User blog:NOBODY/Discoveries from the Wayback Machine:

Hi all!

I know I should be finishing a certain section of the Colour Blind article (don't look for the section unless you've collected all the coins in Colour Blind), but this past week I got addicted to going through all Nitrome.com pages on the Wayback Machine.

For all of those who don't know, Wayback Machine is a site which takes pictures of other websites, these pictures it stores. Well, it doesn't really take pictures, it copies all the files, images, and Javascript stuff and places that on a page on the archive.org site. Thus, if you want to see what certain pages looked like a long time ago, you can simply search for a desired page, and archive.org may have that page captured.

So enough with that, it's time I show you all some weird discoveries I found.

Fly Fly
When I stumbled upon this page I was wondering "What is this?". I still don't know. Is this some sort of unreleased Nitrome game titled "Fly Fly"? Or is this an example of an advergame (a game created to advertise a certain product) Nitrome created titled "Fly Fly"? I still don't know. Also, the .swf (the file from which the game is played from) doesn't exist.

Since I used Windows 7, and I was doing this in Firefox, I was able to see some information regarding the page, by right clicking on the page and selecting "View Page I nfo". The description for this page is:

Come and join fly in his adventures. Fly is pretty fly for a black fly, so come play his fun flash games.

And keywords for the page:

stickee,sticky,stickie,sticke,fly,flash,games,kids,cartoons,fun,interactive,macromedia,fly-fly,paint,hiscore,stickman

Some I'm not sure whether this is a Nitrome game, or just some game embedded in a page.

Miracle Grow
Miracle Grow is a super secret Nitrome game, I can't even access it. Page for http://www.nitrome.com/games/miraclegrow/index.php and the page for http://www.nitrome.com/games/miraclegrow/. For the first page, it says it doesn't exist (404), and for the second page, it says I'm not allowed to access the page.

Is Miracle Grow an unreleased Nitrome game? I don't know. Better email Nitrome.

Other sites that redirect to Nitrome
This .xml file states several odd sites. I tried the first two and they redirect to Nitrome.com. I haven't tried the others, though.

Hot Air Balloon Maker Gallery - yet again the Nitrome Wiki lies to us!!!
From this revision of the Hot Air Balloon Maker page, I have found horribly wrong content. Observe:
 * This soon-to-come content would have allowed players to browse a gallery of balloons other people have made. Furthermore, the player would be able to send their balloons to friends. Mat stated that this was yet to be added to the game.


 * Despite Mat saying this was to be added, Balloon Maker was released without these functions, and never did gain them.[3]

Despite Mat saying this was to be added, Balloon Maker was released without these functions, and never did gain them. Well then, what's this? Nothing other than an apparently unimportant and heavily captured page that captured the page titled http://www.nitrome.com/games/hotair2/gallery.html. As you can see, Nitrome did in fact implement the gallery function (although I don't know about the send to friend function).

I had suspected this before, as Nitrome in a previous comment on Facebook said something about flagging a large amount of offensive Balloons. I also found a considerable amount of Hot Air 2 Balloon Maker gallery URLs. Thus, the gallery function did exist, and we were once again lied to by the Nitrome Wiki : ( . Be thankful it wasn't as bad as the last time that happened.

What Nitrome game deserves a sequel? Sorry, you can't vote, voting ended 6 years ago
Nitrome apparently had fans vote for what Nitrome game they wanted to have a sequel for. Although the stuff in the main box isn't there, it proves such a page and event existed. The page I previously linked to would show the results of the vote, while this page would presumably be for voting.

Hot Air 2 previews!
Nitrome has a page where you could see preview images of Hot Air 2. Unfortunately, only one of the four images are visible, the first visible image being an image of level 2 of Hot Air 2. You can see the small versions of the image though, and on a big page with cool art also. Click each image to go a slideshow page to see short pieces of information for other Nitrome games.

Share with a friend
You could email a Nitrome game link to a friend. Cool.

Thanks for taking the shop poll!
Before Nitrome created the Nitrome shop, in place of the shop's page they had a little voting page where you could vote for how interested you were in in content Nitrome could or may provide. This page is a thank-you page for filling out the voting page.

Shop form
What is this page? Every time I go to it nothing appears. Here's the link to all those weird, blank pages titled "shop form.php".

An early Nitrome portfolio
This page was apparently supposed to show everything every employee at Nitrome.com worked on. But now, it doesn't show anything. Oh well.

Rustyard Skipad and Aquanaut Google
Now here comes the very weird part of my trek through the Nitrome.com pages of the Wayback Machine - Rustyard Skipad and Aquanaut Google. Throughout going through all the 5,535 pages that were crawled, I came across what seemed to be endless amounts of broken Nitrome.com URLs for incorrect spellings of Mutiny and Skywire 2. These were crawled once, and they redirect to the front page of Nitrome.com.

Two pages I came across - Rustyard Skipad and Aquanuat Google - had peculiar names, non-broken URLs, and actually worked. Rustyard Skipad link and Aquanaut Google. The links take you to weird Nitrome.com pages, with nothing on them. Could these be beta names for Rustyard and Aquanaut? No, I don't think so. If not, then what are they?

That's all!
Thanks for reading! Hopefully, I'll get around to writing a blog post about citing emails, something I should have wrote a month ago.