Video games have been a part of our culture for a long time, so what about flash games? For many people growing up in the early 2000s, flash games are a part of their childhood. People visited lots of different sites to ply these games, whether it be newgrounds, kongregate, or some other gaming site. In China, one of the largest and most popular flash games sites, was and still is 4399.com.
4399 has a huge range of flash games, and in recent years has moved into the realm of html5 and other online game types. Each game on 4399 has a special number ID assigned to them, and these can be seen in the urls. Going through the lowest numbers listed on the site, numbers such as 1 & 2 aren't available, but 3 is. Checking the wayback machine on archive.org, these pages don't exist in even the oldest captures, so it it unknown whether these pages ever existed, or if they were deleted shortly after they were created.
Looking at the page, the game is called Invasion of the Galactic Goobers, and was published on the site on the 15th of May 2004. It is a simple clone of Space Invaders, but with a bit of a twist, with the addition of boss fights.
Disclaimer: This article was written as a YouTube Video script, and hence may make reference to audio of visual elements not available on this page. The original article written about this topic, as well as references can be found HERE.
2003. Back when Amazon was little more than a glorified bookstore, and when Netflix and Chill meant to order a DVD on Netflix and wait for it to arrive in the post. 2003 was a year before prevalent online video streaming, and although there were sites and programs like Napster and LimeWire which allowed you to download music and videos, they weren't exactly legal. The only real way to easily access films and TV at the time was to go to a video rental store and rent a VHS Tape or DVD, that or just buy the video outright. Apart from the lack of streaming, not everyone had a phone that they could use a a portable media player to watch videos.
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Video game consoles have had a lot of accessories throughout the years. So what about for watching videos on a portable console such as the Gameboy Advance? You are probably aware that in the West, the Nintendo GBA had special cartridges released in 2004 that featured low resolution TV show episodes.
In Japan however, Gameboy Advance Video did not exist. Instead they had their own system of playing videos on the Gameboy Advance. This technology is apparently so unheard of in the west that unlike for the Western Gameboy Advance cartridges, Wikipedia doesn't even have an article for their Japanese counterpart.
In Japan in 2003, AM3 created their own system for playing videos on the Gameboy Advance, a whole year before the Gameboy Advance cartridges were released. This system was called 'Advance Video', which admittedly has a name very similar to 'Gameboy Advance Video'. AM3's system used a specially designed cartridge that could play videos off of a standard Smart Media card inserted into a slot on the side.
These cards could be purchased either with content already on them, or as blank cards which could be taken to a kiosk to have an episode written on them. There were also packages that included both the adapter as well as a card, or you could buy your cards and adapter separately. After you watched a video, you could keep the card to rewatch the video later, or you could use a kiosk to rewrite the card with a new video. Something interesting to note about these cards, is that they are partially transparent.
These cards can hold up to 24 minutes of animated content on a standard 32 megabyte card, or 192 minutes on a 256 megabyte card. The videos are compressed using a proprietary video compression technology developed in conjunction by Act Image of France, as well as IMAGICA Corporation, which is also known for HDCAM compression.
4 titles were available for the launch in May 2003, and the adapter was available for 3200 yen. To use the kiosks to rewrite cards, it would cost you between 100 yen and 500 yen, depending on what exactly you wanted to write on the card. To purchase a new blank card, it would cost you around 1800 yen. These kiosks were called 'Advance Gacha', and were designed to be able to be set up in convenience stores and toy shops. This system was similar to the kiosks set up to allow people in Japan to write Famicom Disk System games onto disks. AM3 planned to set up over 10,000 of these smart media copying machines in Japan by the summer of 2005. These systems were distributed in conjunction with Happinet Co.
A large number of anime titles were made available. The original series announced to be distributed were 'Detective Conan' and 'Time Bokan'. These were all available on prewritten cards, with the first episode of 'Detective Conan', 'The Roller Coaster Murder' being available in a bundle with the adapter, for only 600 yen more than the cost of the adapter itself. That's a pretty good deal if you ask me, considering to just get a blank card will set you back 1800 yen.
With the initial release, you are also paying for the novelty of portable videos. Hasbro's VideoNow also launched in 2003. Although the VideoNow discs were available at a lower price-point, there are several disadvantages. The original VideoNow only worked in black and white, whereas the Advance Video supported colour. The VideoNow player could only be used to watch videos and had no support to play any games. The VideoNow had a much smaller screen, and did not support any kind of rewriteable format.
According to the website for lik-sang, a former importer of Japanese products, content for AM3's Advance Video was planned to be released in stores on CDs, which could then be later transferred to cards. It isn't known whether any CDs with content were ever made or released. This idea is however contradicted by an article by ASCII corp., which claims that the content would utilise DRM that tied data to hardware in order to prevent unauthorised copying. This DRM would make it very hard to write content onto the Smart Media cards yourself. The system adopted a special ROM-specific ID system recorded for each file, so even if it was copied onto a commercially available Smart Media card or even another card with a different video on it, it could not be played. This would be encrypted with DES encryption and use a 128-bit encryption key which would be recorded in the media ROM, and would need to be verified before a video could be played back. Despite this, data from computers and cameras could still be recorded to the memory cards, although this likely could not be accessed with the Advance Video adapter.
When the Western Gameboy Advance Video cartridges were released, they used DRM to stop them from being played on the Gamecube Gameboy adapter, as the owners of the rights to the television series were worried that users would watch their shows on a bigger screen, or even try to record their episodes. AM3's Advance Video adapters however work fine in the Gamecube Gameboy adapter. While we are comparing differences between the two systems, while the western Advance Video cartridges sat flush with the GBA as they were standard sized cartridges, in order to make room for the Smart Media card slots, the Japanese system required a larger cartridge. The adapter is 55 mm long, which is about 1 cm less than an original Gameboy cartridge, meaning it stuck out of a GBA by 2 cm. Interestingly, as the width of a Gameboy cartridge is also about 55 mm, this means that the AM3's Advance Video cartridge is a perfect square.
The player has several functions that can be used whilst playing back video. The system can play and pause using the 'A' button. It can also fast forwards and backwards, using the right and left buttons on the d-pad respectively and by pressing and holding forwards and backwards, you can change between 1x speed, 2x speed, 3x speed, and 4x speed. Some material would also support chapter menus, although earlier content such as the Detective Conan Roller Coaster Murder Case did not. Titles such as the Pokemon titles would support basic interactive menus which allowed the selection of either the main movie, or short commercials for other Pokemon movies.
The player contains no decoding chip, but instead uses the ARM7 CPU of the GBA in conjunction with the specially developed FastVideo codec to allow for video playback. This allowed the player to be built at a low price-point as it did not have to contain any custom chips. Video can be played back at 30 fps and at a resolution of 240 x 160 pixels, the full resolution of the GBA screen.
Lik-sang, also expected a wide range of content to be released for the system including animated content, aka. the anime shows, game and movie trailers, similar to what is available on the Pokemon cards, pictures, music, educational software titles, ebooks, as well as karaoke.
This is also backed up by a 2004 GameSpot article which claims that AM3 was also planning to release other peripherals that would work with different types of media. These included: Advance Picture for still images, Advance Music for music, Advance Comic for manga, and Advance Navi for maps.
According to ASCII, AM3 would release animated content at first, but planned to also release other content such as eBooks, so that the GBA and GBA SP could be used for educational materials. Nintendo however prohibited the company from using the technology to distribute any games or adult materials.
Looking at listings for the Smart Media Player on Amazon.co.jp (which can be found by searching for 'AM3' under the category 'TV games'), it can be seen that cards were released for many anime series including, but not limited to: Meitantei Conan/Detective Conan also known as Case Closed, Pokemon, Lelere's Genius Bakabon, Crayon Shin-chan, and Time Bokan.
These releases could have either television series episodes or movies on them. During the time of the Nintendo DS, smart media cards continued to be released with Nintendo DS branding on the packaging, although they were still the same GBA cartridge design. AM3 would go on to release DSVision, which was a similar concept to the Smart Media Player except it took Micro SD/TF cards and was housed in a special DS cartridge that looked similar to a DS flash cart.
The ActImage codec was announced by Shinji Hashimoto, the executive officer of Square Enix to also be planned for use in the GBA game 'Kingdom Hearts Chain of Memories', which did feature rendered cut-scenes. Although from research I cannot find whether it was in fact this codec used to compress the video used in cut-scenes, it likely was due to this announcement.
In 2005, am3 would also provide 'Poke Park Advanced Navi' at PokePark, the world's first Pokemon theme park, which was a video utilising the Advance Video technology and could be written free of charge onto a card using an 'Advance Gachapon' system. They also operated a lending system there, where a guest could pay 2100 yen to rent a system with the card and movie, 2000 yen being given back to the guest on the system's return.
Currently, there does not appear to be much information on the internet about the AM3 Smart Media Player, or at least it is not easily accessible. Many sites that contain information about the product such as 'lik-sang.com' are no longer available, and many western sites did not cover this product as it did not have an international release, unlike Gameboy Advance Video. It is likely that the Smart Media Player was not released internationally, due to the success of Gameboy Advance Video, and it's much simpler nature only requiring a cartridge for each video, instead of a bulky adapter with fancy media cards. Some information can be found through listings on sites such as Amazon.co.jp, which is not normally used by people outside of Japan, which makes it hard for people to discover AM3's Advance Video smart media player.
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