To Show Off Chrome Integration, Google Builds A Flash Game On Top Of YouTube

As we noted a few days ago, the latest stable builds of Google Chrome now come with native Flash support built-in by default. The hope behind this is to get better performance and better security out of Adobe’s plug-in. To showcase how well it works, Google has created a Flash-based game on top of YouTube, Chrome Fastball. It’s pretty nifty.

If you go to this page you YouTube, you’ll find the game. Basically, it’s a combination of a YouTube video and a task-based game that you try to complete as quickly as possible. A video starts playing showing a Rube Goldberg-like contraption. As a ball travels through it, at certain points, challenges pop up that you must complete before the video continues. One challenge is to find the best route in Google Maps, one is to tweet something (from a generic Twitter account tied to the game), one is to look up artists on Last.fm, etc.

Says Google:

In testing Flash Player integration into Chrome, the Chrome team admittedly spent many, many fun hours with a few of our favorite Flash-based indie games. So as a side project, we teamed up with a few creative folks to build Chrome FastBall, a Flash-based game built on top of the YouTube platform.

Chrome Fastball is actually six YouTube video stitched together with these challenges in the middle, triggered by Flash. It’s not quite as cool looking at the Chrome speed test video, but it’s a nice showcase. And it does seem to perform pretty well — my fans aren’t spinning, yet.

Yesterday, YouTube also made the case for continuing to support Flash going forward. While they’re experimenting with HTML5 (with both H.264 and their own new WebM standard), it still can’t do some of the things YouTube needs.