The best game of 2009 was, in fact, onlinegames.com/basketball. This was amazing, because up until that point, there had only been one decent game ever written in Flash: Nanaca Crash. But computer programmers are clever! 2010 brought us Sanctuary-17 by Chris Klimas and Joel Haddock, over at Twofold Secret. It’s a fine fucking game, regardless of what platform it was developed on. So I’m ready to say that good games – truly good, interesting games – can be made in Flash.
But that’s also helped by the 2009 Game of the Year: onlinegames.com/basketball.
Look, there’s a crisis, and it’s going on RIGHT NOW. The international ultiplayer component of onlinegames.com/basketball has been removed. And I won’t stand for it!
When you sign up for a game of onlinegames.com/basketball, you’re allowed to put your country of origin, age and handle into a form. People haven’t used this to forge peace treaties, exactly. It almost instantly turned into a way to savage other nations in the high score boards. Hundreds of people might be playing at a given time, in a given “session”… and after two minutes, the top ten scores (and all the info they submitted) comes up on the screen. Benjamin “Pinback” Parrish and Adam Cadre are both amazing at this game. Adam doesn’t suffer from deep psychological sociopathy, so there’s no recorded evidence of him doing any race-baiting with the thing. It took Pinback, however, about two games before he realized what an important tool this is to nationtroll. Adam also didn’t have someone ready to cackle at every single screenshot that spoke, in thirteen characters, as to what a shithole North Korea was.
And now the multiplayer component is gone. And please, understand: Pinback had the high score there. The other people in the high score table simply hated the citizens of other countries THAT much. (In addition to being good enough at the game to get one of the ten best scores, out of a pool of hundreds.)
Personally, it was a sad day when I realized that not only was I terrible at real sports, but virtua ones as well. I have no idea how Pinback consistently gets scores into the 300 and 400s with this thing. It’s clicking on a spot on the screen where you launch a fake basketball. Which is lots of fun. It’s also communicating how much you think other nations suck, where the people of those nations can read it. I can go on Twitter right now and say that I think that Scandinavia is a horrible country. The only people who are going to read it are – well, they’re not Scandinavians. In fact, if I tweet that shit, I’m going to LOSE followers and not make anyone in Norway feel bad about themselves. Get the top score in flash basketball, and you CAN hurt people. (Or forge peace, but again, welp.)
Dr. James Naismith invented basketball to be an easy going game that fat white people could enjoy. Although Bud Selig probably believes that it was invented by Alfred Eugene “Mudwall” Jackson, Brigadier General of the Confederate Army. Since the good doctor’s intentions were completely brushed aside by people who can run and jump, it’s perfectly OK that his vision of bring people together has also been destroyed. But more, my vision of driving people apart has also now been destroyed. Pinback and I are composing an e-mail to onlinegames.com in the hopes of understanding *why* this important multiplayer setup has been quietly removed.
And fuck North Korea.