Giveaway of the Day Forums

1. 

   Dragonlair
   Member

   As many of you are also doing, I have been getting free games from FreeGamePick.com and carefully avoiding the search engine change or the toolbar installation. That means some fussing around with the shortcut after installation and I remove the "toolbar" folder after installation to be sure I don't get caught in the trap.

   However, I have not been able to remove the opening of their website in my default browser upon exit.

   I have an idea on it. I have discovered what it is doing but I've only been able to circumvent it once. My other attempts were unsuccessful.

   I noticed when I installed FreeGamePick's newest game (Bato) that I got an error that it could not find play.url when I exited the game. That turned out to be some strange problem caused by my leaving the browser open (with their site) after I installed the game. You can see a shortcut file "Play" that is actually "play.url". I was able to "replace" the file with a simple text file (I used their file "default.root") and named it "play.url". I made a copy of the original file in case it failed. It worked in this case.

   However, a similar attempt on another game simply gave an error as the play.url file having an invalid target.

   Does anybody know what I can use that will not cause an error or open the browser for this situation?

   BTW - I can't find a similar situation for GameTop.com. They do their browser opening trick another way.

   Diane

   Posted 15 years ago #
2. 

   GMMan, Hexadecimal Blacksmith
   Blocked

   Interesting idea. Maybe if you can hex edit the link to have a blank address it would work. Through looking through with a debugger, I think GameTop's links are compiled in right with the game. Maybe zeroing out the address with a hex editor might work.

   Posted 15 years ago #
3. 

   Whiterabbit-uk
   Games Guru

   Although I like the idea of getting rid of the irritating browser opening sequence once you close a Freegamepick or Gametop game down; it would actually be circumventing the licence under which these two game distribution site give away these games. All the games given away are actually commercial games; but they (Freegamepick and Gametop) pay the developers money to be able to give them away for free; the price we pay is the browser opening when we close the game.

   Regards

   W.R.

   Posted 15 years ago #
4. 

   GMMan, Hexadecimal Blacksmith
   Blocked

   Is that similar to having to view ads when I'm on a website? I tend to use all methods possible to block them. Same thing with programs for me. I f they have ads, I'm going to try to get rid of them, from using Privoxy to block them to hex-editing them out if I have to.

   Posted 15 years ago #
5. 

   Whiterabbit-uk
   Games Guru

   No I think its different. When you visit a site you're not getting anything for free. These games do cost money, but we are getting them for free. Taking away the coding that forces us to go to the web site is tantamount to stealing (IMO)

   The sites are sponsored by Forex.

   Posted 15 years ago #
6. 

   Quantum Dragon
   Member

   You are right, Whiterabbit, it indeed would be like stealing!

   I mean, these sites have not stolen the codes for the games, they have paid a license for it and they need to recoup their expenses in some way.

   It may be irritating to some but I find it trivial.

   There is a saying where I come from: "Nous ne pouvons pas avoir à la fois le beurre et l'argent du beurre" which translates to "We cannot have both the butter and the money for the butter" meaning we have to make choices: Having the games for free and living with the ads or "buying" the games to be ad free but also poorer in the wallet.

   This culture of free is making "monster consumers" as you can see with the Winpatrol experiment, those monsters will not pay regular prices for anything and when they get a deal like the one Mr Bill P. (Scotty's Father) did, they buy it in bulk and sell it back on ebay.

   So we must make a choice, driving all prices down whatever the cost to creators and then getting what we pay for (poor programs) or be willing to pay the correct price (either in cash or by tolerating that we can get shuffled back to a website when we exit) for quality products.

   Again, this here is my humble opinion!

   Posted 15 years ago #
7. 

   Dragonlair
   Member

   You're right but the one case did it on it's own the first time. It didn't work for the other cases anyway. I'll just leave the one off since it told me what to do itself so I didn't steal it.

   I still don't getting the trailing ad for those that the developer gives us (like PopCap and BigFishGames). Big Fish told me how to avoid it themselves so that definitely isn't stealing.

   Bypassing an options features (the toolbar and the search engine) is a totally different situation, though!

   Posted 15 years ago #

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