Play Low Bandwidth Online Games With Gamezer

Everyone loves games. When you think of ways to kill time, games are one of the higher ranking activities. Whether at work, at home, or on the train, games are an important parts of our life.

Gamzer is here to make playing low-bandwidth games quick and easy with 4 games available from their free service. They offer Pool, Chess, Checkers and Gladiator. All 4 of these games are played against the computer or another real person. We have covered websites that feature online pool and chess before, and Gamezer hopes to take your attention away and keep all your online gaming focused on their service that offers both, plus checkers and Gladiator.

Allow me to preface this with a little explanation of why someone would be interested in low-bandwidth games. Some Internet service providers don’t offer an unlimited plan, so users have to pay for the service based on how much data they actually use. By using a service like Gamezer they are able to still have fun playing online games, but aren’t forced into using a massive amount of data and racking up a huge bill.

Another reason someone may be particularly interested in low-bandwidth games is because they have a very slow Internet connection. If your Internet connection is slow, waiting for a high resolution 3D game to stream can take forever, and that is frustrating.

Registration

To begin playing games on Gamezer you have to register, which is a snap. Simply go to the main page and click the “play now” button or the link for whichever of the 4 games you would like to play. You will then be taken to the page where you can log in or register a new account. The link to register is on the right side of the page.

After clicking on the register button you will taken to a screen to enter in your information such as your email address, language, password, and of course a “CAPTCHA” to make sure you are human.

Finding A Game

After you complete the registration process, your next goal will be to play some games. This process is easy enough, but it is not nearly as streamlined as it could be. Once you click the game you want to play you are taken to a screen to choose a lobby. You’ll want to look for one that has less than 130 people, since that is their maximum. If you choose “National Rooms” you can play with only people from your country.

Once in a lobby you can click “new game” to start a game against a computer opponent, or you can browse the area on the left side of the screen and invite another person to play. I find it kind of odd that there is no option for quickly being matched against another real live opponent who is looking to play. This can make finding a game a little more challenging than is necessary. That said, it never took me more than a couple of minutes to find a game, even if it isn’t the most streamlined process.

To actually invite a user, simply click the little arrow next to their name and wait for their response.

Quality Of Games

Gamezer’s bread and butter is definitively their pool game. That is where most of the players are, and that is the game with the best quality. The game doesn’t look great graphically, but that’s acceptable because of the nature of a low-bandwidth service such as this. The lower graphics allow the game to stream quickly, and without using much data.

The physics are good, and the balls move like you would expect them to. The chess and checkers games are also good, the Gladiator game however, not so much. It’s basically a 2D fighter, where you hack your sword at your opponent until one of you is longer standing. I played one full game of Gladiator, and decided my time was better spent playing one of the three other offerings on the site. However, being able to play an action based game such as this, while keeping your data usage low will certainly benefit many people.

Other Features

Gamezer features a very nice leader board so you can see how the best players in the world are doing. This is one area where Gamezer really beats out a lot of similar services. Most services of this type don’t keep track of your records or stats, so the games never seem to have any real sense of consequence. Being able to keep track of your performances keeps Gamezer competitive with other browser based gaming services.

Major Flaw

Gamezer has one flaw that really hurt me. I think this image speaks for itself.

As an avid Google Chrome user this upset me a great deal, and it pained me to have to dig out Firefox to check out the games. Hopefully the folks at Gamezer add support for Chrome down the line.

Conclusion

If you are in a situation where you need to play games while using as little data as possible, I think Gamezer just might be the service for you.

What free browser-based gaming services do you use? Have you used Gamezer before? What is your opinion? Let us know in the comments below.