With that out of the way let’s talk about Flashpoint itself. We’re about 3,000 games up at this point over 6.3, which is kind of insane at this point of the month. I’d like to take the time to highlight just some of them, because going over all of them would be kind of insane.

MOTAS / Mystery of Time and Space, Completed At Last

Yeah, I tried a big push for this one, but it apparently didn’t make it too far, so let’s try again. MOTAS, or Mystery of Time and Space, was previously missing the last levels of the game: a problem that has since been solved by someone coming along and just dumping the rest of the game in our lap. I just want to point out that games like MOTAS are one of the biggest examples of “someone needs to save it” situation I talked about earlier in this newsletter. We’ve been looking for this damn game for years, and it took RidgeX, who backed the game up in 2008, to come along to provide it for us. Save your shit, folks.

You can play the completed MOTAS in the current version of Flashpoint Infinity; ignore the fact it says that it’s the not-complete version, it’ll still pull down the previously missing levels as you go.

Miles upon Miles of Escape the Room titles

The resident right-hand man for me, mister DarkMoe, has a guilty pleasure for escape the room titles, so if you see a huge batch of them in any one place when you sort by Date Added, it was probably him that managed to do it.

He writes simple bots that download entire websites, ready for him to take almost-but-not-really automated logos and screenshots, tests them, and puts them in a big flippin’ package to stick into Flashpoint, and he’s been doing this for quite some time. Escape the Room games are massive in number on the internet, so someone going through the pile like this is probably the only way they were going to be done.

This kind of thing has been used for more than just ETR titles though…

(Almost) Every Remaining Game on ArmorGames.com

That headline is not a joke.

One of my personal pet projects over the last few versions was working my way through Armor Games and making sure that I had every last game that they had on the website at the time, curating ones we didn’t have as I went. As of around 6.2’s launch, I had combed through half of the sites’ pages. After getting frustrated at the length of it, I was offered a compromise; find out what games were left to be added to Flashpoint, and Moe would pull his magic trick on AG, too.

I did and he did.

There might be a couple of games missing from the sites’ past and there may be a new Flash game or two in the future, but, with very few exceptions (and possibly a couple of games we don’t know about for one reason or another), we have every game on ArmorGames now.

I guess I’ll have to go through something like MaxGames next…hopefully it’ll at least be shorter than ArmorGames.

2-XL Talking Robot Emulator

This one caught me off guard the first time I saw it in the curation queue by relatively new curator sm_programmer. What the hell is a 2-XL Talking Robot, and what does it even have to do with Flash or webgames?

It was a toy released in the 70s by Tiger Electronics that more or less gave players a choose-your-own-adventure style audio tape — you could swap audio tracks during play as answers to questions for a different journey each time. It’s such a bizarre concept, and someone took the effort to make an “emulator” for it in Flash, and now it’s in Flashpoint. I might have to do a video on this thing at some point…

I bring up the 2-XL entry in Flashpoint because, in the middle of the storm of escape the room titles, weird games about girls furiously using toilets (do not ask) and filling out the ranks of popular flash portals that we have in varying states of completion, some unusual but standout ones can tend to slip by if you aren’t paying attention. I’d like to jump back to just before 6.3’s release to talk about one that’s kinda neat…

ByteCamp

I don’t know much about the Canadian business called ByteCamp, but they must have taught some kind of class for coding games in Flash at some point, which would then be added to some kind of launcher on their website. I can’t explain how 700 games, clearly designed by younger children, made it into Flashpoint via a single entry otherwise…

Yeah, this is actually a thing we have in Flashpoint now. I don’t understand how people manage to find this kind of stuff; it’s just…a thing that Choror found by browsing the Internet Archive. It’s an oddity like this that would never be saved by someone just downloading one SWF; this is 700+ individual SWFs, not to mention the XML that holds all the info about these games. It’s definitely something you can’t get the traditional way.