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On The Merit of Online Game Rental Services
JamesKeenan
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
Essentially, I almost feel physically nauseous when I imagine the multiple gaming experiences I've missed out on. Fantastic games I'd only ever heard tales of. I'm considering using an online gaming rental service to augment my gaming experience, as I couldn't afford, truly, to buy every game I'd ever missed out on.
However, my choices are Gamefly and Games and Flicks (that's the goddamn name). Could anyone who has used these service tell me each's merits? Gamefly's 23 bucks a month for two games at a time seems steep, especially if most of the time will be spent waiting for games in transit, or for them to arrive and depart.
Games and Flicks's prices are significantly better, but they do not offer DS games, and that's both problematic, and an omen of poor selection for the systems they do cover.
I want to catch up on something like 7 years of backlogged gameplay, but is this the advisable path, or would I be better off bargain bin diving at my local Gamestops?
However, my choices are Gamefly and Games and Flicks (that's the goddamn name). Could anyone who has used these service tell me each's merits? Gamefly's 23 bucks a month for two games at a time seems steep, especially if most of the time will be spent waiting for games in transit, or for them to arrive and depart.
Games and Flicks's prices are significantly better, but they do not offer DS games, and that's both problematic, and an omen of poor selection for the systems they do cover.
I want to catch up on something like 7 years of backlogged gameplay, but is this the advisable path, or would I be better off bargain bin diving at my local Gamestops?
JamesKeenan on
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Does anyone know of a Canadian place that works like Gamefly? At the moment I use Blockbuster because of their "no late fees" in Canada, and it actually works pretty well. In most cases, I can blow through a game in a week or 2 and renting them ensures that I save a ton of money.
For example, I wanted to buy "The Club" for 360 when I initially heard about it. I decided to give it a rental and after a week, I've done most of the shit you can do in the game. Great game, but definitely not something I'd come back to once I'm totally finished with it.
I may resub in the future if they open their Austin shipping center, but it took a week and a half to get a new game after sending one back and that's just way too much time in transit.
Precisely my main concern, besides, of course, the size of their selection. I live in Tampa, though, so I'll just have to try it out and see.
I probably keep my games an average of 5 days. I mainly use Gamefly to see if a game is worth buying, not to play games from start to finish (unless the game is fun, really short, and low on replay value, then I might keep it a couple of weeks). But anyways, I know you said the 2-game price was steep, and after a year, I counted all the games I rented (since they keep a complete list on your account page), and divided the total of my 12 monthly bills by the number of games I rented, and it came to about 4 or 5 bucks per game. That's a lot cheaper than renting games at Blockbuster of Hollywood Video.
Maybe I should have expected this?
Well, I'd imagine a library would get a bit of sprawl after five plus years of market dominance.
I've only had 2 problems with games, 1 not arriving and the other not making it back to them. But you just fill out a form, and they send a replacement or the next one in your queue.
They have a distribution center in FL, so your shipping times probably won't be bad at all.
That's actually one of the things I like about Gamefly. They stock all these (kinda) old games too. They have 1,500 PS2 games. Their selection of 360 titles is small, because the library of the 360 is small. I tried to find a full list of 360 releases, to compare the total number to the number of titles available on Gamefly (currently 314), but one list (with 355 games) was incomplete, and included Live Arcade games. Another list had 453 games, but included a lot of unreleased games. I didn't care enough to count the unreleased games on the list, but I would guess 75-100 wouldn't be far off. So 314 out of (maybe) 353-378. That's not bad, really.
I have a really strong feeling I'll be getting most of my shit from the PS2 selection. A really strong feeling. My PS2 selection sucked.
One nice thing about Gamefly is the "keep it" feature. If you have a game rented out that you like, you can buy it from Gamefly. They send you the game's mint-condition case and manual, and then send you the next game in your queue. It's a nice feature because there are some games that I know I'm going to hold onto for a long time (mostly multiplayer games). The "keep it" price is always much lower than you'd pay even for a used game at EBstop. For example, right now I have out Burnout Paradise. The "keep it" price is $45. I've recently picked up Warioware: Smooth Moves for $30 and Virtua Fighter 5 for $35. All free shipping too.
My complaints are that 1) The shipping times aren't as fast as Netflix (although they're not terrible) and 2) I don't like the way they deal with games in your queue that they don't have in stock. Most new releases will have "high availability" or "medium availability" as their status, instead of "available now". Misleadingly enough, that means that they're not in stock. If you just throw those games at the top of your queue, then they'll send you the next game down that is "available now". This is easy to get around--you just have to empty your queue except for whatever game you want right now. There's usually then a 1 or 2 day wait for it. But this does mean that you can't use your queue as a big list of games that you want to eventually get. Instead, you have to put in only the games you actually want.
The selection is good, and if you manage your queue well, you'll get most games you want pretty quick. It does require some effort to make sure you get what you want next, since almost nothing is actually on hand, so you're playing with percentages (how likely are they to get in a copy of Game X the day I want to rent it).
I use it as my primary way of playing single player games and am, in general, pleased with the service. In the past three or so months I essentially caught up on the major 360 releases I'd missed (Dead Rising, Bioshock, CoD4, Orange Box), all the Guitar Heroes, as well as a ton of more niche titles that I wanted to try, but never would have bought (Killzone, Zack and Wiki, Kim Possible 2, Rogue Galaxy, Excitetruck).
Timeshift was actually pretty good. The timeshift skills were fun as hell, but the shooting was meh at best. You'll have fun still.
-Pros-
Download games directly to your hard drive
No limit on how many games you have available to play at one time (well, aside from your hard drive space)
A few new games like Tomb Raider Anniversary, Overlord, Clive Barker Jericho, and all the new Sam & Max episodes.
Great for trying out a bunch of games you would never have tried (or in fact heard of) or just reliving fun games of your past.
Good selection of games (around 1000 at the moment), especially Neo Geo, Genesis, DOS, Windows, and classic arcade.
Emulation of games is generally good. Heck, GameTap Planescape Torment works on my computer while my CD copy doesn't.
Cheaper ($60/year compared to $20 or so a month).
You get sub-accounts which you can give to a family member or friend so you can play online with them (limit 2 accounts online at the same time).
-Cons-
No consoles more recent than the Dreamcast & Saturn.
If your Internet connection dies, you're out of luck.
Not many new games available.
Steam ID : rwb36, Twitter : Werezompire,
That both counteracts the wait times (as you're simply shipping off another game) and makes the service less valuable. Why? Because Netflix excels due to the fact that you can watch a movie in 2 hours (and know that you saw everything the movie had to offer) and send it back, so the more movies you can watch, the more the service is worth to you. With games, they almost all naturally take longer to play, meaning that if you only make it through a game a month, it cost, say, $23.
It's fantastic for brand new games that you want to play but aren't sure about, and it's also great for slightly older games that you're curious about but don't really want to beat -- you just want to play them. Frankly I think it's a little expensive for what you get, but they do have a good selection.
The only other thing, though, is that for older games (like PS2 games), you can probably find many of the games you're looking for on, say, Amazon, in their used section. Buy the game (with $3 shipping), play it to your heart's content, and then simply sell it again on Amazon ;D Now, that works best for RPGs, longer adventure games, and games you know you're into. But many PS2 games are under $30 bucks, many under $20, and I don't really know what kind of games you're looking for but you could easily create a pretty full PS2 library.
Again, though, if you're just curious about games and aren't really a collector, GameFly is the answer. You can always try it out for a month or two, see how it goes, and if it doesn't work or you're playing games too quickly or too slowly, just cancel it. Canceling doesn't ban you from the service a few months down the road