Welcome to the comprehensive guide on how to play Earth Taken, the hit 2013 Flash game by SeethingSwarm studios. There are several ways to play this game, all of which will be detailed below, with their pro's and cons.
- ON THE INTERNET.
Probably the easiest way to get this game to run is in your browser. Simply searching Earth Taken on the internet will give you a few results of websites where you can play this game. These websites often use a Flash Emulator to run the .swf file, like Ruffle.
PRO's:
- ✔Easiest
CON's:
- ❌Harder to record gameplay and use Livesplit
- ❌Websites might have ads
USING AN EMULATOR. Using an emulator is a little more advanced that the method above. There are several emulators to choose from, but I will be discussing two: Ruffle and the Flash Debug Tool. Both are viable options and there seems to be very little difference in their functionality. I personally use the Flash Debug Tool since it's a tool made by Adobe Flash, which feels a little more official.
PRO's:
- ✔Easy to record and use Livesplit with
CON's:
- ❌More complicated
STEP 1: Downloading the emulator.
Downloading an emulator is quite straight forward. Ruffle can be downloaded here: http://ruffle.rs/ and the Flash Debug Tool can be downloaded here: http://sourceforge.net/projects/flashdebugtool/ Keep in mind that both of these files are standalone executables, meaning that these do not install anything on your system. When you want to run these, you simply run their .exe. If you want, these can be left in the downloads folder, placed on the desktop, or placed in a folder with a shortcut leading to them.
STEP 2: Downloading the game. Now it's time to download the game. .swf's can be extracted from the source code of a webpage, but this is more complicated than it has to be. All .swf files can be found at https://archive.org/details/earth-taken-flash-game-series. Keep in mind that some of these files are duplicates of eachother (look at the filesizes when in doubt), or are redundant. The file required for this game is either 625871_aliengame_ngmedals.swf, earthtakenMjA3Ng==.swf or earth-taken-15598.swf. earthtaken15598.swf seems to be an older version of the game. It's unclear what the differences are.
STEP 3: Running the game. There are a couple ways to run these (All of these are different ways of doing the same thing). Either open your emulator then drag the .swf file into it, drag the .sfw file onto the emulator's .exe file, or by doubleclicking the .swf, clicking "look for another app on this pc" and clicking the emulator.
And that's it! This should be all you need to know on how to speedrun the game. Please do make sure to use a speedrun timer (for example livesplit) to time your game. It's not required, but helps out a mod like me. You can look forward to more guides on how to speedrun the game, which I'll make when I have the time.
