14 DAY TRIAL // While the console and PC games industry is piling up the multi-million triple A titles, there is a silent revolution taking place. Though many 'gamers' don't actually view web games made in Java and flash as being anything close to 'real games,' the average users see things quite differently. Internet games have become a very large and profitable market, with the very low development costs, independent developers and true innovators can easily make 'new' games, something that is severely lacking in the mainstream industry. But perhaps the biggest advantage of Internet games is that they are both easy to play and do not require a lot of time invested in them. The one disadvantage of internet games is the fact that they are treated as web-pages and are often tedious to keep track of and must be played from a browser. Fortunately, third party software such as iDistract can step in and overcome these limitations, letting you enjoy internet games from your desktop.
What it does iDistract is a small program that lets you enjoy flash games form your desktop. Not only can you play games without a browser, but it also makes it easy to see what other people are playing, what the most popular games are and play random games when you just want to kill some time. Though these games can be enjoyed with just a browser, iDistract gives one unified place for everything so you can keep your browser for other stuff.
Working with it When you first open up iDistract it will greet you with its Play tab. From here, you can just hit the one big button to start playing a random game. If you are not feeling very lucky, you can choose which category of games you want the program to pick from, but the individual game will still be randomly chosen. What is really good about this is that the program will automatically get the current lists of games from the internet and you can instantly jump into one of the top games or the new ones, without actually having to do anything except hit that button. If random game sampling is not your cup of tea, you should proceed to the control center.
From the Control Center, you can make specific selections and see what other people are doing. Here you can see what games you've played, a list of your favorite games, as well as what other people are playing. This is one of the better aspects of iDistract, as it only takes one person to play a game, for it to be visible to everybody and the voting makes it a snap to see which games are better than the rest. You can, of course, add your own games simply by supplying the URL that you see in the browser to the program. And last but not least, you can also download the games that you like most, so that you can play them even if offline.
Pros and Cons Besides what it does in itself, playing flash games through iDistract has several advantages. Firstly, you can play them in full screen, which is a very nice touch for some games. Secondly, you can easily pause games, simply by moving to another tab in the game window.
Conversely, playing games with iDistract also has some distinct disadvantages. Firstly, the program will wreak havoc on anything that is sprite based. For some reason it won't let the window be resized horizontally underneath a certain point, and for many games, it will stretch them so that they fit the default window size when opening them. The result is messy and pixilated and you have to patiently resize the window to something appropriate to make it look good again. Moreover, many flash games have a fixed size for their display, but there are actually things happening outside that viewable area. IDistract has issues with some of these games and it will display even those things that the developer carefully cut out of the main view. Again, you have to manually resize to make things look decent. Another shortcoming is the fact that the program tends to crash so often, taking down the games you were playing with it. Though this can happen in browsers also, it is a much rarer occurrence.
The Good A good way to enjoy flash games without the hassle of browsers and web sites. See what others are playing and save you own favorites, or just play something at random.
The Bad Bad handling of game viewable size, window resizing and overall rendering. Tends to crash everyone in a while and it will not remember anything you did since you last launched it.
The Truth This program has great potential, it still needs some work to get all the bugs out and it could use a better system for profiling games, but it's a great start.
Here are some screenshots, click to enlarge:
