Aral Balkan

I just went over to see the Nokia 20Lives web site after reading about the cool Flash games on there from FlashSteamWorks only to be greeted with a message telling me that I should install Flash Player 7.

At first I thought it was a bad detection script and it couldn't handle Flash Player 8 (remember people, always >= not ==) but, on closer inspection, I saw that the message was crafted directly at users with Flash Player 8.

And this is how the message ran... sciiience, fiictiiioon... uhum, yes:

"20Lives is optimized for Macromedia Flash Player 7. We see that you have Flash Player 8 installed. To guarantee that you will have the best possible experience, we recommend that you re-install Macromedia Flash Player 7 . . . First, uninstall Flash Player 8.0..."

What a load of bullocks!

Comments

• lol, that's really insane -- even if the project was framebased that's nothing changing the FPS and a null stream sound won't fix ;)

  by Peter on 2005-10-09 22:33:36

• I wonder if the guys hair will be on fire when 8.5 is pushed ...
  
  :)
  
  -sj

  by scott janousek on 2005-10-10 00:39:40

• Yeah, kinda weird since you can still enter the site with player 8 and it works like a charm. Someone should email Nokia and ask them to get rid of the script, maybe there wre some issues with player 8 betas or something. If it's still there after two weeks, we can attempt to get the public opinion on our side by calling them "evil terrorist Nazis" and advertising this as a fight between the good and evil ;)

  by Patrick Mineault on 2005-10-10 01:54:49

• Absolutely ridiculous and a good laugh! I feel sorry for Nokia...

  by Burak KALAYCI on 2005-10-10 03:43:45

• We'll after diggin for some time of the Nokida site, I finaly found a contact form for site ffedback.
  
  Having written a fairly long request to remove the message, and justification as to why the marketing team responsible should be instantly demoted to the mail/copy room I discovered that the form doesnt even work - no theres a suprise.

  by Pete on 2005-10-10 09:38:19

• It's probably because the games were created in Flash Lite (Flash 4 syntax). Some deprecated items (like "add") are no longer supported in Flash 8.
  
  But I agree, the page is lame for not explaining it somewhere.

  by Satori on 2005-10-10 16:29:11

• Hi Cisnky,
  
  While what you say happened is not hard to guess, the message is lame as ever.
  
  If it said what you just said, people would empathize. As it is, it's ridiculous.
  
  IMHO, an honest message, without the blurb like 'optimized', 'best possible experience', would have saved the day...
  
  Best regards,
  Burak

  by Burak KALAYCI on 2005-10-12 23:20:01

• The site was originally built to run with Flash Player 7. The day before the site went into public beta the Flash player 8 was released. Some elements of the site have bugs due to the new Flash Player. So to guarantee the best experience, users are recommended to drop back a player.
  
  No big plot to sabotage the Flash 8 penetration. :)
  
  P.S. MM are looking into the issues ;)
  

  by cisnky on 2005-10-12 10:11:31

• yeah apparently they had issues with the site running fine in 7 player, but crashing in the 8 player, I am building a similar project at the moment and am having the same issues, ie just throws an error, saying, a problem with this plug in occured, this happens periodically, so its going to be quiet difficult to track down :| I think their deadline was up, nasty solution still.
  
  MaTT

  by mattmuller on 2005-10-15 22:51:37

• Not that I'm totally impressed, but this is more than I expected for when I found a link on Furl telling that the info is awesome. Thanks.

  by How to Get Six Pack Fast on 2009-04-15 14:52:32