As someone in the Venn diagram intersection of "software engineer" and "studied climate/astrophysics/planetary science" in school, reading comments here is painfully disheartening. Virtually everyone highly engaged in this field is anticipating multiple, systemic apocalyptic scenarios that will end modern life as we know it. I'd assume that most of the people reading have enough of a calculus background to understand some of the underlying math. I implore you to find a good book or course on it.
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.
I made this port, thanks for sharing it! The reason this game doesn't appear in the original list is because it was made in Shockwave, not Flash. I'm curious if there is any kind of emulator for Shockwave being worked on like what Ruffle is for Flash.
Thank you for being a part of my childhood then! I probably played (like everyone else my age) most if not all CN games. It's a shame they didn't do any sort of effort to preserve them officially.
So did I. Your username suggests we might be from the same country. If so, we must have worked for the same awful person of a boss!
(I briefly thought that maybe you were that awful person, but he wouldn't be caught dead in HN; his whole thing was to exploit and abuse the people who did the actual work and forbid them from taking credit or even mentioning the work in a CV)
Same, none of the ones I worked on. But I did more work for Nickelodeon than CN, so I'm not really surprised. I only remember one CN one I did, but I might have worked on two or three that I'd know if I saw them again...
There are very few from 2008-2012 which is when I was working on that.
Alas no. I worked on their Power Play downloadable system to embed games in a local player and also did stuff like add Mojo Jojo and new levels to games like Power Puff Girls Fast and the Flurrious. Fun times :)
I worked on their Power Play downloadable system to embed games in a local player and also did stuff like add Mojo Jojo and new levels to games like Power Puff Girls Fast and the Flurrious. They had a mini golf game with a 3d golf club I embedded that I spent more time playing than working on :)
We're on the verge of ecological collapse, undergoing an insane mass extinction event with ocean acidification and methane release going off the charts. I can't even begin to conceive of your reality.
The point is that this is not what people were worried about in the 70s. Even halving the population we’d still have all of these problems. While we obviously don’t suffer from famine, at least not globally.
Those predictions have completely failed and were replaced by new issues.
We're not yet suffering from famine, because new technologies allowed us to extract way more food than anticipated from the same surface area. However, these practices are not workable long term. You can't actually extract the amount of food we are currently extracting from our agricultural land for another 100-200 years. If we try, we'll ultimately leave the soil in such a bad state that will not grow much of anything - and mass starvation will happen long before then.
I work in distributed systems programming and have been horrified by the crap the AIs produce. I've found them to be quite helpful at summarizing papers and doing research, providing jumping off points. But none of the code I write can be scraped from a blog post.
We run a large distributed cluster (currently 4 DCs spanning the US) and use hot code reload for live patches when needed and rolling deployments for our standard releases.
I think that's a good point. Our largest pain point with Elixir is definitely the size of the community and the associated dearth of niche libraries. The technology behind it, though, is solid enough that once those libraries exist, things really take off. My team wrote several open source medical libraries for Elixir and we've seen it really expand into the healthcare market.
