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Flash of insight.
Flash games endure as one of the last wild frontiers of game development. Visit any one of the major Flash game hubs and you'll find a veritable grab bag of genres, styles, and stolen SNES sprites. They're how many people first break in to game development, which means a lot of big ideas and inconsistent execution.
Super Meat Boy
Super Meat Boy is renowned for being a masterfully crafted platformer and one of the earliest examples of a breakout, independently-developed hit. But before it was a smashing success, Super Meat Boy began as a humble, tough-as-nails Flash game. Back in October of 2008, game developers Jonathan McEntee and Edmund McMillen posted the bloody-yet-cuddly Meat Boy to the Newgrounds games portal, where it still resides today.
Alien Hominid HD
Six years before Meat Boy arrived on the scene, another two-man team was vexing Newgrounds' visitors with its own unforgiving 2D action game. Alien Hominid hit the site in August of 2002, courtesy of Tom Fulp and Dan Paladin. While the entire game was only a single level and two boss fights, players were instantly enamored with its quirky humor and keyboard-smashing difficulty.
Luftrausers
Luftrausers gets right what so many other games fumble: the basics. Number of guns? Number of levels? Number of overpriced DLC packs? None of that stuff matters if the basics of moving and shooting - the fun stuff - aren't silky smooth. And this game has, like, a gazillion mommes of silky smoothness (for all you fabric fans out there).
TowerFall Ascension
The bow-and-arrow brawler TowerFall Ascension is great for parties, but it started out as something almost entirely different. As Polygon reports, Towerfall began as a single-player flash game in which players were meant to feel like a "skilled archer out of an ancient legend." But the more the developers played with and worked on the game, the more they found themselves drawn to one particular mode: multiplayer.
Hatoful Boyfriend
Ah yes, Hatoful Boyfriend, the pigeon-dating simulator. If you've been on the internet these past few years, then you've undoubtedly heard all the big personalities in gaming raise an eyebrow at this unorthodox dating sim. "It's one of those Japanese dating games, but with, like, birds, man." And while that is indeed true, Hatoful Boyfriend: A School of Hope and White Wings has even more going on than just affectionate avians.
Realm of the Mad God
You know, the games industry really doesn't see enough massively multiplayer cooperative bullet hell shooters. We've got the cooperative shooter part down pretty good, but rarely rarely do they aspire to these levels of scale and chaos. RofMG sort of plays like a mix of World of Warcraft and Geometry Wars. You pick your class, collect items and equipment, level up, and so on, but the way you fight is by dodging around bullets (or spells, or arrows) and returning fire.
Canabalt
Canabalt is likely the most popular game on this list, next to Super Meat Boy. In it, an unnamed man wearing a black suits leaps from the window of his office building onto the rooftop of a neighboring building. Then, he runs. He runs and he runs and sometimes he jumps and he doesn't stop until you get him killed, which gets easier and easier to accomplish as the game continually gets faster and faster.
