Flash'd

Flash, the greatest thing to happen to the Internet.

My first encounters with flash were those awesome stick fighting games. Of course, this was long before the advent of affordable broadband in India. So watching flash videos on www.youtube.com wasn't practical, neither was downloading games via torrents. In short, I had to make do with flash games apart from the odd couple of duplicate-cd games which I could muster to buy. And they were worthy companions, providing for countless hours of fun. But that was mainly because it was a new experience. The original Diner Dash game was so much fun just because I hadn't played anything like it before. Well, I had :( . But this was something new, something free and the flash games tend to be so light on the MB's. So it made for a good couple of hours of timepass.

As the years went on, flash games were more elaborately created. Sadly, most of them were neither charming nor innovative enough to sit for more than a couple of minutes. Diner Dash 2, Diner Dash 3 and probably countless rehashes and ripoffs had found their way onto the internet. Looked different and came along with fancy names, but alas, it was a case of the same candy in different covers. And the sad part is some of these games weren't free. Not sure how their sales went though :) . However I did manage to find a couple of good games.

For an old style read and click adventure, check out http://www.choiceofgames.com/about.html . It isn't a flash game but I can't categorize it as anything else.The site boasts of two games at present, both having good stories and quite a few alternative endings. I really do feel that the read and click adventure model hasn't been exploited enough. Visual novels of this kind would be downright awesome. Backed by a storyline, such a game/novel would give the gamer/reader a lot of control over what they would do if they were in that situation. Lets face it , not everyone is interested in fighting thugs and more powerful bosses. If fighting is so important, then a Mortal Kombat or a Street Fighter would be a better choice. For an adventure game, I rather decide how I want events to pan out. I hope some great authors decide some day to write a story for such a game with numerous alternate outcomes where every decision matters.

In case you don't remember the great xiao xiao , check out stickpage. However I must warn you, the stick games now are superficial instead of being simple and creative like the ones which came out earlier. Stickpage is full of crappy games, but the stick videos and stick humor are really good. I have never been a fan of miniclip because to find one game that you might remotely like, you will have to try out a hundred. The internet is so vast ; It is easily possible that I haven't seen most of the great flash games out there. But most of what I have seen is rubbish.

Adobe apparently claims that 99% of all internet users have flash installed on their computers. Youtube should be the primary reason why people would have installed flash. Which brings me back to my original point. Is flash, the best thing to happen to the internet. Or is Youtube, the best thing to happen to Flash (I hope Meemaw tries answering this :P ) . I wonder...

On another note, I happened to notice something really brilliant a couple of days back. Check this out !!

PS : In college a game called Bubble Trouble (Finally I remembered the name) was wildly popular only next to CS, FIFA and DOTA. It was a flash game. It was more of an exercise than fun. Challenging yes, but not fun. Good for killing time but not for timepass. Most of the flash games nowadays seem to be like that. Thank God for torrents and broadband.