i'm thinking of starting to do this for some fun practice. does anyone else recreate their favorite flash games in their programing language of choice?

That would be very counter-productive.

Flash games exist because they are so "easy" to make.

Recreating legacy games, such as space invaders or pacman has learning value, since there are some interesting properties which were exploited by the original implementations. Those games tend to work the way they do because there was no other way to make them - hardware simply couldn't do anything else.

Flash games on the other hand depend on huge library where C++ based frameworks can't even scratch the surface - unless you find flash replacement.

Doing something like this in Java or C# would make slightly more sense, since you can use the UI and graphics related toolkits (animating sprites is relatively painless, so are various transforms).