Gamefly

I want to add a couple of things that I got too late for the last post to the list of birthday acknowledgements - quadralien, who managed to excel himself again by coming up with jewel cases of Alone in the Dark and Quake 2 by hunting around charity shops (I miss doing that in America - there aren't any places that I know of around here where you're likely to find relics like that) and pami_zee, who sent me the softest dressing gown in the world. My parents had also bought me a new leather jacket when they were over - both items of clothing replace two things that I've had for a number of years and, difficult though it was to consign them to the back of the cupboard, I have to admit that my old ones were absolutely falling to pieces. I also happened to receive the latest game in our Gamefly queue that evening, too...

Since I got the recommendation to join Gamefly a few months ago I've been mostly happy with it so far - I'm not sure what the price of 'conventionally' renting a game is now, but I'm sure it was about £5 for three nights when I last went to Blockbusters during the PS1 era. With this online method, you have no rental limits, instead paying a monthly fee to be able to take out one or two games at a time and keep them as long as you're using them. I'm surprised that nobody thought of the idea before, because it makes a whole lot more sense than having to blitz through a rented game by playing it constantly for a couple of days.

The service did had a couple of shortcomings at first - the most obvious was that I found the process very slow, with gaps of just over a week between sending a game and receiving the next in our queue. However, that's been improving over time, especially with their recent introduction of being able to send the next game as soon as the post office confirms that the one you're sending back is in the post rather than on the day that they receive it - that pretty much cuts the waiting time in half.

The other problem is something that's only come up recently, and that's the issue of unplayable discs. A few weeks ago I got out the original Ratchet and Clank because I thought Whitney would like it, it was a success and we then worked our way through the rest of the series. But the disc of the second game that we received wouldn't work at all, sticking at the first loading screen - we sent that one back and got a playable one in its place after a few days. And after moving on to the third one, it sadly had similar problems - the first disc we had wouldn't go past a section where it had to load a cut-scene a few hours in, and after getting a replacement of that one as well, the replacement disc then stuck a couple of hours later (and has left our save game in limbo eternally trying to load a planet that it can't find!)

So I'm not sure if it's just because of the relative popularity of the games compared to what we had out earlier (I noticed the first attempt they sent us of the second one appeared to actually have bite marks in it, as if someone had mistaken it for a really shiny cracker) - I should probably look into cleaning our PS2's lens as well just in case that's the problem, though it doesn't seem to have had any problems when I've been replaying Resident Evil 4 in the meantime.

So we've given up on the Ratchet and Clank series for now and have gone for what I'm going to literally parse as Silent Hill Zerorigins instead. I'm aware that some people think it's a bit rubbish, but it's for the sake of completeness as I liked the others (and that fewer people will have got their grubby fingers on the disc).