GameFly: Video Game Subscription Services

I have no attention span. I started this blog, then a few days later, I'd already forgotten it. Luckily I'm adding it to my feed page so I'll be reminded of my own unfortunate tendency to procrastinate, review, draft, ponder, pontificate, erase, and ultimately not publish -- and then go play some World of Warcraft (Feathermoon, anyone?).

I also like Bejeweled, Brain Age, Guild Wars, and Animal Crossing: Wild World, so I have endless opportunities to not write. I sometimes wonder if I would enjoy writing for games, but I probably would not; let the experts make the games.

The primary goal of a commercial game developer is to write a game that will be enjoyable enough to separate you from the money in your wallet, which is a familiar tactic to most people alive on this earth today. What makes me grumpy is buying games that get shelved relatively quickly; I never really know what kind of gameplay will endure and what will turn out to be a momentary diversion.

Of course, my local Big Corporate Video Store carries games for rent. Some of the local stores even rent consoles, but the prices are exorbitant. As such, I'd never rent a console. The one time I even thought about it because I really wanted to play an Oddworld game, I got as far as entering the store, and faced with the task of communicating to the pimply-faced teenager of the male persuasion that I wished to procure a Hoosbatz-3000 Talking-and-Playing Machine and all necessary accoutrements, such as they were, I keenly felt the absence of a Smithers-like assistant who might have had some fluency in the tinny jabber of young persons.

Thus wracked with indecision, and unwilling to engage a live person in a painful and alien conversation about S-videos and splitters and input modes and scan lines and so on and so forth, I grabbed a used copy of "Dune" (the older one, with Kyle McLachlan), handed over something in the vicinity of eight dollars, and fled.

Enter....GameFly.

There's not much to describe in this one -- if you know what Netflix is about, you know what GameFly is about. You can have one or two games rented to you by mail, for any platform, for a fixed monthly fee, without late charges. GameFly does offer the option to purchase a game if you like it enough. For most games, you'll play through the six or ten or thirty hours of game time, and when you finish, instead of shelving it, you'll just send it back and get another one. I understand that Mario Kart has replayability, but any game that relies to any degree on advancing a storyline is probably not going to be pulled out again and again for fun.

For around $20/month, it seems like the service is ideal for people who jump on a game as soon as it comes out, play it through to the end with barely an interruption, and then discard it. I'm considering getting this service as a gift subscription for my mate, when the Wii comes out, since the Wii console is an inevitable purchase for our household.