Having trouble?

Most of the games, cartoons and content of spikything.com require version 6 (or higher) of Macromedia's free Flash Player, a popular browser plugin for playing Flash interactive content. The latest version of the player (version 8) is available for your browser here.

The games are designed to work on most home computers, but some of the games do not support all browsers, due to incompatibility of spikything's in-built anti-piracy security with some browsers. Over 95% of internet users have no problem viewing the content of this site, if you're one of the unlucky 5%, read on.

Windows XP users

Some Windows XP users may have problems with their browser's security settings. XP now blocks some interactive web content by default, as you visit any spikything page you may notice a message at the top of your browser saying ActiveX content blocked. You will need to click and enable this to play the games.

Mac users

You should be using Mac OS X and may get best results with the FireFox browser.

AOL users

You should a browser other than that supplied with your AOL membership, such as Internet Explorer or FireFox, otherwise you may have to manually install a recent version of the Flash Player for your AOL browser.

Chat users

Since 'spikyChat' uses a socket connection, you will need to make sure your firewall (if you have one) will allow outgoing connections to port 1935 (the same port Macromedia Flash Communication Server uses). The server goes up and down from time to time and there are no guarantees of service.

Other problems

- If you lose keyboard control of a game, you may need to click the mouse in the game screen, just to 'focus' the window, so the key presses up picked up correctly.

- If any game is running too slowly, try using a lower quality setting. This is sometimes offered as an in-game option. If not, try right-clicking on the game screen a choosing the 'low' or 'medium' setting under the 'quality' heading in the menu that appears. Failing this, try shutting down any other programs or browser windows you may have running. For example, other websites with interactive content, your music player, etc.

- If the game isn't playing at all or just doesn't load, try pressing F5 or come back later - the game may be down for maintenance.