Playing Games… ssssh!

This is a fun review, in order to know what I’m talking about I have get to hang out and play games. Now, I’ve visited a few arcades but haven’t really spent a huge amount of time getting to grips with the issues that arcade owners have to tackle so this is very much a user’s review 🙂

Last Stop Games (cute domain name) is a free flash games site with a wide range of arcade games. Some have different names Collapse is called Crash Down for instance.

The site comes complete with the usual garish ads but these sites have to pay for themselves and here they aren’t as bad as they could be, no pop ups or pop unders – yet.

Arcade sites offer a different experience to RuneScape, Club Penguin, Star Doll or moshi monsters but the site is easily navigated and I’d be happy to send my kids along to take a look. They wouldn’t understand some of the political games, I hope, but they all seemed family friendly. For me they provide a quick break in my day without having to commit to membership, points and building up a profile.

From a construction point of view, the load times are impacted by the ads and the heavy use of graphics that is obligatory in an arcade site. The html is clean and lean but better use of styles could have seen the end of spacer rows in tables, for instance.

The free action games page, however, took over 8 seconds to load despite most of the images already being cached. The delays seemed to be centered around the ad delivery.

The arcade is sitting on a very respectable PR4 which means Nick (the owner) has been working hard. That commitment is good because it means the site will be kept fresh with new games, working games and no broken links.