Hey guys, good news. Most of the games you’ve enjoyed for years are safe and can be played online as usual. I even updated some of them.
Key updates
The following games are all playable and got new versions:
Fall of 21XX v1.1.0
The major change is the introduction of difficulty settings. Just go to the options section to set the difficulty before starting a new game.
Easy Mode changes
- More lives.
- Weaker enemies.
- Enemies do not respawn.
- Metool fires one shot, and slower.
- Spikes do not kill at once.
Hard Mode changes
- Battoon Bone moves faster
- Metool shots are faster.
- Bosses take longer to kill.
Keep reading for more details.
Accessing the Difficulty setting
Hopefully, with Easy Mode you can now complete the game and watch the ending. And for those experts, you now have a new challenge in Hard Mode so revisit the game and enjoy all the bug fixes.
As for the changes for the other games:
Fire Man Incoming Storm 2.0.5
- Script Fixes.
- The locks do not take so long to destroy.
Fire Man vs Bass 1.2.3
- Script Fixes
Bad Box Over 0.9.6
- This troublemaker refuses to die, but for now, I just did some compatibility fixes.
How come these games are playable? Didn’t Flash die?
I know, right? For those who are not aware of the technical side of these games, they required a browser plugin called Adobe Flash Player that was discontinued after December 2020.
Literally, a few days after New Year’s Eve I learned about this project called Ruffle which is a client-side technology that emulates Flash in your browser using nothing but the browser itself.
I gave it a try and I noticed that despite some errors, the games were playable. They just needed some corrections to get them into a functional state again. The results were so good that I just dropped other projects I was working on and decided to complete this update.
Now, your mileage may vary. I do not know if you need some cutting-edge graphic card on your system. I tried these games on a very old Windows laptop with an integrated graphics card and I could play them with no major issue.
I’ve seen some odd results though, such as Mozilla Firefox on macOS being faster to play these games than Google Chrome. So essentially, just try all the options you have.
Fullscreen mode
Right-click on the game and select the Fullscreen setting, Yes, finally! Exit the mode if you think the game gets too slow.
Mobile support
After years of dismissal, you can finally load these games on your mobile device powered by Android or iOS.
Well, you can’t do much since you do not have keyboard input and no on-screen controls, except maybe for Bad Box Over, but still, this was an unexpected and welcomed development. The more options, the better.
Music Issues
Ruffle is not perfect, and I had to make adjustments to the music. Essentially, I can only have the looping section of the songs. Hopefully, the APIs I need become available in the future and I can restore the music to its original state.
Progress bars
The progress bars do not seem to be working correctly. So be patient, expect a blank screen, and wait for a few seconds before you see anything on the screen. Sometimes I’ve also seen a large orange Play button. Just click on it and wait for the game to load.
High Scores
I have not looked much into this and honestly, I did not even expect all the good stuff we have working so far so I won’t complain much about this. I will review them later.
What about Bass Abyss?
Bass Abyss is going to take some more time to fix. I’ve seen some promising results, but it was not ready for this update. My expectation is that as Ruffle makes more progress in further releases, I will not have to spend much time adding workarounds to the code base as I did with the other games. Bass Abyss is still online and if you have an old browser with Flash support, you can play it.
I do not recommend installing any browser that promises Adobe Flash plugin support though. The plugin is gone with no support from its maker. The most likely scenario is that you’d be installing an obsolete browser with security issues.
Tested Browsers
| Browser | Version | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Goggle Chrome | Version 87.0.4280.141 (Official Build) (64-bit) | |
| Microsoft Edge | Version 87.0.664.75 (Official build) (64-bit) | Edge, and Opera, are essentially Chrome now so I won’t be reporting it anymore. |
| Firefox | 84.0.2 (64-bit) |
Final words
Well, you have so many things to test: Mobile options and Fullscreen options for four games, and difficulty settings for Fall of 21XX. A few days cannot replace all the testing I’ve been doing for years so expect a bumpy road ahead.
But still, going from the Flash apocalypse to this? Unthinkable!
References
Ruffle – The Flash Player emulator.