Ike's Flash game preservation project (downloads included)

[Isaac Sauvage]

If you want to jump to the games, you can skip to the next part. If you're interested in how Flash is being preserved, check out this list of resources. Below is an explanation of what's going on:

Finally tried out BlueMaxima's Flashpoint project, and I must say it's pretty impressive! Flashpoint is a massive project meant to preserve not just old Flash games and animations, but content made in Shockwave, Java, Unity, Microsoft Silverlight, 3DVIA, PopCap, ActiveX, and of course, Shiva3D. 16 different dev platforms in all.

So if you're missing some favorite Flash games and don't need the hassle of tracking down their .SWF files and getting them to run in modern browsers, this is a great way to not only get them all in one place, but to discover and play around with many more by the same sites & devs. The growing database is up to ~50K entries at this point, and there are over 100 resource contributors & tinkerers on the project.

This project also solves a major issue common to many Flash games-- getting them to run offline on your local setup. Flashpoint usually solves that by creating a virtual web server, persuading the game that it's still running on the original host. Another method (I've used this myself with success) is to use editing tools to change paths and remove links in various .SWF files, and that's another part of the work being done by the project team.

Just now I compared some of my local collection of 500+ archived Flash games to their list, and right now Flashpoint looks like they already have ~75% archived. That's nice to see, and I'm thinking I might want to get involved in the project at some point to add the missing games they don't have yet.

To wrap this up, the downloadable installer size is 466mb. Or if you like, you can torrent the installer bundled with the complete collection of games; around 330gb(!) After you install, the interface lets you browse the list of games in various ways, and when you double-click one, if you don't already have it, the game will download automatically, then run in the matching player bundled in.

With Flash games in particular, these will play not in browser but in Adobe's official player. What's nice is that you can usually expand them to fullscreen, which wasn't commonly possible running them from their original sites.

Sample screenies below:

 

[Isaac Sauvage]

Read below for how to use a solo Flash player without needing the FlashPoint suite. Also included is a cool game to test it with:

While this crazy world spins out of control, I've continued to investigate the Flashpoint software suite. IMO it could still use some polish in various ways, but it's already quite powerful and really, absolutely invaluable for me at this point.

The bundled-in Flashplayer_32_sa.exe (only 15megs) has become my default Flash player, taking over from Firefox, which I used to play .SWF files in the past. In fact it's a relief not having to worry about Mozilla screwing up it's built-in Flash-player via update, which has been known to happen before.

Ordinarily I'd recommend getting the player direct from Adobe, but since Flash is going to be officially discontinued at the end of this year, instead I'd recommend going for the basic Flashpoint suite, instead (linked earlier). What's nice is that Flashpoint includes at least ten different players (attachment #1) for historic purposes, probably because every once in a while an old game requires an old player to run.

If you don't want to download the Flashpoint project at this time, attachment #2 is Adobe's Flash player I was talking about. It's the one I've been using this past week, and to my surprise, has allowed me to run some archived Flash games I wasn't able to in the past. I scanned it with up-to-date Windows Defender, and it's attachment #2.

If you'd like a game to test it with, how about Robot Avoider? I just discovered it today, and it's quite a cool mashup of classic games, such as the 16-bit classic Crystal Quest, with hints of the old 8-bit, turn-based Dalek game, in which you you try to outwit and outmaneuver a bunch of enemies for as long as you can. It's a pretty intense but minimilast game, with lots of levels, different enemies, and upgrades. Two screenies are attached. It even has a pinball level!

If that interests you, grab the .SWF file below and save it to your machine: (edit: it's also attachment #5)

http://www.benoldinggames.co.uk/sf/benoldinggames/games/swfs/RobotAvoider.swf

Then double-click it, and point it to wherever you placed the Flash player. From then on, every .SWF game should run with a double-click.

Any problems or questions, feel free to post. Happy gaming. :)

 

[Isaac Sauvage]

Okay, let's get it on! Here are four of my all-time favorite Flash arcade-style games:

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Para-Uber is a ridiculously cool, intense, upgraded remake of the 8-bit classic Paratrooper. While it's tempting (and fun) to lay on the fire button and sweep your gun all over the screen, cutting down enemies willy-nilly, you also lose points by doing so. In other words, your final score equals how much ammunition you save across the game. So it's important to balance precision fire against going all-out. There's lots of different enemies and depth to the game, as you'll discover. Pro tip: if an enemy reaches the ground (that's bad news), you can take them out by kerplunking another enemy on top of their heads. That's done by shooting out their parachute instead of going to the body.

​

Hot Rocks is one of the cleanest, coolest upgraded Asteroids remakes I've ever seen. The main new feature here is the ability to enter a docking station and grab special weapons to play with.

​

Uber-Boat is an absolutely killer version of the arcade classic Depth Charge. You pilot a destroyer, dropping depth charges on waves of enemy submarines firing torpedoes and mines upwards at you. Your supply of depth charges is limited, and replenishes slowly, which means there's a real art to skillfully dodging the enemies' shots while preserving your ammunition for just the right moments. Like Para-Uber (by the same outfit), this game gets incredibly intense at higher levels.

GRID RUNNER++ is kind of a silly lark, very much in line with the original 8-bit game. It's a Centipede-style shooter with lots of fun, gonzo effects... as much of a game as it an immersive toy. Note: give it an extra moment to start up after loading.

Remember, you can go full-screen with all these games by hitting Ctrl-F from the player, or just using the menu drop-downs.

 

[Isaac Sauvage]

Hmm... so we now have less than three months left before Flash goes offline. The clock is ticking! My local collection now stands at about 800 worthy games, but there's still hundreds more to evaluate before the new year. This is going to be tough.

Maybe what makes the effort worthwhile is when I discover a stone-cold classic that for some reason I'd never seen before. Such was the case recently with Bumper Bowl 1000, which I'll describe and attach last.

Kings of Conquest v6 is based on the 8-bit classic Lords of Conquest, which was itself based on classic board games like "Risk." LoC made some key changes to the formula, such as removing armies and instead having the number of adjacent territories count as your military strength. It also added nifty features such as resources, cities, weapons, boats and stockpiles, making the game more interesting and complex. Kings of Conquest takes all that and adds even more wrinkles, such as magic, kings and special units. Happily, you can completely customise "settings" to specify which features you want and which you don't, meaning you can make the game as simple or as involved as you want. The only edit I've made to the game file is to allow it to run full-screen. Note: unfortunately the sounds aren't very good in this version, something which I may try to improve in future. However, if you want the latest version with better sound effects, you can play it online while it still lasts here.

Win One Million is a great little version of the Who Wants to be a Millionaire trivia gameshow. It's got the music, the question tree, the three lifelines, and a fairly deep question set. My only quibble is that the questions date from 2006, and are a little too oriented towards American culture for my taste. Despite that, it's still a load of fun. Note: if you don't mind the "Jeopardy" format, you can play with a more dynamic set of online questions here.

Barbarian Onslaught - The Secret of Steel is a rollicking, gory, yet still adorable tribute to 8-bit classic hack'n'slash games, like Conan: Hall of Volta, Bruce Lee and others. The controls are pretty ingenious in that they're literally just 'arrows and action key,' yet you can perform an array of different combat actions based on timing alone. There's a pleasantly surprising level of atmosphere and little details for such a stripped down game, including tricky bosses across various levels.

Globetrotter XL is probably the best geography game I've ever seen. In a Flash game, or anywhere else. The concept is very simple-- you're given a location and have to click your best guess on a map of the Earth, trying not to take too much time. You receive a score based on how close your guess was. Questions come in small sets, and if you score enough points in one, you move on to another set with an additional location to guess, requiring a slightly higher (and harder) minimum score to pass.

 

[Isaac Sauvage]

Bumper Bowl 1000 is a unique, ingenious mashup of games like Shuffleboard and Roller Derby. You and the computer each start with a four-unit team, and to win, you must eliminate the other team first. Players alternate turns in which they may fling one of their units (in succeeding order) around the game level, trying to damage the other team's units. Hazards include electrified walls and lava pits which can set a unit on fire for a couple turns. There's also a randomly appearing power-up that lets a unit become charged with electrical force for a few turns, with the aim of shocking the enemy units.

There's plenty of tactics in this game, and likewise strategies that work and ones that don't. It's important both to plan your shots well and to execute them by moving your mouse to indicate force & direction, then releasing. Lots of things can go wrong, such as accidentally bumping your other units in to bad positions, missing the enemy, or damaging yourself... all to frustrating (and hilarious) effect! OTOH, it's also hugely satisfying to pull off a great shot, causing catastrophic chain reactions amongst the enemy.

One other thing to note is that before you begin, you get to choose the individual units for your team from a roster, each with different qualities, like "mass," "speed," and "armor." Other units need to be unlocked first. I was a little confused about this part of the game as a beginner, but fortunately, once you choose and save your team, you can keep using it automatically with a single click. I also wasn't 100% crazy about the guitar-rock background music, which can only be disabled by turning off the game's sound. Despite these minor quibbles, BB1000 is a fantastic game, and I certainly hope the concept isn't lost, as it would surely make a great online team game. Perhaps someone's already done that, but I've never seen it in Android's Google Play store, for example.

So there you go. Now see if you can beat all ten levels, which include a range of enemy teams and maps. :)

Note: hold down the space bar and move the mouse to zoom out and look around the game level. That's pretty much an essential feature that oddly doesn't get mentioned in the instructions.

 

[Isaac Sauvage]

The Cover Orange series is truly the embodiment of Flash's simple genius at its best. On one hand, it's a toolkit / engine that allows users to design puzzle levels full of falling items, stationary objects, bombs, triggers, wheels, pulleys and so forth, but for the casual player, it's simply a great big collection of pre-designed puzzles to solve.

The object in each puzzle is to figure out how to protect an orange (yes, the fruit) from a toxic rain cloud that passes overhead. At its simplest, this involves dropping a limited supply of objects in order to successfully shelter the orange. In more complicated puzzle levels, you'll need to figure out what to drop where in order to trigger a series of events that creates the shelter. Figuring out how to solve a tricky level is a great feeling, and probably helps explain why BubbleBox released so many collections in this series.

I've gathered all ten puzzle collections together and am sharing it now because I recently figured out how to un-sitelock the editor, allowing you to mess around and create your own puzzles. It's pretty easy to pick up, although if you want a tutorial, there are plenty here. Levels are saved locally, and it should be possible to share them around, if anyone's interested in me researching that.

There are also Android and Apple versions if mobile's your thing.

 

[TheHermit]

I used to play this on Android several years ago. I only stopped as every time I got a new phone it lost my progress, and having to redo the 100+ I'd already done got boring lol

 

[Isaac Sauvage]

Oof, I'd been meaning to get back to this project for awhile, so why not give with some adventures? Well then, here's the complete Covert Front series (1-4), which reimagines pre-WWI spy intrigues. It's my very favorite series from "Pastel Games," and I hope I'm not alone in that.

I've altered each game in the series to run in full-screen mode, because why not?

If you need help in solving, here are walkthroughs for each chapter at JayIsGames:

Covertfront Games at Jayisgames

We recommend and review the best covertfront games. Since 2003.

jayisgames.com

 

[AnonTet]

@Isaac Sauvage

If you downloaded the full set, can I abuse your good will and ask you to search for the file name "mahjong_e.swf"? In the collection it's under "japanese mahjong". Lucky me, it's the only one and probably the only REAL Mahjong game in the pile of matching tiles crap!
And if you find it, throw in the flashplayer.exe in the .zip, just because :)

I used to play it here: https://www.gamedesign.jp/flash/mahjong/mahjong_e.html but of course, unless I install older browser version I can't play it. It was really hard to beat but one of the best games of Riichi Mahjong I've found, only short of red fives but that I never used anyway.

Thanks in advance.

 

[Isaac Sauvage]

@AnonTet,
Sure. I love that site's games, and will put together a package of them for my next post.

In the meantime, you can grab the game file here:

https://www.gamedesign.jp/flash/mahjong/mahjong_e.swf

And the Flash player is in the first or second post.

Btw, not sure what you mean by "full set," but this project is just me, hand-picking flash games and occasionally editing them to make certain improvements.

 

[AnonTet]

Oh, I thought you had downloaded the full set on the link in your first post and you were handpinking from there.
It's over 1tb so I decided it was best to ask.

Thanks for your help.

Meanwhile I did get flashplayer 32bit standalone (no install) from AO (took a while to get!) This version and Saikyo no Mahjong 3D are now sitting in my gaming pc desktop the latter not being flash though but also old.
Something I like and can use only 1 hand. Maybe it's time to try and actually learn pacman too :D

 

[Isaac Sauvage]

Oh, I thought you had downloaded the full set on the link in your first post and you were handpinking from there.
It's over 1tb so I decided it was best to ask.

Oh, okay. It sounds like you're saying there's a 'full set' of flash games on AO or maybe torrents.

The problem with archives like that is manifold: 1) many games are missing or unplayable because they were originally site-locked, 2) most flash games are sadly just rubbish, and not worth preserving, 3) lots of flash games were designed to run in smallish in-browser windows, and their code needs to be modified to run properly in full-screen.

So that's why I started working on this project on my own, a couple years before flash went down. So far in my 'best of archives' I have 1k+ organised games, and in my loose archives, another 1k+ to be evaluated.

But anyway, if you're interested in a great 'full set' flash archive that solves issue one and only downloads a flash game as needed (and not automatically, like most full sets), I'd heartily recommend BlueMaxima's FlashPoint Infinity suite:

BlueMaxima's Flashpoint

A webgame preservation project and archive.

bluemaxima.org

 

[xenonph]

For those who cannot find Flash Player...
If you need Offline Flash Player, I added as attachment.
I do believe this was the last version they made.

 

[AnonTet]

@xenonph
I compared that one with the one I got, and yes, seems to be the same version in properties details tab.

@Isaac Sauvage
I was mentioning the set at blumaxima's Flashpoint. BTW, the Ultimate set is at 11.1 version and says:

Size: 1.48TB download, 1.76TB when extracted

Put me off there and then hence me questioning you.
I agree, most are crap; just search for Mahjong and you can take 1TB off it :D (exagerating to make a point, ofc)

I'm not into flash games except that Mahjong title though.

 

[Isaac Sauvage]

I was mentioning the set at blumaxima's Flashpoint. BTW, the Ultimate set is at 11.1 version and says:

Put me off there and then hence me questioning you.
I agree, most are crap; just search for Mahjong and you can take 1TB off it :D (exagerating to make a point, ofc)

I'm not into flash games except that Mahjong title though.

Yessir, that's why I recommended the lightweight Infinity version, specifically over the total 1TB version, matey. You got me?

IMO there are absolute LOADS of awesome flash & java games, but it takes lots of sifting to find the really good ones. And that's where collectors like myself (and maybe me good matey, yar) can help people out, I hope?

 

[AnonTet]

I could help but... no, i'm sorry.
Still can' use my right hand properly to play, and i prefer other platforms, namely MAME that just got me into a new adventure; scripting to extract arcade only games from mame.xml. It's working already but I need to do this another way so I'm still feeling like Indiana Jones discovering new tricks in regexp's :D

 

[Isaac Sauvage]

I could help but... no, i'm sorry.
Still can' use my right hand properly to play, and i prefer other platforms, namely MAME that just got me into a new adventure; scripting to extract arcade only games from mame.xml. It's working already but I need to do this another way so I'm still feeling like Indiana Jones discovering new tricks in regexp's :D

Okay, I realise now,
I misunderstood pretty badly right there, and was unwantedly sarcastic, for no good reason.

Sorry Tiago,
(it really is amazingly spectacular how much of a total moron I can be)

 

[AnonTet]

All in good sport mate, don't sweat it because I clearly didn't :)

 

[xenonph]

Alot of the items in that Blumaxima Flash collection are not games, but just Flash animations.
Otherwise a great collection.

 

[Isaac Sauvage]

Alot of the items in that Blumaxima Flash collection are not games, but just Flash animations.
Otherwise a great collection.

Indeed, FlashPoint contains a staggering collection of games, animations and other projects covering dozens of dev platforms, like ShockWave, Java, and many others I've never heard of, going back to the 90's I think.

Also I believe they now back up modern formats, like Unity, WebGL, HTML, etc, like you might see at Itch.io and modern browser gaming sites. That stuff's far trickier than Flash to archive, which I can usually handle in seconds at this point.

Funnily enough, I had just fired up FlashPoint up for the first time in ages today to see if it had archived an old Java game called "Prehistoric Tribes," but my (admittedly older) version did not. On an Android forum, some users had figured out how to run it on their phones, and I'd love to see if I can do the same for Windows. It looks really good to me: