My favorite three aren't in there. All Dexter's Lab themed, now that I think about it.
One was puzzle game where you had to bounce a laser off of mirrors to pop balloons. The second was kind of a Chip's Challenge kind of deal I think, where you as Dexter were running away from an out of control robot, and had to collect some computer chips or something.
And in the third game, Dexter was running, inexplicably, a record store? Dunno if it was a tie in for a specific episode I don't remember now, but it's quite a funny premise, and a fun game too.
If you worked on any of these games, thank you! I spent so many hours back then on those, and many others.
I still had dial up back then, and I couldn't stay online for long. Eventually I figured out that if I kept the website open, then disconnected (rather than closing then disconnecting, which was what my parents taught me), the games would still work. Which is obvious to me now, of course, but as a 6~7 year old, who had no idea of how any of this worked, I felt like an actual, proper hacker. I literally just had the thought, "wait, what if..." and was promptly rewarded. I've been chasing that high ever since :)
From then on, my evening routine after school was connecting, picking the 3~4 games I wanted to play for that night, letting them load, disconnecting, and playing to my heart's content. If I hacked anything that fateful night, it was my parent's main excuse to get me off the computer!
The games you mention are Dexter's Laser Lab, Dexter's Labyrinth and Dexter MixMaster, by developers NetBabyWorld. Those games were originally their own game without the Cartoon Network branding. Labyrinth was based on Ninja Girl 1 and 2 and Dexter MixMaster was originally Tune Inn (that's why this one felt a bit off).
Since they were Shockwave based games they're not playable on modern browsers but they're playable with the Flashpoint Archive project. Huge timewaster, be careful. Better look for the games on YouTube :)
Hah, that explains the out-of-left-field theme! I had no idea they were reskins of exiting games. Interesting how child me managed to unknowingly zero in into the games of a single developer.!
And thanks for the game names as wel, although, I must admit that after posting that comment, I did go looking for them, and... Well, let's just say I've found my MixMaster skills to be quite rusty after all this time :p
This Dexter's Lab laser game was the first flash game I had ever played, and one of my first actual experiences with the internet. I remember seeing cartoonnetwork.com on the TV, understanding that there are games I could play online, and trying to figure out what the funny phone noises meant with AOL. Someone helped me go online using dialup and I ended up on the website somehow (probably struggling really badly to type as a kid) and it took forever for the flash game to load. At first I had little understanding of what I was looking at, felt very hard to understand websites. I also remember the Samurai Jack one really vividly, even took a note down of the game cheatcode on the TV and hid the note in a drawer after we moved and didn't have a PC anymore, because my parents said I'd have to wait "until I was a 18" to ever have an internet connection again. I was so little, I certainly lost it or someone tossed it, but we got a computer so I did end up enjoying the game a lot! I also really liked the HiHi Puffy Ami Yumi flash games, like the vacation one.
What a shame CN took their classic game sites down, when hosting flash games isn't even all that resource-intensive. An archive by them would've been nice. I recall every couple of years, older games slowly got removed which made me sad, until eventually flash died completely.
My goodness, I've come so far now in life. I know what tools to use to decompile flash games and look at the assets and logic, it's crazy to look back on how much games inspired me to learn about programming because I wanted to make my own.
To anyone who worked on these, thank you SO MUCH for having built them; you've definitely had a positive influence on countless people who were mentally stimulated and learned about how to use computers more in an effort to play them.
Most homeless people aren't born homeless. Maybe at the point they're at now, yeah, a $500 rent and a $5000 are equally inaccessible.
But for the people on the edge of homelessness, that $500 rent could be the difference that prevents them from going down the death spiral of homelessness, lack of options, drug addiction, etc.
To support your point, we’re talking nonsense when we use the word “homeless” to describe all the different types of people who can fit that definition.
Doing that masks the fact that there are working people with housing insecurity, by putting them in the same category as emotionally disturbed drug addicts.
In every analysis I’ve seen, poor people with housing insecurities outnumber the mentally ill type homeless people by three or four to one. It’s very possible to help them, but very difficult to talk about it because everyone imagines you’re talking about the other “chronic homeless” type.
In practice it is a problem, because not everyone who needs low latency audio is a professional.
Case in point: just the other week I was trying to get Rocksmith (a guitar game where you plug in an actual guitar with their custom USB cable) working on windows, and I could not do it. The latency was too high for it to be usable.
The community has many workarounds for it, but most involve getting an audio interface and connecting through that. But that really, really shouldn't be needed. I used to play this game on MacOS, and it worked perfectly. It's ridiculous that Windows fails at this.
How come that when people handling uranium decide the rules are nonsensical it's bad, but when people handling bananas decide the rules (that, please note, apply to everyone with radioactive materials), it's somehow A-ok?
Most people who have the option of buying a Mac and still go with Windows/Linux machines do so because of the software. The hardware is almost universally agreed to be great, and a stronger overall package than most non-Mac options.
So making Mac-like hardware with Windows/Linux software is very much a great value proposition to many people.
> The hardware is almost universally agreed to be great
There is some agreement in terms of the M chips. There is no universl agreement re keyboard layout, screen technology and surfacing, trackpoints, touchscreens, 2-in-1 form factors, port selection, or aluminium unibodies.
I thought I'd be unimpressed by the mirrored version, but I can say that for myself, it really did have a different feel to it.
I've always pictured the boats moving right, sliding down, as if surfing the wave.
The mirrored version makes it clear that, no, they're going against the wave, which makes it that much more of a scary situation!
Now, having noticed that, I see how the position of the rowers in the boat would be enough to deduce that. But still, it goes to show that (at least for me, personally, in this specific case) the mirroring really did bring a more intuitive feel for what the artist was trying to represent.
I do think that there's some loss in translated manga, actually!
When the mangaka is creating the layout, they're conceptualizing the flow not only of the panels, but also of the text inside panels, to be RTL.
Translating the text into a LTR language without mirroring the image, makes it so that your eyes have to zig zag around a bit more, going RTL panel wise, but LTR text box wise.
Compared to the problems that mirroring the art brings, I still think that's best compromise of the options, but doesn't mean it's not an actual impact on the experience, even if a subtle one.
I have wondered before, though, about how had might it be to learn to read mirrored, RLT english. Might be a bit of a challenge at first, but would enable you to read translated manga RTL with no compromises (other than the inherent lossiness of language translation in general).
I've long thought that words such as "unlimited", "infinite" and so on should be legally banned from marketing, or at the very least their use should be heavenly regulated.
_Nothing_ is actually infinite. Everything has limits.
"But X terabytes is functionally infinite for 99.99% of users"
Cool, then advertise that you offer Xtb of storage. Infinite means infinite, and if you offer anything less than that - and you do - then you shouldn't be allowed to say otherwise.
One was puzzle game where you had to bounce a laser off of mirrors to pop balloons. The second was kind of a Chip's Challenge kind of deal I think, where you as Dexter were running away from an out of control robot, and had to collect some computer chips or something.
And in the third game, Dexter was running, inexplicably, a record store? Dunno if it was a tie in for a specific episode I don't remember now, but it's quite a funny premise, and a fun game too.
If you worked on any of these games, thank you! I spent so many hours back then on those, and many others.
I still had dial up back then, and I couldn't stay online for long. Eventually I figured out that if I kept the website open, then disconnected (rather than closing then disconnecting, which was what my parents taught me), the games would still work. Which is obvious to me now, of course, but as a 6~7 year old, who had no idea of how any of this worked, I felt like an actual, proper hacker. I literally just had the thought, "wait, what if..." and was promptly rewarded. I've been chasing that high ever since :)
From then on, my evening routine after school was connecting, picking the 3~4 games I wanted to play for that night, letting them load, disconnecting, and playing to my heart's content. If I hacked anything that fateful night, it was my parent's main excuse to get me off the computer!