Flash Game Archive lets you play thousands of Flash Games on your Windows PC
Flash is no longer supported officially and Adobe, Microsoft and browser makers such as Mozilla or Google have disabled support in their products. While Flash is no longer in active development, it is still home to thousands of games and applications, as these have not just vanished with the end of support.
You can still play Flash content in your browser in 2021, but also using various tools, e.g. the Flash games preservation project, or Internet sites. Many of these use ruffle, a Flash emulator. While not perfect, it works with many games and applications already.
The Flash Game Archive is another tool for Windows to play classic Flash games. The latest version supports more than 4000 games, all neatly categorized in the application. The app has a size of just 50 Megabytes, as games are downloaded on demand.
The program launches in a windowed fullscreen mode which is a bit hard to navigate. You may set the desired screen resolution in the interface, browse game categories, newest additions, or a featured listing.
Note that the app includes adult content, but that the content is locked by a password.
You may browse all games from the categories page; there you find categories such as tower defense, brain, shooting or RPG. A click opens the list of games in the selected category. Each game is listed with its name initially.
Select a game to display a screenshot and to get some information, e.g. a description or its version. The information is not available for all games though.
Select the play button to download the game and to start playing it. Flash Game Archive supports several Flash versions, with Flash 13 preselected. If a game is not working, you may need to change the Flash version to see if that does the trick.
Games play in a dedicated window, and you may allow the Flash version to communicate with the Internet, as some games won't work if you disallow it.
You may add games to the favorites for faster access in the future. A search is provided, but it is only useful if you are looking for a particular game or want to find games by tags.
As far as the selection of games is concerned, you find trashy but also well polished games supported. The Tower Defense category, for example, lists games such as Cursed Treasure or Viking Defense, which used to be very popular back in the Flash gaming days.
Closing words
Flash Game Archive lets you play more than 4000 Flash games on your Windows PCs at the time of writing. It does not use emulation but "real" Flash versions for that, it seems. While these won't get installed permanently on the system, it still means that Flash is run on the device when games are played.
Now You: do you use a program or site to play Flash games?
Long ago I started to download my favorite SWF games. They can be played on the local machine using the Adobe standalone flash player. The one I use is called flashplayer 11.exe (V11.8.800.168). There are newer versions.
@Phrozen Ghost
Do you need Flash installed to use that player though?
No. It’s entirely standalone.
BlueMaxima’s Flashpoint is a lot better than FGA, full stop. It’s the one ricknick91 mentioned, and has over 100000 entries. However, there is also a version that takes up only 2GB and downloads games on demand. It’s a lot larger than Flash Game Archive because it supports 33 plugind, not just Flash. Zero content is locked behind a paywall (FGA locks NSFW content behind one).
It would be awesome if i could play some old Miniclip games. There is another project like this one, but with a way bigger database (500 GB i think). The only reason i don’t use that other project it’s because i don’t have a 500GB HDD
You can use it as long as you have 2GB free, just use the Infinity version (downloads on demand)
That would be BlueMaxima’s Flashpoint, which is also mentioned in this article. They have a lighter version called Flashpoint Infinity which downloads games on demand – it’s only about half a gigabyte.
Nme of the project please?
BlueMaxima’s Flashpoint (https://bluemaxima.org/flashpoint)