Are Disabled Gamers Caught in the Middle of Apple vs. Flash? Part Two

Thursday, 13 May 2010 21:10 Written by Rebecca Fortelka

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Flash is a great tool for making games and as a result there are 1,000’s of games available in all different genres for all gamers at all skill levels. Granted, not all are accessible but there are more than a 1000 games that are fully accessible. The variety of games genre are including but not limited to adventure, shooting, action, puzzles, racing and many others, the fact they are free to play, easy to find do makes the flash games very popular and everyday they do attract a lot of players.

It’s true that flash games don't typically have great graphics or stories as long as traditional games, but there are many very fun and challenging ones if you look in the right places.

We at Ablegamers help you find those accessible Flash games by posting a weekly column called Ioo's Web Game of the Week. This week we featured an amazing game called Cursed Treasure, which is excellent tower defense with some new twists and turns.

The Web Game of The Week has become one of the most popular features on Ablegamers because we focus on the accessibility review and try to find games that fit for our whole community.

Flash is really emerging in the social gaming world because of the easy-access and cross-platform capabilities. In other words, they can be played both online or offline and they do not require any client side software to be installed, apart from the web browser and common plug-ins such as Java or Flash Player.

Companies like Xynga, the people who make favorites like Mafia Wars, Farmville and Cafe world, focus entirely on flash games. Another big player in social gaming world is Playfish who develop popular titles such as Pet Society, Hotel City and Country Story.

In addition, a lot of Indie game developers are joining in on the Flash craze. We as gamers are very lucky because we can play all different types of Flash games that are great for people of all likes, ages and skills.

A lot of old-school favorites have been reinvented to include Flash and many of these are from our friends at Namco Games like Dig-Dug and Pac-Man. Since these games are online, it’s a great way to play some of your old-favorites without a console or arcade machine!

You can also play old fighting favorites like Mortal Kombat and Street Fighter. You can even play board games like chess and checkers or my personal favorite Mancala. You’re lucky because all of these genres can be found on both Facebook and MySpace, which are still considered the best social net working sites for gaming. For those who do have accounts on these sites you can still play these online by just doing a simple Google search.

Flash has been very innovative as far developing games; i n the last release of flash development, they had a tool that allowed a developer to use flash and then "convert it" to fit the Apple handhelds but now that means that all those flash developers can no longer use the skills to make non-flash Apple games and that many disabled gamers may find the interface of the iPad a great alternative because of its ease of use. But you’re in luck because you can still play Flash Games on your Mac Desktops or Laptops.

Flash is also great for media rich websites and animations. It can also be important if you want an immersive experience of some kind sound and Complex animation with arbitrary shapes.

Now that you have heard both sides of the argument and it’s your turn to make the decision: Are you PRO Flash or PRO Apple?

Part One

Comments (2) Add Comment

John Bannick

June 16, 2010

Votes: +0

...

A really good summary and analysis, Rebecca. I'm passing it along to our Marketing folks.

Couple of comments:

Our recent study of HTML 5, plus the feedback we're getting from IGDA and other industry colleagues, suggests that HTML 5 won't actually be used by many people, gamers or otherwise, for 1 - 2 years from now.

Our own technical study of the latest Flash was sufficiently positive, both re accessibility and general development-ability, that our own company is investing in a Flash gaming project.

If you go to statcounter.com you'll see why the mobile market, though large and growing, is still less important than other platforms.

Aside from all that, it personally pisses me off that Jobs is excluding Flash from iStuff so he can maximize profits at the expense of the general public. Just because we're a capitalist society does not make it morally right.

John Bannick
CTO
7-128 Software