I miss the era of the internet with random games on every website
I miss the era of the internet with random games on every website
131 comments
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I see you don't appreciate the "click all traffic lights" minigame on every single website in existence
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All right, bonus ambiguous motorcycle level!
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Or "Click the zebra crossing" and the page is a 6*6 image and it's just one huge zebra crossing
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I actually made a random game you can play without login or tracking or anything. Dunno if it's any fun, though 🤔
And you need a keyboard to play. Otherwise it's just a screensaver.
https://nailbar.io/proj/miniduel3/
Sorry about the plug, but I am kinda proud of it.
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I mean, that's a pretty badass screensaver.
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Dude! This is amazing! How did you get it to run so smoothly?
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There's some optimization, like not drawing anything out of view, but other than that I guess it's just the case of this game not really doing all that much, and the physics is delegated to a third party library.
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THIS is what I'm talking about!
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OMG - This game gives me flashbacks to my Netrek days: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netrek
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That makes for a great screensaver though.
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Issues with Flash and the actual quality of those games aside, what I really miss from that period of the internet was that children could use it safely. There's no spaces for children on the internet anymore and I think that's really sad, nine year old should be playing Hannah Montana dress-up not get eating disorders from TikTok influencers
Edit for clarity: I didn't mean to come off as though I think the internet was ever safe for unsupervised children because that's not what I believe. What I was trying to say is that the loss of spaces made for children, with adequate content curation and moderation, pushed children on social media which is awful for them
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what I really miss from that period of the internet was that children could use it safely.
Or less safely. You have to try a lot harder to see someone crush a glass jar in their anus nowadays.
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yeah naw, I was flirting with pedophiles in chat rooms at like 12, it absolutely was not a safe space. Maybe not as harmful of a space, but the internet has always been poison to children. It's why parental supervision is so important.
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While it frustrated me as a kid, I think Poptropica’s method of players speaking to each other through prewritten dialog options was the safest option to keep things from getting weird or contact continuing on another platform where the site creators can’t keep kids safe anymore. If they just relied on word filters, people would just type differently to get around them and the words “face” and “book” wouldn’t be banned even if “Facebook” was.
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Homie, the porn was right next to the flash games on Kongregate.
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Is it a sarcastic post? Internet was not safer before, it's just much more accessible to kids nowadays, the good and the bad, thanks to wireless connections, small portable computers and easy UIs.
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Not sarcasm just a poor choice of words haha. You're right in that the internet wasn't safer, what I was trying to get across was that at least when there were sites for children they had a curated space where they wouldn't be exposed to anything inappropriate, whereas now they're on sites that don't cater to children (and nor should they!) where they're exposed to lots of things they shouldn't be exposed to
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Nice shitpost
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I miss those days so much, never forget what they took from us.
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Don't forget miniclip!
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Anagram magic was my jam!
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I still vote on newgrounds. Been a member for more than 20 years...
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Remember Notdoppler!
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I spent a lot of time on candystand.com too.
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I was thinking about old flash games the other day. Swords and Sandals and Line Rider ate a lot of my time.
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I apologize in advance for any decrease in productivity or wasted time.
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I'm on a Macromedia kick this morning but the internet really died when adobe bought flash, turning point for me personally lol
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Flash was hells response to programming languages though. Where is uh that web stuff that should revolution everything, html5 mebbe?
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Yeah there is a bit of nostalgia for me, admittedly. Modern canvas with a decent lib can produce flash-like/flash-superior content but the tooling is aimed at engineers while flash was aimed at creatives/general public (imho), hence why we got so much trash (accessability) but also why we got so much incredible stuff (again, accessability)
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I opened lemmy to procrastinate working on my web game and this is the first post I see.
I can take a hint internet.
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I'm sure you get asked this a lot, but why is your username backwards?
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For fun I put a RTLO char in my display username and wrote it backwards to see what clients it can break. The answer is a lot.
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Yeah, I miss it in some ways, too. It was more of the Wild West of internet.
I would argue today's internet is fully optimized for control over people (when desired) & profitability. Unless there's some Earth-shattering backlash where idk people kill all ads & they purchase NOTHING online unless they very specifically search for it....this is the internet, perfected. The internet is free, our attention & wallets are the product. Traded, tracked, bought, and sold.
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I grew up in the wild west of the internet and I do miss it. Things were so much more interesting, but that was probably becuase I was a kid and the internet was new, so having all this content was not usual.
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It used to be a whole weird wide world. Then the corpos got a hold of it, and now it's 5 giant spyware websites filled with screenshots of the other 4. Say what you will about the old web (NO HTTPS!) but at least it was human.
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Itch.io game devs unite! There's still hope. I miss Ebaumsworld, New grounds and Miniclip too but I think there a small part of the Internet that still has this charm.
Here's my game dev contribution:
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The Lego website had a huge collection of games.
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You can still find a lot of their games on the various flash game collection websites. I lived on Lego and Cartoon Network games.
I'll forever miss playing that Galidor Quest one though. Haven't found a place to replay that, think someone said it needed backend stuff that wasn't ever made public. 😭
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What "not leaving money on the table" does to a mf
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Am I misremembering or would corporate websites randomly have branded flash games
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We got a free, breakfast-themed Doom total conversion .wad in boxes of Chex. Truly a golden age.
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ChexQuest marked humanity's peak
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Most Aussies of around my age can remember getting (or at least knowing someone else who got) a full copy of Age of Empires on a CD contained in Kellogg's cereal. That was truly a great time.
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I remember playing King of the Hill paintball Shockwave plugin game.
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The old internet was like the wild west. Who'd have thought it would meet a similar fate to it too?
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We referred to it as the wild west even back then, and we knew eventually civilization would catch up.
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For me, it’s the fact that every god damned program I want to use requires a fucking subscription.
Shout out to fucking Blender and GIMP and InkScape. They’re really keeping shit cool.
So sick of this “pay to play” structure we now have on EVERYTHING.
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Lifesavers had a bowling game on their site that was actually a ton of fun and decent quality. All the balls were patterned to look like their candy, but still. It was free and that's where the advertisements ended.
It was a fair trade.
Edit: This might've actually been creamsavers, not lifesavers. It was back in 2002.
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I've been inside a few big companies and I've seen exactly how it works.
In order to manage huge organisations, they divide them all up into cost centers. And the website is considered marketing so it gets given a budget on the theory that it brings customers. It uses the budget to make games and it does indeed bring customers.
Then a few years later, the shareholders are asking why their stock hasn't outperformed the market, and they put in a CEO tasked with fixing it, and the CEO asks the head of the department in charge of websites what can he do to address the fact that his department is losing money instead of making it.
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While this is a nice theory, even with traditional marketing like print and tv ads, it's always going to cost the company money.
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For sure. But it's a harder sell internally to say: This game is generating revenue.
With a print ad you might say: This magazine has x monthly readers, so that is the impressions we get and it's rather obvious how that might give you more sales.
With the game, you might have some visitor numbers as well, but if that is translating to sales is hard to prove. Additionally, they are already on your website.
You might have to do a survey of your clients or during the order process and ask them "how did you find out about us?" or something like that. And only if enough people say "I bought something from you, because of the game on your website", will you be able to justify the expense of maintaining it.
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I remember when Chex and Dominoes put out games that were better than they had any right being. Chex even gave it away for free.
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There's a remastered version of Chex Quest that is pretty awesome.
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I doubt this will be the catalyst for social change, but I agree. The idea that society owes nothing to the average person, but ownership class members are entitled to public resources, is exactly what will cause heads to roll, if we get to that point. This is a silly little microcosm of that situation, and I do miss those days.
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itch.io, sort by free browser games
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I loved their Dexter's lab Flash game back in the days. CN and Nick lost their charm
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You can still do that on newgrounds.com
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Robot Unicorn Attack was my shit.
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That was back when every site wanted you to install a toolbar that was spyware.
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It was the best of times. It was the bloated of times.
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The Ed Edd and Eddy game where you used machine puzzle pieces to put a jawbraker into a bucket was my game as a kid.
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There was also a beavis and butthead game somewhere where you hocked a loogie at people from a rooftop lol
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Still waiting for the resurgence of Ben 10. I feel like WB games would have made a standalone game a la arkham by now if it wasn't so mismanaged
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I'd love it to be absolutely anyone other than WB Games though
Could make for a cool Metroidvania game. Go around defeating the various aliens to gain their powers and unlock new exploration and combat abilities. Could be 2d or 3d game with plenty of platforming and combat. Basically just hollow knight but you transform to use different powers
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The hard part of implementing a good Ben 10 game is that you would have to create at least 11 different gameplay styles to encapsulate the feeling of being Ben. You somehow need to find a way to integrate all of that into a cohesive game that doesn't make you think "oh no not the Grey Matter section again" when you're forced to solve some convoluted puzzle.
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Oof my personally specific nostalgia.
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I remember pure website games too. There was some alien one where you had a certain amount of energy to use for the day. You could work out, attack other aliens or a few other things. Didn't cost anything to play. It was hard starting out because higher level guys could attack you. I remember putting a note: "please stop attacking me." One person attacked and said: "no."
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I'm sympathetic to the "Why does everything have to require a fucking login?"
But come on. So many of those games were just inferior reskins of classics. If you want to play Pac-Man, then play Pac-Man. You don't need to go to Lays.com and play Cheeto Crunchers, where a giant Chester Cheetah floating head chases snack foods through a maze.
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ugh I remember the Cartoon network resort and despite everything it was amazing
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To an extent this still exist, but instead of flash games its now html5 games
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Frogapult!
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Friv.com has a simple UI that's fairly kid safe. Just throw /old at the end of the URL to get the better, older UI. The new one is kinda meh. Friv doesn't have a lot of games, but enough to keep you entertained for a while every now and then. Its' biggest strength was always the simple UI. No accounts, comments, ratings, anything. Only games.
I love that Ruffle exists, it makes so many of these good old flash games sites great again!
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Did anybody else play Kids Next Door Fusion Fall?
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Did anyone else play the dungeons-and-dragons-esque text based game on the Eragon website?
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I mean all those in browser games required shockwave, flash, or java which basically was malware but we didn’t know better then
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We used to get video games in the captain crunch box or in exchange for tokens on the crunch boxes or something to that effect... anyway that was essentially just a flash game but equally if not more interested. Got a lot of mileage out of that crunchwrare game in the 90s
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My website has a game on it still lol
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link?
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131 comments
Oh, wow, we're there now?
Like, the online hellscape of endless Flash applets and browser shovelware games is retro now?
You get what that means, right? In twenty years you GenZ Tumblr nerds will be in some online forum recoiling in horror at some kid waxing nostalgic about back when you could just play a free gacha game full of anime waifus and where have all the good phone games gone?
It's happening and you're not ready.
Well, either that or Thunderdome. We'll see.
Ok but where have the good phone games gone. I'm horrified watching a 10 year old or so relative playing games on his phone only to spend 90% of the time watching unskippable ads.
It's worth it to pay 1 to 5 dollars for a no ad mobile game for the kid. Even if they play it for a week, it's just like any other $5 toy they may have gotten and got bored of.
Balatro has an Android version which is great
This is why I just set my kid up with an emulator and a huge list of games.
Well, for one thing there are plenty of directly purchaseable games on phones these days. I've been handing kids some Peglin and heard no complaints.
For another, 2000s Flash games WERE unskippable ads and yet here we are.
Horrified, you will be. I'm telling you.
There were never any good phone games. That past of the industry was immediately filled with micro transactions and gambling esque mechanics.
You can find lots of good ones curated from minireview.io
The next balatro (at least in terms of game being played into the ground by Northernlion) is nubby's number factory.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/3191030/Nubbys_Number_Factory/
Almost every asset has a gradient, or is a low poly model.
EDIT : Overwhelmingly Positive (4,480 reviews)
2000s are back baby. The only thing that sucks is that I don't feel 90s retro really took off, the 80s just had a double helping.
The 90s nostalgia is all the boomer shooters, Thief and Deus Ex style immersive sims, and indie games with a PS1 or N64 style aesthetic.
Also Hypnospace Outlaw.
Who Rules Barter Town?!?
Not Macromedia, I'll tell you that.