Old computer, New Games - So Hack!!

Well, it's not as dramatic as the title sounds, but my computer is getting pretty old, about 4 years now. It's a puny Athlon 2800+ XP. Overclocked a bit, but like everyone one knows, it's not much of a gain.

For the past little while, I've been addicted to some of the games at TeaGames.com. Nothing different from any other site offering up a slew of Flashed based games... but there are two games in particular that are a lot of fun to play(read: waste time). TG Motocross 3, TG Motocross 3: Australia. Maybe it's a nostalgic thing, but a few years ago, I remember playing their original versions, at school even though I had assignments due. I remember procrastinating, while playing these games, and saying to myself, one last try to beat the top score.

But over the years, the advertising on the site has gone up dramatically. At first, there used to be static image ads, no big deal. Then they had the ads on all the pages accept the ones that you played the game on, how though full of them. But now not only are there Flash based ads everywhere on the site, but there is one in the header, and one on the right sidebar and are becoming a pain in the ass. My computer is slow enough as is; to play the Flash ‘physics’ based games, then on top of that add two Flash based ads that the CPU has to render and you’ve got one slow moving motocross guy.

Some quick investigation revealed that I couldn’t directly goto the swf file and play it that way. It does some sort of check and re-directs you back to the main page with the ads. Clever! But there is one hack that does work. Make sure the game swf is pre-loaded in the browsers cache, then as soon as it start, stop the page from loading any further, so that the ads don’t have time to load. Since the ads are random and refreshed every time you visit the page, you can sometimes prevent any of them from loading. You just have to experiment a few times to figure out how quickly your browser loads the game… after that, you can nail the stop load every time. If you can’t, and your browser loads the page too quickly, then you probably have a fast enough computer, and don’t need this little hack anyways.

Enjoy your ad-less gaming experience!!!

Aside: I know why the site has to put up advertising, but think of the little guy, that doesn’t have the money to upgrade his computer to the latest quad-core. If they want ads, how about some Google Adwords on the side, that don’t hog up precious CPU cycles to render their animations.