freeloader.com > Reviews (25)

I went to the freeloader.com site after reading an article in Video Gamer about the PC game Jimmy Whites Cueball 2. The review gave the game a very respectable 8 out of 10, which was a recommendation on its own, but the reason for this magazine looking at this year old game was actually because they said you can currently download it for free at freeloader.com.

The homepage gave me four country options to choose from, so I clicked on the UK link. Next I had to register to start freeloading as the site puts it. I filled in the typical registration form, giving a username, password, name, address and other personal details, occupation and e-mail address. The next two boxes were the terms and conditions and privacy policy and I clicked on the register button to confirm I had read through them. I know you should always read these things but to be honest I rarely give them anything more than a glance.

After completing my registration I was thanked for joining and told I now had full access to the site and could go to the myloader page to see details of my account and see how many credits I had. Apparently these credits are the currency members use to allow them to download the games and I was given 500 for joining and more credits could be gained by clicking on the adverts on the site. There were also detailed download instructions on this page which I was advised to read. These seemed straightforward enough, basically you save the .exe and .dat files to disk, then double click the .exe file and it’s done.

Next I clicked on the games link on the left hand side menu and on the next page was given the option of either clicking on the different game types on the right hand side or scrolling down the page to view the newest games. I found the Jimy White game on this page and clicked the freeload it link. There was a description of the game, a few screen shots and links to other details such as technical info and also an option to do a system check before downloading, with this being my first go I chose this option. Everything in the check looked OK so I went for the download link.

The download screen explained that the game needed to be downloaded in four episodes, with different things being available with each episode, for example episode no.1 was the snooker low graphics game and no.2 the high resolution graphics. A figure of –25 credits was shown next to the download episode link and I clicked this next. The following screen said I could now download the first episode after I had answered a few questions and after pressing continue the questions started. They were fairly basic, such as do you ever buy online? and some adverting banners were shown between the questions. After 3 or 4 questions I was given the option screen to download the .exe and .dat files. I left these files saving into a My Downloads folder I had already set up and went back to start downloading more episodes. I realised after my machine nearly came to a standstill that trying to do all 4 episodes at once was not advisable and I restricted my downloading to 2 at a time.

I went back for all four episodes with the entire download process taking quite a long time, probably around an hour, which wasn’t bad considering that the biggest file was over 6.5 meg in size. During the downloads you can continue surfing anyway but other sites do take a bit longer to load so I watched a bit of television while I waited.

After all the files had saved, I closed all open windows, as freeloader advised, and double clicked the.exe file of episode no.1 followed by numbers 2,3 and 4, making sure to wait for all files to be decompressed as instructed. I restarted my machine and, hey presto, I had a game which retailed at around £30 for free. One word of warning, make sure the entire file has downloaded correctly by checking the file size otherwise it will not install. This happened to me but after going back to freedloader and downloading again, everything was fine and I was not charged any more credits. The Jimy White game looks really good. The graphics, sound and gameplay are excellent but I’m not very good at the moment.

I was very impressed with freeloader.com and found it easy to register and begin downloading the games. From what I saw of the site there is a large range of quality games of all types and the credit system seems a good idea. The Jimmy White game only “cost” me 50 credits so I’m going back tomorrow to get some more.

A definate must visit site in my view.