gonna add pictures later, but not now i am lazy lmao

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As a kid I remember begging my parents quite often about getting a game console. I wanted one so bad for the longest time ever since I found out that my cousins had one. They would sometimes bring their console over to my house to play GTA San Andreas, whatever FIFA game they had on hand, or some random fighting game, and we would have a blast playing and passing around the controller taking turns to play. Hell, even watching someone else play those games was fun. Of course, my parents said no, and they often changed the reason on why I couldn’t have a console. Those excuses went from “it is too expensive”, or that “video games make you stupid-er”, or the classic “video games are EVIL!!!”.

I would find ways play games eventually at least. Flash games would be an obvious choice, since you don’t really need anything more but a browser that had Flash support and a computer (two things that I did had access back then). I also eventually found out that you can pirate games, and I managed to play a bunch of these games and I thought that they were fun. I probably spent hundreds of hours playing various GTA games, like III, Vice City, San Andreas and the like. These games are so fun even to this day, and the music in-game is amazing. GTA VC and SA probably has the best soundtracks of any game, and they partially influenced my music tastes and contributed to what music I listen now.

It is somewhat sad and kinda ironic nowadays that I am now an adult that can purchase or pirate whatever game I want, yet I barely have motivation or the time to play any of them. I end up buying a game and thinking to myself “i will play this someday” and then proceed to never touch it again, I sometimes pirate games and end up never playing them, and they end up just sitting there, wasting space on my hard drive. Like I know I have amazing games just waiting on the virtual Steam shelf just waiting to be downloaded and played, I haven’t even played Deltarune or Undertale yet, literally two of the best games of all time (allegedly). So many people have told me to try out Outer Wilds, and they have told me that it is a great game, yet I just haven’t found the motivation to play it yet. It is kinda like that one meme I remember seeing that there are games, but no games at the same time. So many options but each take up a chunk of my limited free time, while the rest is taken up by sleep, chores or work.

Flash games

I think the only reliable access that I had back then to any sort of gaming was via Flash games. Back in the day a lot of websites had them, examples being nick.com and disney.com. These websites had awesome flash games that you can play on the shittiest of computers, and I did play a lot of those games on those websites back then. I remember that there was this shitty clone of Mario Kart on nick.com. and it had Spongebob characters instead. It was fun, and it was my favorite game on that site. I think there was also a Spongebob platformer, but the details on that are very lost on me. I am kinda surprised I never got into playing Club Penguin or Habbo back in the day, but maybe it is because as a kid I saw all the cool stuff they locked behind a membership, and to ask my parents for money for a video game would be next to impossible to convince them. So I never played those games in the first place.

Facebook flash games

Facebook during 2010-11 was popping off back then. Everyone I knew (relatives and friends) were joining that “new” social media like wildfire. I remember for some reason not liking Facebook, and wished people would shut up about it, but eventually with the help of one of my cousins, I finally made my own Facebook account. I was 10 or 11 at the time, and it was probably an awful idea considering the risks of a child having a Facebook account, but everyone was fine with it apparently.

I quickly realized that Facebook had flash games. Many of these games were fun, and I probably spent thousands of hours playing them. Looking back to these games, they were mostly pretty fucking awful. They were rife with predatory monetization, fucking power bars, and had every trick in the book to convince you to buy into the micro-transactions. I think another thing that you had to do back then was basically pester your friends to be able to unlock something on your end. An example of this is the City Hall building, or the firehouse (or pretty much any services building) in Cityville: the only way to make it work is to ask your friends if they want to be “employees”. These buildings usually required 5 people to work, and once placed, you cannot move or get rid of it. This means that if you accidentally placed this building in the middle of the city wrong, you can’t really move it anywhere, which means most often than not you would have a monument dedicated to your dumbassery.

Another cool (read as in: awful) tactic is the use of power bars, energy bars, whatever you call them. So in games with this kind of system, every action you do takes up a certain amount of energy. Let’s say for Cityville, collecting rent takes up something like 1 energy point. Maybe building a house takes up 2 energy. And you have an energy bar with 50 energy points. This means that the game tends to end very quickly, and the insidious thing is that these games often have a long waiting period until the bar fills up fully again. A game I remember these long waits for the energy bar to refill was Empires and Allies, where it took something like two and a half hours. It sucked, and every game that has this stupid system should be dragged out into the street and shot. And the funny thing is that they is always a little plus symbol somewhere where you can buy energy for a couple dollars., which of course won’t get rid of the damn energy bar, instead only filling it up again up until it runs out once more.1

Cityville is a city building game that doesn’t really play like one. Unlike something like City: Skylines, Cityville is probably the most simplest city builder game out there. There is no traffic, no traffic management, no public transit mechanics, nothing at all. The city often stays very static, since it is a flash game after all. The game plays from like a top-down perspective, and like most Facebook flash games, you end up realizing that there is a very very annoying energy bar meter on the top of the screen. If I am remembering correctly, every action takes up one or two energy points, which means that the game won’t really last for long sadly. There was a sequel to the game, but I barely remember any of the details about it. I think the mayor’s house gets burned down in arson or whatever, I forgor.

Empires and Allies is probably my favorite games back then. It is like a very very simplified version of those real time war strategy games like uhh Command and Conquer??? IDK man. Anyways, you essentially play as a small island empire that has to fight to the death to survive. The game makes it sound that the world is in this forever war, and you have no choice but to join on the fight. The game is very easy to play at least. What you do is that you invade other people islands (be it your friends or other random people on the site), fight against whatever units they may have, and afterwards you can collect whatever resources you want from said invaded tile. Sometimes you get invaded, and that sucks because now you need to pay the invaders for every time you access any buildings in that building tile. If you didn’t have the equipment that can defeat the invasion force, the alternative is to wait a couple days (IRL days, btw) and hope that the invasion force left.

I remember there was this one update that added newer stuff like this big-ass robot that you can use to essentially kill anything, but to actually build is was pretty much a never ending grind fest because every small little part needed building, and of course the game wasn’t gonna give that for free, right? And another thing they added was this feature where there was a chance to find planes or boats or tanks in unpurchased land tiles, and if you purchased said land tile, whatever thing that was hiding in there would now be yours. I think this is how I manage to build a formidable navy and air force, while I just kinda forgot about the army, oh well. This strat didn’t really work well at the end, since I had a shitload of ocean that I rule over, but no land nor nowhere to go. I think this game got remade into a mobile game at some point, but at that point, I was pretty sick of the stupid energy bars, so I just didn’t play the remake at all.

The last game I will be talking about will be Pet Society. It is essentially a cheap clone of an Animal Crossing game, where you get a character, you can dress that character however you want, and then you have a house that you can customize however you saw fit. There was a neighborhood that you can just walk around, visit your Facebook friend’s houses, and there was also a couple mini-games that you can do to earn money. It used to be very fun, tbh. I used to have loads of screenshots from in-game, but I pretty much purged them all back in 2017, which I kinda regret but oh well, I guess that is how things go sometimes. Also I kinda remember my character that I had in the game, and I may draw him, some day.

I think the saddest thing about all of these games is how disrespectful they are towards the player base. They show up, they form a small yet dedicated player base, and sooner or later, the companies behind these games just pull the plug and shut down the game, no matter how many people were actively playing. Add this to the horrible monetization that you can find in these kinds of games, and you would end up with a horrible experience that no one would give a shit about today. Yet at the same time, I had quite a bit of fun while playing these games, and I managed to roll with the punches and deal with the annoying stuff while also maximizing my play time. I remember I would play something like Cityville, and then when I ran out of energy on that, I would play a bit of Empires of Allies, and then when that ran out, I would go and play some other flash game for a while, or play Space Cadet, or something else entirely. It is funny how with so little games I was able to entertain myself, but now as an adult that owns around 400 games across both Steam and EGS, I barely know what the hell to play. I guess it do be like that, sometimes.

Flash game aggregators and the all-you-can-eat buffet

Back in the day, there used to be large websites which only had the purpose of hosting flash games, and not much else. There were some websites that would make their own games, but most of them would just steal them and just host them themselves.

Friv.com was one of these flash game aggregator websites. It was introduced to me by a cousin that was much older than me at the time, and had more experience with the internet than me. Friv.com I remember had 250 games of variying quality, some of them bangers, but most of them were pretty shit to be honest. But there is enough good games to talk about them. I would mention more sites, but it seems that I have forgotten about them, sadly.

Fireboy and Watergirl is a series of flash games that used to be popular back then. It is a co-op game where you can play as Fireboy or Watergirl, and the goal is to not die and to get to the end of the level. I played that game a couple of times, but never had anyone else to play it with. I could, of course, just play it by myself, but that kinda just kills the fun out of a co-op game, doesn’t it?

Haunt the House used to have a promotional flash game attached to the game. The game was about a ghost that was a piece of shit that wanted an entire mansion to themselves. So the goal was to scare people to the point they would leave, but that was tricky because if you scare them too much, they may just jump out the fucking window and die, and that kinda defeats the purpose of trying to make people to leave, since they will show up as ghosts and be like “oh hi lmao” at the end of the game. You can use literally every object in the mansion to scare them off, but two of the best ones that worked very well was that mirror in the living room, and that bird cage in the attic. Both are very effective (especially that birdcage in the attic, you can end up scaring them to the point they jump out the window). I would eventually end up purchasing the full game, and it was fun, but kinda was missing something sadly. Like, I noticed many of the sound effects were changed compared to the original flash game version, and they end up reusing a lot of sound effects, especially on the larger levels. It is kinda a shame, tbh.

I Love Traffic is a game about controlling traffic. Your job is to basically control a traffic light signaled intersection, and make sure no traffic crashes. It is also your responsibility to make sure that the traffic waiting times remain in check, and any major traffic jams will also result in a game over. It is pretty fun despite of how boring the description may sound.

There are a couple of games that I remember playing but I have completely forgotten what they were called. One of them was a platformer running game that was a guy outrunning a flood, which had different sections, like an underground area, sky area, and others.2 There was another game I played once with my cousins and it was about a zombie outbreak, it is a 2D side scroller and the thing I remember is that there was a timer for when the military would arrive and that counted down to zero. Another game was a top-down survival shooter, that had a very monochrome color palette, and the objective was just to survive, you shoot zombies, monsters, the fucking devil himself, it was good game, tbh. I really want to find the name of this game, and play it again. I vaguely remember the name, and it had the word “Block” somewhere in the title. 3

Friv.com had a secret late night area that will show up around midnight and 6 am, and these were mostly more mature games for adults, but there was nothing really stopping a kid breaking the bedtime rule and staying up late to play these flash games. And there is a game that I remember playing, and it has stayed in my mind because of how grim it was. So you play as a bunch of cute animals, these animals had their habitat destroyed and now are trying to get to another place, and you have to cross a bunch of levels, those being 2D platformers in nature. The game gimmick? So there is a button that allows you to fucking kill your character that you’re playing as, and you can use the corpses of your friends to cross a chasm or a spike field or whatever. This game had a name but I also seem to have forgotten the name of it sadly.

Another banger from that site was a game called TU-95. The game consisted of flying a soviet TU-95 bomber, and you’re being trained by this old man. You get a bunch of missions: fly across a certain distance, go deploy paratroopers in this area, etc. The thing is that there is nothing stopping you to just, drive across the ground like a car, so I would often do that because it was fucking funny (and I suck shit at the game lmao). The last level I remember was just to drop a nuke in a testing area, and like the dumbass that I am, I never managed to beat that level ever, because I ended up often too low or I ended up missing the target.

I wish I can list more of these games, but I can’t seem to remember most of them. A lot of my memory from this time period is very hazy. I also never really got into Newgrounds back then, since like, I didn’t know it existed, and I also didn’t know they hosted games. (also lug try not to live under a fucking rock challenge (impossible)).

Tangent 1: minecraft, motion sickness, and how i think i fixed it. (also slime rancher 2 gets fully released)

So for the longest time, Minecraft often gave me crazy motion sickness, and I really didn’t know why exactly. I thought at first it was the view bobbing, but after turning that off, things didn’t change at all. FOV? Changed that and no difference. I found a Reddit comment about this and they suggested that reducing FPS to 60 FPS helps with reducing motion sickness, so I tried it and it worked? I no longer feel sick playing Minecraft finally, fucking hell. TBH i am starting to think that high frame rate kinda does make me motion sick, and I think I will start limiting framerates on other games that make me motion sick too.

Also Slime Rancher 2 finally got a full release, and I am kinda excited. I haven’t played SL2 for a bit now, and I think the last time I did play this game was back when the snowy area was added into the game. I seen from the trailers that they added tons of slimes, drones are back, and other cool stuff I think. So I think I will be playing this more in the foreseeable future.

page updates

  1. Can we talk how fucking awful this system is in general? Like it is on literally every single fucking mobile game out there, to the point that there really is no reason to play mobile games at all. These games with these systems often take longer to wait for the whole power bar to fill up, compared to the amount of play time you can get on every gaming session.↩︎

  2. i think this game was Flood Runner 3, but I am not sure.↩︎

  3. Apparently this game’s name was Boxhead, I played it for a bit again and goddamn it is a banger.↩︎