Flash Game Remembrance 💀

nomadic

With the beginning of the year 2021, support for Adobe Flash is ending... While I am happy that web standards have moved on to better and more secure standards, it does bring with it the death ( *sort of, more on that below ) of a part of my childhood, Flash Games.

Many people might never really have been exposed to too many Flash Games, as there were more full featured gaming experiences available through other means, but it could be fun to share some of your favorite Flash Games here for those that did get a chance to play some browser based games.

How to keep playing

If you find yourself wanting to take a walk down memory lane, you can still play many of the Flash Games of yore ( wasn't really all that long ago )

BlueMaxima's Flashpoint
http://bluemaxima.org/flashpoint/

Mentioned a few times in previous threads, this archive of webgames is pretty impressive. You should be able to find most games in their collection, even some obscure ones.

You probably want to download the Flashpoint Infinity version, which lets you download games as you choose. Unless you are a data hoarder and want to archive the complete collection (532 GB).

Each game should include everything you need to run it locally (no need for Flash to remain installed), but I did encounter issues running one game.
Archiving Games as SWF Files and Using a Flash Projector
If you can still find a website hosting the Flash Game you want to save, you should be able to download it as an SWF file by inspecting the page with devTools.
1. Getting the SWF File
  Navigate to the website URL with the game and inspect the page with the right-click context menu or pressing Ctrl + Shift + I
  
  Then go to the Network tab at the top of devTools and look for entries that are .swf files. You might need to refresh the page with devTools still open if the Network Tab is blank. The .swf files should have a content type listed as something like application/x-shockwave-flash. There might be a few, so it might require some trial and error or making educated guesses based off the file names.
  
  Right click on the item and select Copy → Copy Link Address.
  
  Paste the link in a new tab which will either start downloading or launch the game in that tab.
  
  It seems like you need Flash working to see the SWF files in devTools. I have already uninstalled Flash on my system, but it still works in Internet Explorer on Windows. Pasting the copied link in IE just launches the game, but is difficult to figure out how to download, so I just paste the link into another browser, which starts the download. Note, it seems to crash Vivaldi.
2. Downloading a Launcher to Load the SWF Files for When Flash is Uninstalled
  Since you should uninstall Flash from your system, you need another way to launch the SWF files. At least as of right now, Adobe will still let you download a Flash Projector, which is like a standalone version of Flash. This is basically the same thing BlueMaxima from above uses.
  
  You can find it here: https://www.adobe.com/support/flashplayer/debug_downloads.html
  
  Find the version for your operating system, and click on the option called Download the Flash Player projector.
  
  Then all you need to do is open the SWF files with the Projector.
  
  Some games only work with older versions of Flash, so you might have hunt down older Project versions. Just make sure they come from a reputable source (same goes for the SWF files).
  
  Another issue is that some games need some extra components. This is more difficult to address, and will need to be looked into on a game by game basis.

Middle school, for me, was filled with lots of time with access to computers, but the internet was shut off other than during specific times. We weren't able to download and install programs, but we were able to download SWF files.

I spent a good chunk of time time playing Flash Games with this method. There are not too many ways to occupy your time on a locked down Mac computer. I could only make so many images and animations using shapes in Pages and Keynote or using the image preview tool to do some basic photo editing, so being able to play Flash Games offline was a major discovery.

nomadic

N-Game v1.x (not v2, it has worse level design)

(click image for site)

( A tad violent with the death animations, but it is a minuscule stick figure on the screen, so it isn't so bad. )

This is one of my favorite skill based Flash Games. It has very precise and satisfying controls where the length of time you hold down a button influences your movement.

There are a wide variety of well designed levels with different types of enemies that are focused on preventing you from reaching the exit door on each level.

The enemy types include:

Drones that move around the map with varieties that shock you if you get too close (with another sub-variety that will rush in your direction if you come into its vertical or horizontal line of sight), shoot a laser blast in your direction that lasts for a few seconds, or shoots a machine gun type weapon at you
Stationary enemies that have a target locking laser that tracks your movements until it gets a good shot, or another type that shoots a seeking missile that you need to try and evade until it crashes into a wall
Drones that move along flat surfaces to shock you when you set foot on the surface
And mines that make precision jumping necessary

As a timer runs down, you need to run around the level, jumping off walls, through one-way gates, off of jiggly blocks, or on jump boosters to collect the exit door key that could be locked behind additional gates with keys scattered about the map. Collecting gold helps increase the time, but it is often a trap to go for the gold.

It is a very challenging game that can be frustrating at times, but the satisfaction of completing a tough level is worth it.

Sometimes getting close to the end of a level can make you overly cautious and lead to disaster like this:

Expand to play GIF

Dr.Flay

You may be interested to know that the Web Archive has added support for rendering flash files.
https://archive.org/details/softwarelibrary_flash

http://blog.archive.org/2020/11/19/flash-animations-live-forever-at-the-internet-archive/
http://blog.archive.org/2020/11/22/flash-back-further-thoughts-on-flash-at-the-internet-archive/

Also you can play SWF files in Winamp/WACUP, VLC, Media Player Classic and Irfanview.

LonM

Some of my favourite games were from nitrome. But they requested that flashpoint remove them from their archive. So I guess their games are unplayable for the moment while they migrate them to HTML5.

Kirk00

Brings back so much memory. tnx for sharing

Priest72

I have the flash standalone player on my pc and have downloaded approximately 35,000 flash swf files which run good as far as i can see.Plus i have palemoon browser for the flash plugin which palemoon still supports for the tricky games which don't work in the projector.

A lot of stuff is on the internet archive too including bluemaxima .
it was indeed sad to see flash go but i still trip the light fantastic with the setup i have.