Club Penguin is shutting down

for those unaware, "CP" often refers to child pornography

Ice fishing was my favourite grift.

I've been thinking about this for a few years. It's one reason that I don't care for online gaming; it's always in the back of my mind that the thing will disappear someday. That's one thing that draws me into retro games; they tend not to have external requirements like internet services, update patches, and so on.

It represents the death of the original Club Penguin though. Nowadays it's all commercials. Disney-themed penguins and adverts for the latest kids movies.

It's a whole new platform with no migration path, from what I can understand. So my son, if he wanted to, could never transfer all his hard work of gathering assets, building stuff and friendships across to the new platform. He basically has to kiss his Penguin goodbye.

It was also a known gateway for terrorists, and terrorist recruiting cells. The relative obscurity of the game and the assumed anonymity made it a breeding ground for black market crimes.

Not nearly enough material. Probably enough for a good blog post. Lan (the guy) probably has enough material, but I only worked with him for a few months.

I think the best quote came from a mutual friend (paraphrased, because decade ago) "When I first met Lan, I made a resolution: I'd be as good as he was in a year. Then I got to know him, and realized: I could be as good as Lan was; he got better faster than I could catch up."

It's accurate, but probably not good. Most of the articles on HN that talk about a shut down are about the company going under. That doesn't seem to be the case here.

Regardless of it's right or wrong to assume the content of a post based on its title, a much better title would make it clear the game is shutting down and not the company.

"Club Penguin" is not shutting down. It's moving to an updated, mobile-only platform. There is still a thing that bears the Club Penguin name and theme, run by the people who run Club Penguin, onto which, presumably, the majority of Club Penguin's current userbase will migrate. From my reading, some types of memberships will even carry over onto the new platform.

This is a major release that drops support for desktop platforms. So it's certainly a substantial change, but it's not fair to call it a shutdown.

If anything, the market for this type of game is only growing as mobile devices become a ubiquitous part of first-world childhoods. It would make no sense for a successful platform like Club Penguin to abandon that market, especially considering the vertical integration opportunities it provides to its parent company.

Not AFAIK, just a reference it seems.

Not even possible. CP didn't allow for player collision, IIRC.

True but they can still do so with an Android emulator like Andy

> Thankfully I've got her jazzed about TF2 now that she's a bit older and has gotten good with the WADS/FPS controls.

You probably already know, but I'd highly recommend Overwatch in that kind of niche. Similar co-operative FPS gameplay with a more vibrant/interesting backstory/world and characters, and very polished. It's got me doing more gaming than I have for perhaps a decade (heck, it's even good enough to be worth putting up with a non-Steam platform).

They are launching a sequel called CP Island. So don't rejoice too soon.

Yes, my older daughter rather likes TF2, particularly since her twitch reflex are much faster than mine now. We're a decent Scout-Medic combo :)

No Overwatch for me, I'm on a Mac.

> gotten good with the WADS/FPS controls

It's never too early to get them started on ESDF.

Moderated Lego forums are closing this month too, weird

Well, funny thing... I really didn't play it much online, so I didn't even realize he was playing on servers for a while. He was 10ish when he started (15 now). When I started looking over his shoulder, I was shocked at some of the other players behavior! I once intervened and took control of the keyboard to scold another player who kept holding him up and taking his cars, money, etc. Turns out it was a role playing server... the other player was his friend, playing a criminal. I kind of left him alone after that!

He's been playing for 5 years now, so he's a mod on a few servers. He started out building simple things, then progressed to wiremod within a couple of weeks. It wasn't long before I couldn't keep up with him when I tried to check out what he was building. He used to build cars/vehicles (mostly from scratch, not using car models) and add them to the workshop, think he has a couple dozen in there. Now he mostly camps on servers and chats with friends (online friends), warns and kicks players when he gets reports, that sort of thing.

In my experience kids love Garry's Mod if they have the patience to learn it. My brother played the heck out of it when he was 13. (To answer your question, he was playing custom game modes and would sometimes use the character poser/scene creation tools). It's great for technically inclined kids who love sandboxes and are bored with Minecraft.

If he was anything like me, mess about, and occaisionally build something simple.

Is there a good way to preserve and run flash content as we move into this brave new flash-free world, with good long-term prospects? At least the stuff that doesn't require a server component?

Lots of cool stuff from the mid-period Web was flash. All of Homestarrunner, obviously. Thousands of games. JibJab was (is?) big, and IIRC their early stuff was Flash. Various animated shorts of varying character and quality (remember when Stickperson Fight animations were big? The best were usually in Flash)