What browser games have you lost the most time to?
THE PCG Q&A
Find all previous editions of the PCG Q&A here. Some highlights:
- Have you tried to make your own game or mod?
- What's something about games you didn't mind as a kid but can't stand now?
- What was the best game on your school computers?
Kongregate has stopped accepting new games, and Flash's "end of life" is six months away. Before they're gone, what browser games did you play the most? Was it Slither.io or Agar.io, or those web versions of PopCap games with the exclusive levels? The Last Stand or Line Rider or QWOP? Did you play the OG versions of Meat Boy and Canabalt back in the day? Refresh your memory with our list of the best if you need to.
What browser games have you lost the most time to? Here are our answers, plus some from our forum.
Lauren Morton: Robot Unicorn Attack. The years around 2003-ish are a haze of Flash games I barely remember. There was the competitive stick archer one. There was one about a yeti slaughtering penguins with a baseball bat. Who would make that? And why would I play it? I don't remember. Oh and then there was Neopets, which I know I sank lots of time into but have almost no memories of somehow. The one I actually remember spending time on was years later when Robot Unicorn Attack took over, and eventually became a phone game that I played too. I'm absolute trash at infinite runner games but that song was just too good. Aaaalways I wanna beeee with you and make belieeeve with you. It even spawned a metal version and a retro one. It really had a solid 15 minutes of fame.
Robin Valentine: It's clickers all the way down for me—from the original Cookie Clicker, to Candy Box, to Universal Paperclips, I'm an absolute sucker for them. If you ever want to utterly sabotage my productivity for the day, just send me a link to one. Hell, I just looked up some of the ones I played to jog my memory, and now I'm halfway into a new game of A Dark Room as I write. Absolute nightmare. At least those will survive the death of flash...
Wes Fenlon: Forget the games, I was all about the animations. I have dim memories of playing janky browser Bomberman clones and other crappy web games at school in the early 2000s, but I don't think any were truly timesucks for me. But I did, to a now embarrassing degree, love that era of Flash animations, many of which were made out of videogame art. One series I remember watching many times was an increasingly complex, increasingly violent odyssey about Mario going to war with Wart (after an initial episode, in which Luigi goes on a rampage following Mario's death. Turns out it was all a dream). It took me a while to find it, but here it is: Rise of the Mushroom Kingdom. It now feels very early 2000s to add bloody decapitations to something like Mario, but I gotta say, the animation's otherwise still pretty dang good. Apparently the creator of the series died in 2012, which makes me feel both sad and old.
Steven Messner: I'm almost embarrassed to admit how addicted to Runescape I was as a kid. It was my first MMO and the experience of playing with hundreds of other players at one time was a revelation to me, and I easily sunk thousands of hours into grinding. It got so bad that at one point I was waking up at 3 or 4 am every morning before school and sneaking into the computer room just to log in and play. Computers back then were especially loud, so I'd bring a pillow and a bedsheet and stuff one under the door to hide the light and throw the other over the computer while connected to dial up to try and muffle that awful chugging noise. Then I'd game away until my parents woke up. On weekends, I'd easily spend 10 hours or more playing, often just clicking rocks to mine coal so I could one day own a colored cape. I was so invested that I even bawled my eyes out one time after dying in a duel and losing all of my best armor—I was devastated. Looking back, I can't believe that my parents didn't intervene. Instead they bought me a subscription when Runescape eventually added a whole continent of new stuff only available to premium players. Those were dark, dark days.
Jody Macgregor: The Last Stand 2 was a perfect distillation of the zombie formula. By day you scrounge for weapons and barricade materials. By night, you stand behind your pile of junk and shoot zombies till dawn. Its creators, Con Artist Games, were also responsible for Warfare 1917 and Crush the Castle, which devoured loads of my time.
Then there was the Rebuild, which were kind of the opposite of The Last Stand. Instead of clicking on zombie heads, the focus was on managing a settlement, keeping people happy and converting blocks of your dead-infested town into homes for your growing enclave. Rebuild 2 ate even more of my time.
From our forum
Mazer: Oh man I've spent so many hours being paid to play flash games in my life, which may explain my career progress.
For me it's a toss up between The Last Stand: Union City and Kingdom Rush, which started my love affair with tower defense. Both series are actually still going, Kingdom Rush Vengeance came out only last year and Google tells me that there's a new Last Stand game coming to Steam early access next year.
So Jody, what do I need to pull in order to get The Last Stand: Aftermath up in the 'Popular' quick bar on the PCG site? I'd love to see it squeeze in between Cyberpunk and Death Stranding.
Frindis: Probably have a couple of hundred hours between my favorites: Surviv.io, Zombroyale.io, Town of Salem, Wings.io, Slither.io, Gartic.io, and Runescape. I also played a lot of stickmen, zombie survivors, and speedrunner games years back. Speaking of Town of Salem:
XoRn: Universal Paperclips! It's difficult to talk about without spoiling much but it starts off as a simple little economy/incremental game. Make a paper clip. Sell a paper clip. Make 1,000 paperclips. Sell 1,000 paperclips. Make 1,000,000,000,000 paperclips? We'll, you'll have to play and see.
Pifanjr: Adventure Quest. I even paid to get a premium account. I think I reached somewhere around level 60-70. I probably would be playing it more if it didn't need flash. I once tried using a flash browser on my phone, but that didn't work very well.
Rensje: Yeti Sports! Pretty much the entirety of my ICT classes in secondary school were spent playing this rather than doing anything productive or interesting.
Krud: At first I thought, "What? I've never played 'brower games'," but then I looked at the list, and... Kingdom of Loathing, hands down.
drunkpunk: Anyone remember when Rust launched from a browser? That counts, right? I think that's the only one I've got, but man I put a lot of time into it back then.
DXCHASE: Lost a lot of time in the .io universe but recently its been CS 1.6, ive lost a good day or 2 in the last 2 weeks to it.
SirWabel: I used to spend way too much time playing Happy Wheels.
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