Austin, Patrick, and Cado start this podcast off by talking through their feelings on the events of January 6th, when white supremacists stormed the US Capitol building. After the break, Patrick is learning the limits of streaming services by playing Assassin's Creed: Valhalla on Stadia, Austin's checking in on new Monster Hunter Rise demo, and we take some time to reminisce about Flash games.
I loved the extended reminiscing about Flash, which took me back 20+ years to playing in the high school lab during computer science class, 15+ years to making experimental Flash games and animations in art school, and 5 years to teaching game design as a high school art teacher using a handmade un-blocked web page with curated Flash games as examples for students to play.
All of those experiences are now locked to the past in a way they weren’t before.
I am a little surprised that all the discussion about a “new Newgrounds” never brought up the obvious contemporary analogue: the App store. It’s similarly a slush pile of games of varying quality, many made by single-person teams using dodgy assets, and like Flash, there are definitely discrete pockets where certain games catch on, and a tiny handful of cross-over hits. It’s also full of harmful garbage, though probably less hate and porn, than Newgrounds and Kongregate.
