I remember pure website games too. There was some alien one where you had a certain amount of energy to use for the day. You could work out, attack other aliens or a few other things. Didn’t cost anything to play. It was hard starting out because higher level guys could attack you. I remember putting a note: “please stop attacking me.” One person attacked and said: “no.”
And on Nintendo’s website, there was an elevator sidebar that’d take you to different levels, each one having some other function like upcoming releases, tips, and stuff.
One was labeled “secret” or something, and opened on a black screen. You’d think it was a broken page. But if you moved your cursor around, you’d find a hidden link that’d take you to their secret page. I can’t remember what was there, but I sure remember feeling like an elite hacker at 10 years old when I did it!
Lifesavers had a bowling game on their site that was actually a ton of fun and decent quality. All the balls were patterned to look like their candy, but still. It was free and that’s where the advertisements ended.
It was a fair trade.
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.
Who Rules Barter Town?!?
Not Macromedia, I’ll tell you that.
Now that’s a name I haven’t heard in a long time
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.
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.
Balatro has an Android version which is great
That’s my go-to on the plane
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.
1-5€ per upgrade you mean.
1-5€ per cosmetic you mean
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.
Can also get an emulator and enjoy all the classics of yore. Chronotrigger holds up, for example
This is why I just set my kid up with an emulator and a huge list of games.
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
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 all the indie games with a PS1 or N64 style aesthetic.
Also Hypnospace Outlaw.
I’m already getting that, every time I say nothing in a video game should cost real money. You talk about the abuses of this business model and people act like you tugged on their favorite stuffed animal.
See, that’s the opposite. Sheer nostalgia goggles.
I keep reminding people I bought Street Fighter 2 three times at full price AND for a long while before that I paid to play it by the match. Bought multiple expansion packs for shooters from Doom to Half-Life. There were three remasters of Resident Evil in like two years at one point. Sonic 3 came out episodically and they invented a whole cartridge system just so they could sell you physical DLC. Arcades were specifically tuned so you would have to pay more money to keep playing every three minutes on average. They ran studies and playtests with this specific goal in mind. I one had my arcade operator give me a free credit because I was the only one there when he got a new game installed. I played for what he deemed too long, so he went into the system menu in front of me and cranked up the difficulty.
I’m not saying the very olds had it best, I’m saying we ALL have rose tinted glasses. I was out there getting exploited by arcades and Capcom re-releases and it was my dad recoiling in horror. He called it “bug squashing” and kept claiming it was the computer playing, not me.
These people have made the exact same comparison, and I will tell you what I told them: buying the same game three times is fundamentally better than being held against the grindstone for potentially thousands of dollars.
And renting time on someone else’s machine is never the same thing as being charged five actual dollars to increment a value in a single-player game on your own goddamn hardware.
And if I felt Magic The Gathering booster packs were the same thing as lootboxes then I’d call to ban booster packs too.
And even the infamous horse armor was at least new content, which you bought. Bethesda sent you a file you didn’t have, in exchange for money. People were mad about the value proposition versus a full expansion. What actually mattered was that it solved a problem Bethesda created. The entire gacha industry is about installing things without asking, telling you that you can’t have them, and convincing you to want them anyway, badly enough to open your wallet and look away.
See, GenZs? This is gonna be you. You’re gonna be doing this to justify why your flash games were cool and their gacha crap is crap.
Been happening since books were new technology and it’ll keep happening.
I am explicitly willing to burn down my own childhood, if anyone convinced me it was the same kind of abuse we’re seeing now.
But I hold that the abuse we’re seeing now is demonstrably worse. And it is a half the industry by revenue. Spare me your narrative posturing and engage with how new things can in fact be fucked in ways that old things were not.
Things can be newly fucked in new and imaginative ways, but that doesn’t preclude things having been fucked in old and imaginative ways. The fuckery mostly just shifts around. Some configurations are worse than others, but a lot of that judgement does have to do with one’s perspective, which in turn has a lot to do with what specific pot of slowly boiling water they were raised in as baby frogs.
So no, I do not concede at all that there is a difference between Magic the Gathering packs and loot boxes. They are quite literally modelled on each other. Fun story, as a broke-ass college student I used to work at a comic store/hobby shop. We did keep a catalogue of collectibles we used to trade piecemeal. I’m not sure at all if this was legal in the first place, but we sure did it. It was a big ole accounting book with handwritten card names and prices because I’m old and so is Magic.
I saw kids jonesing for specific things all the time. I once had someone bang on the locked gate to try to get me to sell them CCGs after closing hours like the gacha zombie apocalypse had started. Another time I had a guy, a full on grown man, buy a HeroClix box, walk halfway down the street and then sprint back into the store to show me the rare he had just packed because it was the last of a set or somesuch. I have never stared more blankly.
And yeah, I was there when browser game MTX were all about energy mechanics and I was the quiet old guy in the back pointing out that they were effectively the same as paying for continues in arcades. And I was self-aware enough to realize that didn’t mean energy mechanics were particularly good, just that arcades were… kinda exploitative when you think about it. We just didn’t think about it that way.
We did think about all the Street Fighter 2 and Resident Evil re-releases, though. People were pissed even at the time. Capcom was the Ubisoft of the mid-90s like that.
I do not concede at all that there is a difference between Magic the Gathering packs and loot boxes.
Then why the fuck don’t you want both banned? Magic Online shouldn’t even be legal. None of the excuses work for a digital game!
I do not respect the comparison as a defense of current horseshit. Charging real money inside video games is a scam. It’s a cancer that lets “free” games somehow slurp up billions of dollars a year. It makes psychological manipulation for unlimited sums of money a primary goal of game design. Being good or fun does not matter, so long as people are addicted and unsatisfied.
I was the quiet old guy in the back pointing out that they were effectively the same as paying for continues in arcades.
You were wrong. Arcades are rental - their entire business model was built on cool shit you cannot possibly afford to own, being accessed in very short bursts, for negligible quantities of money. That’s obviously not the same thing as your tablet, running a generic 2D Unity project, asking ten fucking dollars unless you’d rather stare at a pointless counter for an entire hour.
Specific things getting worse is not some “back in my day” horseshit. Games and gaming have improved massively - but this bu-si-ness mo-del should have been illegal a decade ago. The shithole it spawned in, a pocket computer where you’re not allowed to run your own goddamn software, should never have been tolerated.
This shit is in $70, single-player, flagship-franchise titles. It gets added to shit you already bought. It’s naked greed with no upside. Delete it.
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
Nice shitpost
Homie, the porn was right next to the flash games on Kongregate.
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.
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
Uhh… my largest grievance with how the Internet has been designed is that it was never safe for children to be on it, yet children were thrust onto in en-mass long before adults even really understood what it was. And sill people are ignoring the massive problems it continues to cause, specifically for the healthy development of children, as society is circling the drain.
You’re right, the word safe there was a poor choice lol. But I still do think the internet was at least better for children when there were designated sites/communities for them with appropriate moderation, instead of children being on social media. Though of course the ideal would be for them to be playing outside but that’s a whole different discussion
I believe the problem with children-oriented sites and communities were that the spaces provided a false sense of security for children and parents which led to at least the social spaces being prime targets for predators.
While these communities would have strict moderation as well, I think there were some cases where some community moderators were abusing their position which can happen in any social spaces, but children’s spaces are held to a much higher level of scrutiny for obvious reasons.
Then there’s the issue of scaling and regulations. As Internet usage continued to explode, it would’ve become much harder to scale up the amount of mods needed, which becomes much more expensive when it’s a full time job. Then I believe a good number of large/influential countries also moved in on regulating how companies maintain data for child accounts and I think restricting targeted advertising for children specifically, which would have made it much harder for companies to make money while also dealing with increasing expenses in moderation and hosting upkeep.
It doesnt explain everything completely, but I think that’s why these places disappeared
I think a more accurate statement is that the internet was never safe for children, but online content was never monetized and targeted to various audiences for nefarious purposes the way that it is now (including towards children).
I would also make a tangential argument that interacting with the internet used to foster a degree of technical ability, critical thinking, and reading comprehension that just isn’t necessary when “going online” can just mean downloading an app and mindlessly scrolling through an endless short-form video feed. On a macro level, today’s internet is dumbing kids down, while yesterday’s internet required (or at least encouraged) some understanding of how systems and technologies work.
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
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.
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.
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Oof my personally specific nostalgia.
Did anybody else play Kids Next Door Fusion Fall?
I mean all those in browser games required shockwave, flash, or java which basically was malware but we didn’t know better then
You can still do that on newgrounds.com
I remember when Chex and Dominoes put out games that were better than they had any right being. Chex even gave it away for free.
There’s a remastered version of Chex Quest that is pretty awesome.
I never had Chex Quest but I did have a Mr. Pibb Doom clone that absolutely sucked I got from a McDonald’s kids meal back in the day. 😌
I never had Chex Quest either due to being British and that promotion happening in the US but I’d check out that remastered version on Steam if you want a free and fun FPS.
Wasn’t Chex Quest just a reskin of Doom? Or did they release an original title that I don’t know about?
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.
People were happier. There was still hope back then.
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.
The Ed Edd and Eddy game where you used machine puzzle pieces to put a jawbraker into a bucket was my game as a kid.
There was also a beavis and butthead game somewhere where you hocked a loogie at people from a rooftop lol
That was back when every site wanted you to install a toolbar that was spyware.
Friv.com has a simple UI that’s fairly kid safe. Just throw /old at the end of the URL to get the better, older UI. The new one is kinda meh. Friv doesn’t have a lot of games, but enough to keep you entertained for a while every now and then. Its’ biggest strength was always the simple UI. No accounts, comments, ratings, anything. Only games.
I love that Ruffle exists, it makes so many of these good old flash games sites great again!
I remember when movie theaters showed maybe one or two previews and no ads.
