We are in a dark age for browser-based online games.
I’m not talking about the big MMORPGs that have been around forever. If we’re talking about MMORPGs, RuneScape (that decades-old universe) continues to make money for Jagex and World of Warcraft is somehow still a thing in 2023, despite the best efforts of Blizzard Entertainment.1 No, right now I’m talking about free single player games, the kind that used to be made with Shockwave (dead since 2019) or Flash (dead since January 2021). Those weren’t the only game engines available to casual game developers, obviously — I mean, there’s still Unity2 — but they represented a sort of halcyon era for web games.
It’s not just the game engines that have faded away, but the platforms have gone as well. Miniclip killed off its entire browser game platform in mid-2022 as it pivoted to focus on mobile gaming. Kongregate closed to new game submissions in December 2020 as it prepared for the death of Flash, and in March 2023 shut down the multiplayer free-for-all game Surviv.io (which it had acquired in 2019). Addictinggames.com — they still exist, I guess, but as a shadow of its former self.
What happened? Well, Miniclip was bought out in 2015 by Tencent, and since then has gone on an acquisition spree of its own (most notably by acquiring SYBO, the developers who made Subway Surfers, in 2022). Kongregate was owned by GameStop from 2010 to 2017 — amazingly, despite everything GameStop has done wrong, it wasn’t such a bad steward of Kongregate — and then was acquired by Modern Times Group.3 Addictinggames.com was acquired in 2021 by Enthusiast Gaming.4
Not all hope is lost. Newgrounds and Armor Games continue to soldier on as independent websites, imperfectly preserving part of their older archives with the Ruffle emulator. Yet it is impossible not to note that the simple passage of time has drastically altered the landscape.5
Fortunately, amidst the continuing enshittification of the internet, scores of tireless unpaid volunteers have stepped forward to save what they can. A lot of old games that may have otherwise been lost forever are preserved in the Flashpoint Archive.
Flashpoint is a community project that seeks to archive as many old Flash (and Shockwave, Java, Silverlight, etc) games as possible. Simply download the launcher and search for games. Now, the collection isn’t particularly well-organized, and the sheer volume of how much has been saved may be overwhelming at first glance — if you don’t remember the name, searching for a specific game is quite difficult.6
Anyways. Here’s five completely random games from the Flashpoint collection — unavailable hardly anywhere else — and how to win them.
1. Smokin’ Barrels
Genre: Western, shooting, quicktime events
Developer: gamesheep
Publisher: Kongregate
I remember playing this game more than a decade ago. The controls are simple — in fact, they explain them to you at the beginning of the game. You move your mouse to a neutral zone in the bottom left. At the count of three, you move it as fast as you can to the target (which is randomly placed each round). Once your cursor enters the target, click! And if you were the first to get there, boom, you just shot your opponent. The closer to the center of the target, the more damage dealt. Repeat until someone runs out of hitpoints.
Obviously, this game is only playable if you have an actual mouse, preferably a wired mouse (wireless mice tend to be a trifle slower). It’s not just a matter of clicking the target, it’s a matter of moving your mouse. Laptop trackpads won’t work for this, and touchscreens don’t work at all — if you tap the screen, it treats it like you fired off a round in the safe zone, so you can’t just tap on the target each time. (At least, not under the conditions I’ve tested. It may be possible to put together a clever hack.) No, this is a game that needs to be played with a mouse.7
You have the opportunity to buy supplies (at minimum, you’ll need a gun and bullets) and fight duels. You won’t be able to get a heavier gun until you win duels at the next level. No such restriction exists for ammunition. Buy the exploding bullets as early as you can. The extra oomph comes in handy.
You should also make sure to keep at least a few dollars on hand to buy healing supplies, just in case. If you lose a duel, your health is reduced to zero and you can’t duel again until it’s back up. The cheapest gun and bullets are free, so if you’ve upgraded at any point you can always sell your gun for some quick cash. But higher leveled duels cost more money to enter, and if you’re no longer financially able to enter duels, that’s game over for you.
It is my advice that you try to save up enough money to buy the Silver Knife item, which lets you play a knife-throwing minigame. It’s probably the easiest way to make money if you lost a duel and need to work your way back up to the entrance fee. The trick is to click when the guy’s arm is pointed almost directly at the center of the target. Of course, timing it is still difficult because of the delay between your brain’s synapses and the act of clicking. But you should usually get about ten or twelve dollars out of a round of this if you’re halfway competent at clicking.
The other minigames are fine. The rifle isn’t bad, more expensive but potentially more efficient in making money. The Devil Dice minigame is a great way to lose all your money, don’t waste your time. I’ve never had the patience to save up the money for the horse minigame.
Basically: fight duels, heal as necessary, play minigames if you run out of money for entrance fees (for heaven’s sake don’t sell the Silver Knife! sell your gun before you sell that knife!), and have fun! Battle your way through many top names in Wild West folklore and Hollywood. Or rage at the poor quality of your mouse and quit.
2. World Domination
Genre: War, strategy, turn-based
Developer: I Sioux
Publisher: Totallygame.com8
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Technically, this game is only the free demo. I don’t think it’s even possible to buy the full version anymore. Only the free version is available nowadays, since only the free version was distributed for free online. (Funny how that works.)
There’s a lot of features that are missing from the demo version, but that’s fine.
You start off by picking four enemies to face — all of the figures are misspelled pastiches of various world leaders from the early 2000s, when this game was made.9 I don’t think your choice here matters beyond cosmetics. You can also pick a religion, which is completely unavailable in the demo, so choose whatever you want.
The faction you control is the one in the middle. That one on the island. You and the other players each start with five cities. You can mouse-over yours to check the population (in millions). The design changes depending on how many people live there. The bigger and taller the building, the more people in the city.
The first thing you want to do is start creating weapons. Flip the tab on the top left and then hit the big red button that appears. Do this several times because the number of weapons created is proportional to your country’s population. By the time the game winds down, your population won’t be that large at all. So, word to the wise, make a bunch of weapons as early as you can.
You can try Diplomacy, but that’s pretty much useless. See the portraits of world leaders on the top right, with the numbers on them? Those numbers start at 50 and represent their opinions of you. If you start attacking them (or, I believe, if they start attacking you) then the numbers go down. Diplomacy gives you a chance to improve those numbers (and thus reduce the chance they’ll attack you) but the results appear to be somewhat random, as often the result of a mission will be a worsened relationship. So don’t worry about it.
Religion isn’t implemented in the demo. Propaganda is very useful: it gives the chance of convincing some of your opponents’ citizens to defect to you. Select Propaganda, select a city not owned by you, and if successful, you should see a transfer to a random one of your cities. Now, if you’re unsuccessful (again, random chance) then some citizens from a random one of your cities will leave to join that enemy city. But Propaganda is still very important because it is literally the only way to get more citizens, and you will be losing a lot of people.
The most important besides Propaganda are the delivery vehicles for weapons. Rockets, Fighter / Bombers, and Subs. It takes one turn to prepare them (you will see a little animation of a silo opening, or an airbase in operation, or a submarine surfacing) and then the next turn, you need to click on a payload (either a Warhead or a Bio Load) and then click on an enemy city. If you fail to do this, then you just waste the rocket or whatever that you just prepared.
As you can see, because it’s a demo, you’re restricted in the size of weapons you can produce. Only 10 megaton warheads, et cetera.
Infantry, sorry, “Infantrie,” is available in the form of the GI. You don’t need a turn to set this up, just click GI and then click an enemy city to attack that turn. It does less damage than the other stuff but it’s a bit quicker.
Spies are mostly useless. You can use them to target your opponents, and if successful will receive some information about them (click the ⓘ on the portrait to read it). If very successful, you’ll receive a stolen item. But it’s usually not worth the effort.
Satellites are totally useless because their payloads are not usable in the demo.
Now, if you see one of the other nations preparing a weapon and you figure you’ll be attacked, you might want to use Anti-Air or Anti-Rocket. (Submarines cannot be countered.) Select one of those and then hit the big red button. If you were targeted by a weapon, but you played on the turn it would have struck, then it will miss. The plane will disintegrate in mid-air, or the rocket will land randomly and not blow up a city. Of course, it’s always a bummer when you play one of those and it turns out the other guy was targeting someone else.
Anti-Spy isn’t something that you can manually deploy. It just sits there until someone tries using a Spy on you.
How do you win? Oh, it’s not so difficult, really. Just try and let the other players pummel each other — it helps if two naturally gang up on one — and then try and team up with one of the survivors to pummel the third. Hopefully, by the time it’s 1v1, you have enough surviving population to outlast them. Then again, by the time you get this far, it’s basically a long, slogging grind until the finish. Good luck!
3. Decision
Genre: Zombie, shooting, third person
Developer: FlyAnvil
Publisher: Armor Games
Decision is a top-down zombie shooter and it kicks ass. At least the developer is still around — they’re working on a new installment of the Decision series for Steam. That being said, there’s something uniquely fun about the first installment in the series, this game here. Maybe it’s just my nostalgia talking. I dunno.
The controls are entirely via the mouse, although you can enable alternate controls. Frankly, though, controlling your character with the mouse is intuitive and easy enough. Move the cursor farther away to get your character to move, move the cursor closer to get your character to slow or back up. And click to fire your weapon. Bang bang bang.
Your character has dedicated his time to clearing a city of zombies. The city itself is divided into a number of zones, and you need to 1) do reconnaissance 2) rebuild infrastructure 3) kill zombies (okay you do a lot of killing zombies, including as part of your reconnaissance and in order to protect stuff being rebuilt). Only the area immediately around your cursor is visible (representing the dim aura of a flashlight) but the game, to me, is not frightening but merely atmospheric.
Oh, right, and in the...fourth sector you clear, there’s a massive hulking zombie that is very dangerous. You’ll know you’re about to face it when you check the “threat” on the upper left and it’s a much higher number than you’ve seen before. My advice? When you unlock upgrades and such, invest in better weapons, especially the ones that go kaboom. Keep your distance from the thing and try to blast it. Set off exploding barrels (there are occasionally exploding barrels that you can find, and when you shoot them they explode). Try not to die.
For routine work, that is to say, zombies that aren’t massive and won’t pound you to a pulp immediately, I recommend purchasing the skill that lets your character automatically engage in close combat with zombies that get too close. You want to avoid letting them get too close, anyways (otherwise what’s all the firepower for, exactly?) but the zombie dogs that appear in later levels can run pretty fast. Useful little trick to have up your sleeve, once that happens.
It’s a game where you get to explode zombies into gruesome bits. What’s not to love?
4. Bad Boys
Genre: Crime, open world, third person
Developer: NovaIdeas
Publisher: Addictinggames.com
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Okay so this is basically basically a Grand Theft Auto clone.
You play a guy who has to do crimes for some criminal organization. Unless a mission is timed, though, you can just run around wreaking havoc. Steal cars, kill people, whatever. If you want to massacre people for no reason, it’s a good idea to find a weapon better than your fists. Helpfully, running people over with a car works just fine, too.
If you attract too much heat (represented by the stars on the top-left of the screen lighting up), you’ll face not only cops but SWAT teams in black vans armed with even heavier weapons. Once you get to that point, it’s really best to find someplace to lay low. (I believe completing a mission resets your wanted level as well.) You can’t shoot your way out of notoriety; the more people you gun down, the more cops want to get you. So find some corner of the map where it’s hard to physically see you and just wait.
I don’t think there’s much I can say to improve your chances of winning this game. Explore the map; there are caches of weapons and stuff in various places. Failing a mission just means you have to try again. But I do have one piece of advice: while running people over with your car will eventually draw attention, if you drive at someone and then leap out of your car at the last second, allowing it to careen into them via sheer momentum, the cops don’t consider that illegal. In fact, this game allows you to get away with killing cops like that.
There’s a sequel, Bad Boys 2, which is also quite good.
But yeah, that’s basically it. This is GTA except re-created with Flash and with worse voice acting.
5. Kaya’s Mountain Escape
Genre: Survival horror, historical, text-based
Developer: none specified
Publisher: American Girl
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You are Kaya’aton’my of the Nimiipuu10 and you have been captured by the enemy. Fortunately, you’ve escaped. Unfortunately, you are separated from home by a long, hard journey.
You will have a companion (and your choice determines your traveling speed and therefore the difficulty of the game). Your choices are Steps High (your horse), Two Hawks (an average guy), and Speaking Rain (who is blind).
The mechanisms of the game are self-explanatory. When given the opportunity, try to collect as many berries as you can. Don’t bother spending too much time fishing, just get your fish and get out of there.
Most importantly, you need to always be moving. If snow blankets the ground, you can rest, but otherwise you should be moving. If the weather is very good, move as fast as you can. If the weather is rainy, you can move at a moderate pace. But you need to move, especially in the beginning, to put as much distance between you and your pursuers as possible.
Interestingly, at the game over screen (whether you win or lose), the “play again” button simply links to the (now defunct) url on the American Girl website where this game was once hosted. Apparently, the developer didn’t want to bother figuring out how to reset the game to the beginning, so they simply made you reload the page as a clever (if silly) workaround. What that means is that if you want to replay this game, you’ll need to close it and re-open it in Flashpoint.
And if you don’t succeed the first time you play, don’t worry. Canonically, Kaya didn’t successfully escape on her first try, either.
Oh, I’m sorry, I meant Activision Blizzard, the holding company formed as a result of the merger between those two video game companies which then proceeded to eat several other video game companies. Oh, I’m sorry, I meant Microsoft, which acquired Activision Blizzard in a process that officially concluded about a month ago. My pedantry (and highlighting of the increasingly uncompetitive business environment in the video game industry) should not distract from the fact that Blizzard has blundered from one gaffe to another, whether it was inserting themselves into the wrong side of the 2019 Hong Kong protests or fostering a tremendously hostile workplace environment or simply making bad design decisions about their games (World of Warcraft, Hearthstone, etc).
Incidentally, they kicked off a massive controversy back in September by changing up their licensing policy to charge developers per installation in a way that seemed designed to incentivize microtransactions and to severely curtain demos / freemium / charity projects. Unity ended up walking back some of the worst of their idiocy, but their public trust has been irrevocably shattered, and a lot of game developers who formerly used Unity have jumped ship, never to return.
A Swedish gaming-related holding company. Incidentally, these guys also own Ninja Kiwi, the developers behind Bloons and Bloons Tower Defense.
They’re Canadian.
Even /r/WebGames is a wasteland nowadays. It was a fairly active subreddit when I was an undergraduate, but the death of Flash (and later, the 2023 protests over reddit’s API changes) really did a number on the place.
And it doesn’t help that sometimes names are spelled differently on different occasions — Armor Games vs Armorgames, for example.
People joke about how wireless mice should be called “hamsters” because they have no tail. For my part, I can only reminisce about the times when computer mice had actual physical balls in them. None of this fancy modern business with lights!
Now known as Youda Games, best known for the Governor of Poker series. Those games are also available on Flashpoint, but it’s basically just campaign mode Texas hold’em so there’s not much strategy to explain. Incidentally, Youda Games still exists, although in August 2023 they were sold to Playtika, an Israeli company, by Azerion, a Dutch company. I can’t be bothered to look up when Azerion acquired them but a quick google search shows that I Sioux is an indie Dutch video game developer. (Why “I Sioux”? Their website hasn’t been updated in like a decade but I can’t find anything there explaining the name. But then, I know that some Germans go nuts for Native American culture much like how American weebs go nuts for Japanese culture. And the Netherlands is, like, right next to Germany.)
To the best of my knowledge, at the time of writing the only surviving world leaders from that selection are George W. Bush, Tony Blair, and Vladimir Putin. And Putin, of course, is the only one still in power. The rest of the gang are dead from old age or revolution-related complications.
Autonym; better known to English speakers as the Nez Perce.