I’m not a huge fan of Flash myself, but I certainly recognize its advantages. With that said, it pains me to see things like Machinarium not having a right-click inventory management system, i.e., right-clicking to bring up the inventory/dismiss the currently held items. Instead, it forces you to drag the cursor to a pop-up menu, click on the desired item, drag it to a potential hotspot, and then drag it all the way back to the inventory when the activity is finished. Not that the right click system is necessary per se, but it’s familiar, and Machinarium didn’t accommodate for its absence by creating an interface that was better catered to its platform’s limitations.

Also, I believe there are workarounds in Flash so that right-clicking doesn’t bring up the Adobe menu, but I can’t say for sure.

Either way, not every game can be made in Flash, but an awful lot of them are suitable for it regardless of any backend inefficiencies.

@Leroy – well, if it is ever released I will be satisfied by default. I just want to make sure the high expectations are at least partially deserved. The problem is that the expectations seem to rise constantly. I need to accelerate the development up to expectations-escape velocity.

@Radek – Good point on using Flash. I totally agree with that observation. It is one of the many reasons why Flash is the only development environment I would use for PC right now. I could imagine also using XNA but only in order to go for Xbox. But then again, the audience doesn’t seem to be that large there.

Still, using Flash there is that unsettling taste of wasting enormous amounts of processing power when even the simplest effects slow down your framerate. I always feel like I’m just pretending to be a programmer.

Also, developing it in Flash might not have been such a bad idea: http://www.edery.org/2009/12/igf-observations-1-compatibility-problems/