It's an old promotional game honda made, but I realized that it's missing some files.
How is it missing some files in this SWF file?
It is common for browser games specifically to have what we at Flashpoint had termed "external assets." This is where a game will be split across multiple files - for example, level one is in one file, level two is in another file, and so on.
The idea is that if you just play the first level, but then quit right away, the game will load faster because it won't have to download the entire thing just to play one level. So it'll only download the other parts once you reach them, as necessary. But this often means that Wayback Machine - which is just a bot, it can't actually play the game - only automatically saves the first file. So if you don't have the rest of the files that it would've downloaded as you played, you won't be able to progress past that point.
It was also common to use a pattern called a "loader." This is where the first file is just a nicer loading bar than the default, so the loader and the main game are seperate files. If you only have the loader, you don't have the game, only a fancy loading bar. This unfortunately often leads people to get excited they found a game only to realize what they have is useless.
This is the main reason that a lot of old Flash games don't work. From a technical standpoint, it has little to do with the death of Flash - you can still get the plugin running on an old machine with a bit of extra setup. It's the websites going down in the resulting fallout - and people who assume that saving just the initial SWF and nothing else is enough - that are the killers
Last Edit: Nov 13, 2023 19:03:21 GMT by tomysshadow
