like history, like World War I, I feel like trench warfare really. Right. That was kind of like the, Hey, we're going to make them take this path and we will shoot them. And depending on how much health they have. Yeah. But if they get to our base, we're going to lose some health. So I think that's, I think that's not how trenches worked in World War I don't think you found enemies into your trenches in order to shoot them from outside the trenches. I thought you encouraged them like over here, boy. No.
00:24:50
Speaker
No, that's That's that's a modern thing. That's what we do now. I need to watch more documentaries. Yeah what I'm learning Yeah, I don't really get the history channel anymore Anyways Do I let it go let that one fall off, but you did mention balloons Yeah balloons and this I played it very briefly. Okay, so this is another one that you haven't really you didn't grow up on and
00:25:16
Speaker
No, but I mean, like there's, there's a lot of games that I feel fall under the, the umbrella of shoot projectile break things. Yeah. Yeah. So I think.
00:25:29
Speaker
Earlier, there really might've been something like Breakout, but that's kind of more of like a pong. Yeah. But you're a fixed monkey. But you throw out darts to pop balloons. Yeah. And some balloons have more durability or might have unique interactions. Like if you throw this bomb balloon, you're able to take out other balloons near it. And it's, again, just like clear the thing. You have a set number of darts. Right. Maybe you can get power-ups, whatever.
00:25:57
Speaker
And that was good on its own. And then they eventually made Bloon's tower defense. The joining of two great houses. The Bloon's house and the tower defense house. Yes. It was like super fucking good because.
00:26:13
Speaker
It was still like you're popping balloons, you had that cathartic effect to it. Yeah. And you had these monkeys who were throwing darts, but you could upgrade the monkeys. I like to pause before darts. Don't let us subvert, we'll usually... throwing shit.
00:26:28
Speaker
But the thing I really loved about it is it was fun for me to play. I had the opportunity to play with my dad or like we would enjoy watching each other play like, Oh, like you're doing this level. Oh, cool. Let me see what your strategy is because you have the variety of options for like, Oh, well I can do this tower and just like spam one type of tower. Yeah. Uh, usually for me, it became lightsaber monkeys, which were one of the later upgrades for the boomerang monkeys. Uh-huh.
00:26:55
Speaker
which it would throw out their projectile, but it would come back. Okay. Yeah. Instead of kind of just like shooting something out or doing something that would kind of go on a line or something that would explode for armored units. You know how this goes, but
00:27:08
Speaker
Bloons was fun. Yeah, I liked Bloons. I didn't I didn't check out tower defense I'm just liking the descriptions and mental pictures. I'm getting from lightsaber monkeys and like Boomerang monkeys and all of this all of this at once There really was a ridiculous amount of games like created in the flash space Like we're covering a lot of different genres. I'm realizing as we go through this and
00:27:39
Speaker
It's it's absolutely absurd that it continues through like as as recently as it has like the next thing on our list is Robot unicorn attack, which is by far the newest game on this list Like I don't even know when that came out. It was probably still a decade ago, but Definitely Like adult swim made this right? Yes. Yeah, I
00:28:02
Speaker
I remember seeing a trailer, the one time I was allowed to stay up till like 11 30. Right. Am I an adult? Can I, I was like, ah, yes. Ponies. But it was like a cool thing. It has music from, um, not the pesh mode. The other one.
00:28:22
Speaker
Yeah, I have no idea what the band is. But like it had like chill music, it had a double jump and a dash. It was like this fairly simple game that you could like have on noble these days. But it just took off like a fucking pony storm, you know?
00:28:43
Speaker
A pony storm, yeah. No, it's really basic. I think that's more evidence to this kind of core fundamental, like, get one mechanic and make it good format for a lot of these flash games.
00:29:00
Speaker
Like there was a, what was another one? There was one I was looking at. Uh, it was like, uh, stick RPG, which was like, go around, make money during the day and like spend your money, develop stats, things like that. Kind of like a dating RPG, but with none of the dating.
00:29:15
Speaker
Oh, yeah, um, which I guess just makes be the best stick figure you can be yeah, exactly. It's a personal development thing um, but people That's that's kind of the opposite side of this like single mechanic just make it work and then accelerate Because that's if I remember correctly it's been a while since I played a robot unicorn attack But the game just got faster like you kept going faster and faster. Yeah, that was kind of the difficulty curve It's like
00:29:41
Speaker
how them reflexes. Yeah, exactly. But with a lot of these flash games, you had very limited screen space. I can't recall one that was like, Oh, here's the full fucking browser window. Yeah. It's like, Hey, we're going to give you a 400 by 600. Good luck.
00:29:57
Speaker
Yeah, which led to the infamous problem in my in my case of like uh, it would be game that requires a lot of clicks and then misclick like um, defend your castle was notorious for that for me because i'm like flicking my mouse up to the top of the screen and then invariably I hit the back button I lose everything you're just like Well, I hope sometime in the future. This isn't how games are played Yeah
00:30:22
Speaker
And once once games developed like having some type of statefulness mm-hmm that Increasingly fucking helped yeah, but so many of these were you would just go on any random computer go to the site Download this like one one and a half meg file, and you play this simple ass game Yeah, so you could just do it from anywhere
00:30:43
Speaker
It's kind of like, it used to be that video games were made really tiny, like you'd have floppy disks, you know, and there's only so much you could have floppy disks or whatever. So people had this kind of efficiency mindset and games stayed small for like a really long time. Contrast that to modern games, where it's like
00:31:04
Speaker
Hey, I want to download that Titanfall and it's 50 gigabytes or something like that. You're like, well, that's unfortunate for my old drive. I guess it's time to buy a new one. Flash games kind of carried that forward for a long time because by necessity, they were just super, super tiny.
00:31:22
Speaker
I remember, um, there's a few games I used to play where it's like, uh, it would load a splash screen. Like it wouldn't have a loading bar, but it load a splash screen saying like, the game is not frozen. It's just 25 megabytes. So give it like 15 minutes to prepare. It's absolutely crazy.
00:31:44
Speaker
The things you just have like open up a separate tab, you'd be like, I'll come back to this. Yeah. I had, I had something that's on my list, uh, later, uh, from Lego mindstorms and it was like, um, six minutes, six minute or six Meg download. So, uh, on, on the average internet speed, give this 20 minutes or whatever to, to prepare, like playing away for something when we have so many things instantaneously or.
00:32:12
Speaker
Granted, my internet connection's gone down since I moved. Yeah. Cause I'm no longer doing gigabit, but I can get like any game in 20, 30 minutes tops. Yeah. It like doesn't matter. Yeah. It's like before things that would completely wipe out my hard drive. I'm just like, Oh, well I'll buy that on a limb and then install it and watch a YouTube video, like taking bandwidth and then come back and the game's done. Like that's not what the internet was like back then.
00:32:40
Speaker
Do you remember when you had to pause the YouTube video, you're like, we're going to wait till the red bar gets at least this far. Oh my gosh, buffering. And then I'll resume it. Yeah. And I'll assume that with enough buffer space, it should be able to complete the video without pausing again. Right. I think that's the traditional joke thing, right? It's be like, hey, I was watching some stuff online. There's some inappropriate content, whatever. I want to try this new move. They call it buffering.
00:33:08
Speaker
Yeah, jokes like that just don't exist. You come home from college, your parents are always like, you're slowing down the internet because I have 10 port tabs open. Yeah, that's completely inaccurate, Dave. I have no idea what you're talking about. Flash games. Next one.
00:33:32
Speaker
All right, we're talking about Bob. We'll come back to you and see your thing that I cut off. Well, the next one, let's just spank the monkeys. It'll become full circle. Right. Yeah, no, we're getting there. We're all getting there. So close.
00:33:48
Speaker
Oh man, I'm glad that nobody listens to this. I can't assassinate my character. Kwap though, that was a racing game. What was that? I feel like it was just you. You were the one guy.
00:34:04
Speaker
But you just have like janky ass mechanics like, hey, your movements bound to this shit. Yeah. It's like individual joints. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So it's like instead of just press W to move forward, it's like, all right, first this button makes you kick your foot out and then this button makes you put your foot down. And then, you know, it led to some absolutely ridiculous shenanigans and honestly, just hilarious situations.
00:34:31
Speaker
But like after you crab walk for 10 minutes, you have like a hurdle. You're like, Oh shit. And a lot of people did not get past it. I don't remember if I got past it. I feel like I had trouble with the first gatekeeper. This could actually be, I might've been incorrect. This could be the most well-known.
00:34:51
Speaker
game on this list um i'm tired i would say everyone at least know what co-op is yeah i think this was this one like made its rounds like in middle schools and high schools and things like that people like everyone's like hey have you seen this dumb ass game yeah you gotta try it and everybody did as far as i recall yeah um
00:35:13
Speaker
But I mean, nothing like a good old section of co-op to make you want to play Spank the Monkey, which was aforementioned a game used for cheating by right clicking with your mouse to accelerate it. But the premise was to continue the tradition of getting as far into the description before I tell you what the game is.
00:35:34
Speaker
Spank the monkey where you Pick up a was it like a paddle or like a foam finger like foam hand or something like a foam hand yeah, and There's like a balloon monkey and the goal was to like flick the mouse as quickly as possible To hit the balloon monkey with as much force. Yeah, it tells you how many miles per hour you hit the monkey Yeah, it's kind of like when you're driving and you're like, oh, there's like a a little little speed
00:36:03
Speaker
Checker on my street. So you accelerate? Yeah, exactly. Everyone tries to just like rampant break it So usually you get around like 30 to 40 mm-hmm if you know you had a wrist. Yeah This is pretty important for a lot of these games actually again It's like you'd right-click on the rightmost side of the screen. Mm-hmm Take your mouse all the way over the left side of the screen and then have your mouse fucking DBZ teleport
00:36:29
Speaker
It was just hit for like 600 MPH. Yes. And then as cool music would play, you're like, yeah, it was, it was a clip from Queens. Another one bites the dust and the sound clip said, good job. As you, as you did that, it was, it was great. I like, I didn't play that in preparation of this. I just have like serotonin in my brain from like succeeding at this. And again, hearing queen, that is like the one.
00:36:57
Speaker
Let's say like gameplay loop wise that's definitely shorter than Don't or you have to burn the rope. Yes. Yeah, but I play that don't serve a lot Don't start vicious life advice so far. I've never needed to give that to myself Yeah, I'm well on the other side of the don't starve spectrum. Can we do a cheers to that? If you can
00:37:19
Speaker
Wow, that's not going to even pick up. Wow. Yeah, a can on bottle does not make the best sound effect. Yeah. It's just like open bracket insert like toast sound effect here. Close bracket. Can we put two pieces of toast together?
00:37:35
Speaker
I don't think it would sound like that because it's like scratching maybe we'll get like ASMR listeners ASMR trigger pushing two pieces of toast together so anyways watch me make a sandwich without any spread oh man
00:37:54
Speaker
Sometimes I'm glad that we don't actually have listeners because we say some weird stuff. I know. Yeah, somebody's gonna like like check it out later and like quote me down the line. I'll be like who the fuck said that? I'll be like you. I'll be like oh shit. Oh my gosh. Oh man. There is a so go ahead.
00:38:16
Speaker
So I was gonna say, um, so on that previous note, obviously Newgrounds is like a big site for a lot of internet content. Just got like shit out. Yeah. That ranged from like music, your flash videos and these games. Yeah. But because Newgrounds accepted pretty much all content, there was a metric fuck ton of things that were inappropriate. Yes. Whether they be over the top racist and not okay. Or like over the top sexual.
00:38:47
Speaker
And not okay. But I had more of an interest at that age. But they were really
00:38:57
Speaker
Dumb things. Yeah, there's a lot of really really like diverse and stupid content on Newgrounds and some of like their their characters Were very popular like within the site. I remember like some fighting games I came out you'd have like two-dimensional fighting games and like or you'd have animations that have people like solid fingers and then
00:39:19
Speaker
Just just completely weird things where I never so I wasn't like huge into new grounds when I was a kid I'd play like some games there But I'd play on other games like our other sites like Congregate was a big one for me. Yeah armor games Because they just had games. Yeah
00:39:35
Speaker
Addicting Games was another one. And Newgrounds was kind of the, out of all of those, Newgrounds was the one where it was like an enclosed community, right? Like it was a, I don't know if I'd call it a budget 4chan, but it had its own community where people would have accounts. They would like make reviews. People would kind of develop a portfolio of games and graphics and audio and stuff. Oh, you can check out some of the accounts, like here are the flash videos they've made. Yeah.
00:40:05
Speaker
Um,
00:40:07
Speaker
Just saying Dunkey made some a really shitty content there. Yeah, I didn't know that until like I feel like he's still got a ways to go. Yeah someday Dunkey will make it But probably most notably for me would have been like Eagle Raptor. Oh, yeah who had all of his Metal Gear awesome things and like yeah that for me is when like quotable meme started because we
00:40:37
Speaker
God, like the Ninja Gaiden one is like, God can't help you now. And all these like dumb things. Yeah. Sometimes these flash videos would become gamified in a way. And some of them did like a really good job. I don't have examples because my memory is poor. That's fine. But that's the hallmark of our generation. I'm constantly being distracted. I'm just like, there's some flash games here. And I'm just like, I'm just going to stop recording the podcast and play some things.
00:41:07
Speaker
So what would you say was like stood out for you the most without looking? No, don't even touch the mouse. I was going to just scroll up unrelated because I was going to cue this up later. But what stood out to me the most? Like if I say flash games, what's the first thing that jumps to your mind? Well, what's funny is it's on the list because it's kind of like what I prepared. But I spent like a stupid amount of time on Lego games.
00:41:32
Speaker
Because they had their own, we've talked about addicting games, armor games, all of that. What LEGO did is they would reach out to third party developers. There was a studio named Templar that went out and now makes mobile games. I looked them up. I did the research because I'm an internet reporter. But what they did is they would make supporting products for, or they would make games to support their products.
00:41:57
Speaker
So they had Brick World, which is this 3D run-around adventure game, really toned down Super Mario 64 style thing. Or they would make some adventure games or puzzle games, tactics games.
00:42:15
Speaker
They had all of that and they were usually, I don't know about usually, some of them were surprisingly high quality because Lego was willing to like drop some actual money on having
Lego's Influence in Flash Gaming
00:42:29
Speaker
these made.
00:42:29
Speaker
I mean, that's Lego kind of does that. They're like, Hey, um, we have blank faced people with like a certain aesthetic and then they just apply it to everything. Like a racing Lego star. They just take other IPs are like, but what if we had a Lego version? Yeah. And, uh, one of the shades of gray is like, please, please stop Lego. It's for kids. Oh no.
00:43:00
Speaker
the one the the two that really stood out for me though was um Legos by Lego Bionicle they hate when people say Legos by the way they're like that's not that's not a word
00:43:12
Speaker
So I want to not be assassinated, so Lego Bionicle, which exploded briefly, I guess, when I was a kid. They're still doing it, but... So wait, this is a flash game? There was... So, in doing research for the podcast, I found a... I bought all these Bionicles! I went Toa! Really? I went Golly! So you know the names, though. Shh, don't tell people I know this.
00:43:39
Speaker
And yeah, cause I remember like when Bionicle first came out, they're like kind of cool toys. It was also non-standard Lego cause they were kind of designed more like connects to a certain extent. What are we talking about? This is the Lego episode, right? Okay.
00:43:56
Speaker
But anyways, they had this fantasy like universe set up. They had like a show they had all of this and it was like built off of fantasy and that lended itself well to Flash games in the adventure space and that's what they did. I found this site that had a listing of all of these old games that it pulled from Lego and there's like
00:44:19
Speaker
10 plus, like literally just LEGO Bionicle games. Wow. And some of them are like in depth with minigames, like adventure games, like exploring the island and figuring out puzzles and like discovering secrets and things like that. It's like it's really cool how in depth they went and they were basically flash games. Well, I said basically because some of them were Java games.
00:44:48
Speaker
What you mean like certain things were like very like browser that kind of Point and click. Yeah mine. You're like, hey, I'm gonna feed crunch berries to this thing and because people are like, oh I Can use this as marketing? Yeah, therefore Let's just have something in the space that exists
00:45:08
Speaker
Yeah. And it was, it was, it was honestly really cool. They supported it, um, to an extent that surpassed what a lot of other kind of independent people were doing at the time. Um, and then they, they pushed their other IPs as well. Like, um, uh, storm runner was another Lego series. No one knows about, uh, uh, it's not mind games. It was mind something, mind storm, mind stormers, barnstormers.
00:45:38
Speaker
huge shrug yeah huge shrug i think it was mindstorms lego mindstorms was another like kind of sci-fi that was their um you remember the old lego uh like rovers where it's like hey we put a camera on this one and that lasted for like a release before they're like let's not put a camera on a portable lego rover that kids can use
00:46:02
Speaker
Um, like they make games about what are we talking about? These are all flash games though. Like they they made tactics games around that nonsense. I do not remember These many games because like I said, yeah, but you didn't visit lego. You weren't you weren't that's true. Yeah You were too busy playing bionic. I was doing like some backyard football type things. Yeah But again, that was really just like
00:46:26
Speaker
Simple games, but a lot of my experience was just with Random ass shit. Yeah in the flash space on the internet because You'd be like, oh that's kind of cool But you maybe burn after a little bit and you just look for something you're like, what is this? Yeah, and then you'd find these different genres of games whether it be like I need to shoot bubbles to connect them together to break a thing or Someone did a really try hard RPG or someone who's like
00:46:54
Speaker
What if I animated boobs in a sound effect I have no idea we're talking about you lost me Yeah, and they split off from like those basic game premises into like things that
00:47:09
Speaker
kind of were developed more in the future we talked about it's not on the list but we talked about cookie clicker which while not a flash cape game is still a browser game i'm a huge fan of incremental games like a dark room which i didn't have you play in preparation for this i won't go like in depth but it is an incremental game and it's really immersive and pulls you in
00:47:33
Speaker
Did you plan if the games was like escape the room? I was actually thinking about this. I remember this there was there I have played a couple one of was actually one of them was actually a room and Another that I played. I can't remember the name of it at all, but I remember it was a cube. Oh
00:47:49
Speaker
And there was like puzzles intrinsic to the cube and you had to like, not, it wasn't a Rubik's cube. And that's what people are thinking, right? Um, but you'd have to rotate the cube and like solve puzzles that progressed around the cube until you could finally, uh, crack it and get open. But it had the similar, a similar flow to escape the room.
00:48:11
Speaker
What's crazy is I enjoyed, I mean, I've always enjoyed puzzle aspects. I like the problem solving and like using my brain to like, well, here's the obstacle. Uh, what tools would I have to solve this? Right.
00:48:27
Speaker
hashtag my job, but not the same. I was waiting for the like, and I used my brain to like destroy liberals.
00:48:43
Speaker
It was just really cool to be like I'm limited by these things and like I have to do some sleuthing Mm-hmm to kind of figure out what I needed to do. Yeah, and then many many years later to actually do Escape rooms. Yeah, like I feel like I've done Feel I can actually count I've probably done four mm-hmm three or four
00:49:04
Speaker
But it's really cool to see that literally come to life when I was like 13. I was just clicking on my browser. It's like there might be a key in this drawer. I'm going to click the drawer to see if the drawer opens. The advancements made in virtual reality are absolutely crazy. We've actually entered actual reality at this point. I'm just going to keep pinching myself. Is this real life?
00:49:30
Speaker
That's reality. This, this right here, this is reality. Um, and I think that's, I mean, we, we, we mentioned it, but keep coming
The Legacy of Flash Games
00:49:40
Speaker
back to it. Like we have so much to thank flash games for all of these genres, inspirations for activities that probably broke through into the real world. Uh, it was a hyper experimental development space where you could throw out a new idea and who cares if it fails, you'll have a new one next week. It's like.
00:50:00
Speaker
Um, the production value was traditionally really low. There were exceptions obviously. Um, but because the production value was so low, people could could just basically focus on the mechanics. Like, uh, you were mentioning the puzzle games and like,
00:50:16
Speaker
You can take some of what we kind of encompass there and you can extrapolate out of that and just keep building on it until you have the Talos Principle, like logic puzzles, things like that, like pattern matching, all of this. Obviously the Talos Principle is like a great game and it has a lot of mechanics built on top of that, but it comes from that analytical seed that you can find in a free flash game.
00:50:46
Speaker
Yeah, and this is back in the days before we had standards for Graphics plot and other things. Mm-hmm. We just had The internet we're like, oh shit. What's that? Yeah, and then anything that somebody put up would be like we like this we don't like this and it's slowly kind of shaped and got redirected into if you're like, oh I
00:51:08
Speaker
I need to do something a bit more of this. People like this type of tight control mechanics on platformers or people like certain gradients of turning in like Galaga type clones. All these little things kind of like fed together into more stuff. I feel like if you wanted some inspiration for game mechanics you could build upon, just like go back, play some flash games and like get some inspiration for what was built out there.
00:51:35
Speaker
And the 11th hour of this podcast, I remember two sites that I completely forgot about. Cartoon network, which had a crazy amount of awesome flash games. I'll only mention like one of them, but the team Titans original team Titans fighting game, they had a 2d fighter.
00:51:56
Speaker
Yeah, to be fair it could be my my nose bleeding I could be just my brain making memories Yeah, cuz I did play a lot of or watch a lot of Teen Titans back in the day. Mm-hmm It was it was the heroes versus the villains and you could play as either And you have meter. I think you did. Yeah. Yeah
00:52:14
Speaker
Yeah, I played this because I definitely did like a cyborg laser beam out of his arm. Yep. Yep. It was a freaking great game. And then the other website was Nickelodeon, which they had. I don't think they had some good games. They had a lot of games. Everybody was making games back then for some reason.
00:52:33
Speaker
But I remember they literally had this trading card Set up where you could like cash in cards and like get cards from games or trade cards with other people like on a market Like a decade ago like before all of this before Path of Exile for all of this and I completely forgot about it until literally right now hmm
00:52:55
Speaker
but it was fully in-depth and they had a living economy and all of this nonsense. I remember sitting there at the market, I just discovered where all of my Excel tendencies came from. I remember sitting here looking at the margins between trading cards and waiting for someone to list something low enough that I could buy it and then resell the card.
00:53:17
Speaker
Oh my gosh. Alright, I'm learning a lot about myself. See, like, I personally knew that my animal abuse tendencies came from Neopets. Right. So, like, that question's answered for me. It was Gigapets for me. Oh, I'm sorry. It was impossible not to abuse your Gigapet, though. It's like, alright, good night, Gigapet. Now that you're fully fed and healthy and you wake up in the morning and it's starved to death, you're like, I guess seven hours of sleep was just too much for me.
00:53:46
Speaker
Man, that was a stupid thing.
00:53:48
Speaker
All right. If we're doing like shotgun nostalgia, do you remember e-reader on the game boy? I, uh, I have no idea what you're talking about. Oh, was that the, was that the barcode thing or was that something else? It was essentially like a type of barcode scanner and they had like these Pokemon e-reader cards where you could kind of scan the Pokemon and then like have that in game. So their big draw was like trying to get other things like, well, we have to e-reader, uh, we have to put it on stuff. Yeah. So people will get the e-reader and the same way that they had a.
00:54:19
Speaker
whatever the attachment was for N64, where you could be like, oh, well, you can take your Game Boy color cartridge and slide that into here to play with your Pokemon on Pokemon Stadium. Pokemon Stadium. Yeah. Um, yeah, they had that converter. I remember there was a, I mean, I'm going to stop.
00:54:37
Speaker
We're gonna stop. But as far as barcode scanning, I remember there was this old dinosaur fighting game and literally... Digimon? It was... it was... no, not Digimon. Dinosaur fighting game, Digimon. Digital monsters. And it was barcode agnostic. So it was just scan a barcode, get a dinosaur, and then fight him. It was like PC, I think, with like an accessory or something. I can't remember exactly.
00:55:03
Speaker
This is far enough back that I'm making things up in my mind. I definitely remember it being a mobile app, like when we were in college. Yeah. Which might have been a variation after that. I feel like this was before phones. This was back in the... Before phones. Alexander Graham Bell, you can fuck off. This was way before your time. You fought with actual dinosaurs, if I recall. We gave the old T-Rex the fisticuffs.
00:55:33
Speaker
Oh man. I don't know if this is about flash games anymore, but...
00:55:38
Speaker
I feel like we lost a little bit once we got like that Lego fucking niche. I think anytime we get into like nostalgia, it goes it goes a little bit crazy. A little bit, but I feel like that's the nature of nostalgia. Right. Remembering old things that you forgot about for a long time, but it brings back this feeling of joy and youth. Yeah. And this is the payoff for our listeners for suffering through the weird lewd jokes that we come up with.
00:56:09
Speaker
That all being said, thank you for listening to another episode of Soapstone. As always, you can reach out to us at soapstonepodcast.gmail.com or join the discussion on Facebook at facebook.com slash soapstonepodcast where I'm going to try to remember to put a link to some of the games that we've discussed.
00:56:28
Speaker
At least the names. I don't really want to be responsible for giving people viruses But maybe there's something on the list that you're like crap I remember that they can have the opportunity go back play and also if you have something that you remember you're like, holy shit I used to play this flash game so much and we Didn't cover it probably because we forgot right? Please let us know if they because I would love to have that astrology trip if this is my Sarah tell no
00:56:56
Speaker
I was going to say, if this podcast is an indicator of anything, we forget everything. So I just remember it's on Thursdays. Yep. That's all we need to, all we need to know, but it's not Thursdays for anyone else. That's the weird thing. I might've given up too much information. They're going to dox me now. They know where I live. If people can figure out where you live based off the fact that we record Thursdays, I think they deserve to find you at that point. And I'll be waiting.
00:57:26
Speaker
Until next time, everybody. We'll see you in the next one.