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Penny Arcade - Comic - Rent Free
Dog
Registered User, Administrator, Vanilla Staff admin
Registered User, Administrator, Vanilla Staff admin
Penny Arcade - Comic - Rent Free
Videogaming-related online strip by Mike Krahulik and Jerry Holkins. Includes news and commentary.
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Haha who am I kidding, therapy? More like keep it swaddled in layers of malformed coping mechanisms for a few decades until it becomes time to choose which nursing home their parents are going to. 🤪
Perhaps creating a comic strip about such topics *is* their therapy!
That said, I do have a bit of nostalgia for Blockbuster. Not for the late fees (those were probably the reason they died in the first place) but there was something special about browsing the racks of video games and finding some hidden gem. It did help that the era between the NES and the N64 (and the equivalent systems from Sony and Sega) saw a ton of excellent AA games published. These days, those kinds of games would be digital only, not enough demand to print and ship discs around the world. But man, picking up something like Azure Dreams or Brave Fencer Musashi and discovering games that would become a lifelong obsession on a whim was an incredible feeling.
Picking out games on Gamepass or PS+ Extra just doesn't have the same tension. If it turns out to be shit you're out an hours worth of download time. Back then, that was your weekend, if the game wasn't good it didn't matter, you gritted your teeth and played because that was all you had and you had to make that $5 worth it. There was an air of excitement and tension that's lost.
This also meant that anyone who called Blockbuster X and identified themselves as Blockbuster Y could preemptively cancel late fees by saying the rental had been returned to their store. X had no way to check and would only notice something was wrong when Y failed to deliver the rental back to X. Depending on the personnel involved and the relationship between stores, Blockbuster X would often just write off the missing rental without following up with Blockbuster Y.
Later on, Netflix and Gamefly would offer subscription services for "keep it as long as you want" style rentals, which not only saved money vs the upfront rental fee, but also meant you didn't have to remember to call Blockbuster and get your late fees canceled.
Or the secret guilty joy of renting an RPG and finding the previous renter had named all the party members dirty words.
Or the devastation when re-renting the same game the next week, only to find your carefully crafted party had been deleted (or was stuck on the other cartridge the store had for rent), and you would never see them again.
Still worked.
It was kind of funny though, because this small town grocery was still renting and selling movies well into the Netflix era. The dropping price of movies meant that you could "rent to buy" just by being about a week late...
They aren't exactly nightmares, but there's usually a stress element involved.
If you found out, for example, that your kid spent $300 on Clash of Clans on your phone, do you think you might take the phone away? And as a parent, I'd love to say I'd definitely do that while having a thoughtful conversation with my child about prudent spending and being careful on the internet, and make sure never to let my emotions get the better of me. But...parenting is really hard and kids can be jerks sometimes! And parents don't magically gain the ability to always do everything the way Llama Llama or Bluey's mom does it. (I will reiterate that I am talking about this specific example only, which does not involve violence or abuse which are never excusable).
This is not to say that having your game taken away after an honest mistake isn't hurtful, especially if your parents weren't super nice about how they did it. But also, we're grownups now and maybe we understand a bit how hard it is?
I first beat the original Final Fantasy via rentals. Because the instruction book was so huge, they attached it to the rental case with a rubber band. On my second rental (after learning that they had multiple copies the hard way, as indicated here), I replaced their rubber band with a suspicious red one (IIRC from my paper route?) and would request that version when renting out the copy I had just returned that same day. It worked!
Sure but that that requires empathy for Old People, and realizing they weren't always in an ideal situation themselves and that a pile of unexpected late fees could be financially devastating or the straw on the camel's back to a shitty month filled with physically and/or emotionally debilitating menial labor. Granted, they could also be dicks who never should have become parents on top of that, but demonizing them for not being perfect at all times also isn't going to make them magically grow better parenting skills either.
Old People Are Stupid, Let's Throw Rocks At Them.
IDK about you, but my parents kept track of when our rentals were due back and would hound me for that shit. When they went to return the movies, my games went back to. And if I kept them and incurred a late fee, I had to pay that myself (heck, I usually paid the original rental myself too).
My mother cut the power chord. . .so I, desperate to play Bugs Bunny on the NES, cut the iron power cord and spliced it into the system.
. . .the whoopin' was only, slightly, worth it.
The question is, did said whoopin come from your mom or from electricity?
Or the former using the latter.
20 years ago, a friend had his little brother throw the NES at the wall twice with all the strength a temperamental 10 years old in good physical condition can possibly conjures.
It still work to this day.