TITLE: Flash games... I don't really need to say anything else. AUTHOR: Jim9137 DATE: 4/23/2005 12:03:00 ap. ----- BODY:

The Helicopter. The Roflcopter. The Defend the Castle. The countless Tetris clones, marble and other shooters. The Yeti Sports, stickdeath and so on and so on... Does any of these ring any bell for you? Should, since this is the one of the more hideous parts of the Internet. The dreaded Flash games. And now we're going to take a look at them. --- "Holy shit, what the heck is that?" Is quite regular scream at the computer class in my school. A bunch of students, with nothing productive to do at their breaks is drawn to the wonders of the internet, as usual. Most of this time, instead of doing something productive like reading your email (Seriously, no one does that at school. It's not safe.) or searching for info to your homework, people are either A) Scrambling through IRC-Gallery, B) Laughing at some silly pic of the day, á la Goatse et all, D) Playing flash games. What are Flash Games? Well, they are those coffee-break fun games on the internet. There's already hundreds, thousands of them all around. "You play Java games! EW!" Was the saying not too long ago. Then flash kicked in and Java actually became quite competetive language for games. And that's how my dear readers, stuff happened. In fact, most of the Flash games can be summed with two words; "Stuff happened." And as with everything, there's lots of crap and few gems buried underneath. For example, www.homokaasu.org sports quite amazing games in it's site which are both innovative AND addictive, but then we could take a look at www.miniclip.com or www.candystand.com and we could see what cloned crap 85% Flash games are. Someone makes a rather neat concept (for example Defend your Castle) and after few weeks you see 300 and one clones made of it. With varying themes, parodies and some actually expand the concept, but the plagiarism is even WORSE with Flash games than with the 'real' games. Take a look at thisand check the description. They won't even deny the fact! Hmpf. With free games, this is probably unavoidable, well, freely distributed that is. I've seen few games that need money in order to lock some of their features... Although, I have to wonder if these types of schemes make any money. You could just buy a more proper game while you're at it, instead of wasting the money on some obscure game that you saw on even obscurer netsite. It's screaming deceit all over it. And there's probably a clone of it somewhere, anyway. Another thing with flash games, as I understood it, is that it's way easier than programming in Java and thus is why it's so immensly popular. Judging from some of the graphics in some games, the games are made by 3-year-olds. Really, some of it's that bad. Anyway, are these games good for anything? Why are they so popular? Is it about the same effect as spam was? To start, yes, they can be quite good timekillers. And quite innovative on the game designing part, since no one is breathing down your neck and demanding that your bring this game to the christmas markets or trying to sell their 'vision' on to you. On top of that, they're quite cheap to make so if one thing bombs you can just try something else with minimal loss. They're also very easy to reach, a bit googling should bring you few sites with games, but the mouth-to-mouth method is probably the largest contributing factor to this. It's far easier to talk with someone about Flash games than say, Doom 3. If you'd say to me "Blood 2 was oberly superior to Blood look at da grpahics maaaan1!!" I'd probably punch you in the nose. (That was taken from real life. My friend managed to constrain me.) Hence, when you're playing a silly game and someone walks up to you and says "Heh, that is really silly game you know. What's your score?" It's easy to continue the conversation from there. It's a social thing too, apparently. Globz is a good example of this, their all games are based on two things: A) Cutesy things are forced to do random things with terrific and innovative gameplay ideas B) The sociality that just breathes and is encouraged by the site. As surprising as it might sound, I don't feel most of the "Multiplayer only" games encourage that factor at all. It's just bunch of Gasts with infitely long numbers playing checkers against each other. Oh! OH! We can pull in Yahoo! here! It's games are in Java though, but it shows very nicely done idea of giving bunch of games for freely registered users to play and then boast to eachother about their ratings. Not terribly new idea that, but Yahoo! managed to do it popular by making it work. Arh, I can't write in 01:04, anyway. So Yahoo! works, but is there grey clouds in the sky? Is it really that wonderous? Well, yes it has. It's called spammers and leets and just people who are taking everything so bloody effin seriously. A form of entertainment in it's own way, for those sick enough (like me). I mean, I don't know if anyone really believes if 3 exactly same spambots with differents numbers in the end advertise "their sites which has more exposing photographs" will actually start a private conversation with the things and give out their credit card number. RIGHT? To sum it up, Flashgames are popular, they're spreading at an exponential rate... If it were an animal, it would probably crash and die in few years. Hey, maybe it will! We'll see. Most liable to be targeted for scams, spams and the like. They're social, they don't make you look like nerd (even my granny does it!) and such. It's different than the 'real' games, they can be innovative and unique or be just another tetris clone, and well, that's pretty much it. I just felt I had to write something. Hopefully it was coherent enough for you peeps to enjoy it. OOOH! We've broken the 1000 visitors limit! All hail to the king, which is not me.

----- COMMENT: AUTHOR:  Anonyymi EMAIL: URL: DATE: 00:36 Where the hell is the c) activity on the school internets? ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR:  Jim9137 EMAIL: URL: DATE: 17:46 Think about it. ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR:  Anonyymi EMAIL: URL: DATE: 01:06 Sounds great, i like funny games too. Makes them more entertaining to play! So,this one is my favorite flash game. Have a nice evening. ----- --------