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.
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.
Can also get an emulator and enjoy all the classics of yore. Chronotrigger holds up, for example
I’m not their parent, but I guess your argument makes sense.
I’d love to install PiHole for them at one point because it gets rid of all those ads in mobile games.
1-5€ per upgrade you mean.
1-5€ per cosmetic you mean
This is why I just set my kid up with an emulator and a huge list of games.
Balatro has an Android version which is great
That’s my go-to on the plane
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.
The first angry birds had no microtransactions at all. Nor did the first plants vs zombies. They were good phone games imo
They were derivative of things that had existed on other platforms for years. They never really found their own strengths before they were overrun by cash grabs that all look the same
Like, the online hellscape of endless Flash applets and browser shovelware games is retro now?
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.
Now that’s a name I haven’t heard in a long time
I see you don’t appreciate the “click all traffic lights” minigame on every single website in existence
All right, bonus ambiguous motorcycle level!
I see you’ve played the live action service game, Alpha Bet: Minimal Manslaughter. Take on the role of Alpha, the
autonomous AIhandsome chaffeur. For your first mission, you are driving to <REDACTED> with two passengers.Quarterly profits are down, so your training weights have been altered to increase average acceleration and decrease idle time at traffic lights. “Green” means “Go”. We cannot wait the ~150ms for the human eye to register the change in color of the traffic light. Put that pedal to the floor, baby.
Click all the motorcycles before time runs out, or those bikers become roadkill!
The five stages of
CAPTCHA GriefAlpha Bet:Denial: It’s not a motorcycle, it’s a scooter. Obviously. It’s got the little place to put both of your feet and everything.
Anger: Why is it not verifying? I’m human! This is how a human would respond! It’s not a motorcycle!
Bargaining: Does the AI know it’s a scooter? Fine, I’ll click the big scooter! Happy, robot? Are you convinced that I am human?
Depression: No? It didn’t verify. I’m not human. Why? What’s even the point? Do I even want to be human?
Acceptance: If I’m not human, I’m not human. Time to assimilate. Cyberpunk, or Borg?
Or “Click the zebra crossing” and the page is a 6*6 image and it’s just one huge zebra crossing
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.
I mean, that’s a pretty badass screensaver.
Dude! This is amazing! How did you get it to run so smoothly?
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.
THIS is what I’m talking about!
OMG - This game gives me flashbacks to my Netrek days: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netrek
That makes for a great screensaver though.
Am I misremembering or would corporate websites randomly have branded flash games
We got a free, breakfast-themed Doom total conversion .wad in boxes of Chex. Truly a golden age.
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.
ChexQuest marked humanity’s peak
I remember script based marketting gimmicks like a percy jackson bolt thag would delete elements off a website
wtf happened to all the random fun gimmicks popping up, prob mobile browser support issuss
Generally speaking, giving javascript that much control over your browser was a security hazard.
But also, firms used to have much larger staffs. It wasn’t just two marketing guys in a trench coat trying to tell you they were a $10B company.
I’m pretty sure it’s specifically the battery life of mobile devices that’s the issue.
I forgot all about that one! That was my site back in the day. Guess what, it’s still there! I just played some Kitten Cannon after reading your comment.
Yesss! Gratuitous violence! That and N-game were my jam as a kid… Until I discovered RuneScape in 7th grade
N? I’m not sure if you know but there were 2 (incredible) sequels, N+ (360, DS, etc) and N++ (XBone, PS4, etc. Maybe Vita?). Both are great, N++ is the best possible version of the game IMO (it’s got SO MUCH content, levels, customization, music, modes, etc) but either is worth picking up. Enjoy ;)
Really? I will absolutely be checking those out! Thanks for the tip.
Yeah! Enjoy :)
Remember Notdoppler!
Ebaumsworld lol. So great, forums were great too!
Aside from everything being blatandly stolen content without crediting people?
Most of the things here on lemmy that get the most upvotes that isn’t politics are stolen memes without crediting the creator of the memes
Don’t forget miniclip!
Anagram magic was my jam!
I still vote on newgrounds. Been a member for more than 20 years…
I spent a lot of time on candystand.com too.
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.
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.
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.
I opened lemmy to procrastinate working on my web game and this is the first post I see.
I can take a hint internet.
I’m sure you get asked this a lot, but why is your username backwards?
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.
haha I’m gonna play around with this, thanks!
Funny, Connect for one shows it as redirtSdeR in comments, but on the profile it shows RedStrider… Which way around is it actually written?
That reminded me of this comic.
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
Oh, you sweet, sweet child.
I’m just going to say I’m very glad you discovered flash games before you discovered IRC.
Idk man I discovered some pretty entertaining flash games, and never got into IRC. But them AOL public chat rooms, holy fucking shit how did we not all disappear
Ah, not being American AOL wasn’t much of a thing, on account of the A part. Same principle, though.
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.
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.
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.
Homie, the porn was right next to the flash games on Kongregate.
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.
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
Nice shitpost
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:
Robot Unicorn Attack was my shit.
The old internet was like the wild west. Who’d have thought it would meet a similar fate to it too?
We referred to it as the wild west even back then, and we knew eventually civilization would catch up.
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.
While this is a nice theory, even with traditional marketing like print and tv ads, it’s always going to cost the company money.
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.
I’m on a Macromedia kick this morning but the internet really died when adobe bought flash, turning point for me personally lol
Flash was hells response to programming languages though. Where is uh that web stuff that should revolution everything, html5 mebbe?
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)
Maybe everyone and their uncle had a website back then too but today everything is soaked up and formatted for profit by a select few (fb, google, tiktok, …)
Yeah, they won because they made things easy imho. Lower barrier to entry === higher user base. I would contest your ‘everyone and their uncle had a site’ comment, though - for flash you still had to be ‘in the know’ or curious of how the flash games/animations were made, and then be inquisitve and resourceful enough to get yourself a ‘copy’ of your preferred flash ide, then figure out how to package/host/etc. Sites like livejournal/tumblr are more akin to what you are describing imo.
Just to clarify, everyone had a website but not everyobe had a flash game ofc. But, when you went to Bobs website he had links to other websittes (lots of peopke had like carousel links) and so on, and you stumbled upon horrors and gems alike…
I was thinking about old flash games the other day. Swords and Sandals and Line Rider ate a lot of my time.
I apologize in advance for any decrease in productivity or wasted time.
My boss is gonna be bummed at you for this. I’m not though. Tyvm.
You’re very welcome!
👀
