Posted by willmeyers 18 hours ago
One was puzzle game where you had to bounce a laser off of mirrors to pop balloons. The second was kind of a Chip's Challenge kind of deal I think, where you as Dexter were running away from an out of control robot, and had to collect some computer chips or something.
And in the third game, Dexter was running, inexplicably, a record store? Dunno if it was a tie in for a specific episode I don't remember now, but it's quite a funny premise, and a fun game too.
If you worked on any of these games, thank you! I spent so many hours back then on those, and many others.
I still had dial up back then, and I couldn't stay online for long. Eventually I figured out that if I kept the website open, then disconnected (rather than closing then disconnecting, which was what my parents taught me), the games would still work. Which is obvious to me now, of course, but as a 6~7 year old, who had no idea of how any of this worked, I felt like an actual, proper hacker. I literally just had the thought, "wait, what if..." and was promptly rewarded. I've been chasing that high ever since :)
From then on, my evening routine after school was connecting, picking the 3~4 games I wanted to play for that night, letting them load, disconnecting, and playing to my heart's content. If I hacked anything that fateful night, it was my parent's main excuse to get me off the computer!
Since they were Shockwave based games they're not playable on modern browsers but they're playable with the Flashpoint Archive project. Huge timewaster, be careful. Better look for the games on YouTube :)
And thanks for the game names as wel, although, I must admit that after posting that comment, I did go looking for them, and... Well, let's just say I've found my MixMaster skills to be quite rusty after all this time :p
What a shame CN took their classic game sites down, when hosting flash games isn't even all that resource-intensive. An archive by them would've been nice. I recall every couple of years, older games slowly got removed which made me sad, until eventually flash died completely.
My goodness, I've come so far now in life. I know what tools to use to decompile flash games and look at the assets and logic, it's crazy to look back on how much games inspired me to learn about programming because I wanted to make my own.
To anyone who worked on these, thank you SO MUCH for having built them; you've definitely had a positive influence on countless people who were mentally stimulated and learned about how to use computers more in an effort to play them.
[1] https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/Dexter%27s_Laboratory:_Sci...
Though that's an interesting point: some games were localized on the Brazilian CN website! Not all, but it's cool that at least some of them were.
You can play here: https://mattbruv.github.io/ccsr/
I don't know if it's nostalgia or what, but I still have fun playing it. Which can't be said for a lot of games.
ESPN also used to have great flash games. they had one where you'd skate on the roofs of houses and one where you had a BMX game that I think had a racing version and a freestyle version.
Pizza City: https://flashpointproject.github.io/flashpoint-database/sear...
Cookie Party: https://flashpointproject.github.io/flashpoint-database/sear...
I learned a lot making these games while studying compsci. The platformer had a custom physics engine and I recall the pizza city open world was challenging to optimize for me at the time. Super fun to work on and appreciated the opportunity to work on these for PixelJam. These games were for comedy network and adult swim so in the same vein.
Some games won't work if you try to play them outside of Flashpoint though: https://flashpointarchive.org/datahub/How_Flashpoint_Works
Can just grab them out of the cache once they've been downloaded, wherever they're stored.
You must have one somewhere, you're chatting on HN with a modern SSL certificate.
These days the official website redirects to their YouTube channel which I feel is very sad. There used to be places for kids on the internet, now everything is heading towards major platforms which I honestly feel is going to be damaging the youth in the long term.
What about the short term? Even edgy angst flash movies like Sallad fingers on Newgrounds is pretty cutsie by modern big tech standards.
There's also a few on the Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/softwarelibrary_flash_unsorted?t...
(In case the OP also made you think of Teen Titans Battle Blitz for the first time in 20 years)
That was my entire computer class in 9th grade.
(that and harrassing teachers with netsend)
I have unfortunately forgotten the gorillaz game though