Why bother renting, WHEN YOU CAN BUY!

While today in the midst of taking down the newspapers to the recycling depot, I made my way to Blockbuster to check out what they have and the movies I've missed for the past 6 months of so, of not going to any movies showing in theatres.

I went across to the gaming aisle, or perhaps I should say, what gaming aisle. Most of the stock they had there were Gran Turismo 3s, a few GTAs, some Ford Racing, Final Fantasy X, Dark Cloud 1, and some miscellaneous sports titles of little mention. I've known that the gaming market has moved to basically buying the games rather than renting and then buying. Thinking back now, perhaps the last time that a game was ever rented would probably be close to 10 years. This was when I still had the Super Nintendo and would sometimes rent out games occassionally. In total, I only had 4 games which I owned: Super Mario Bros, Mario Paint, Star Fox, and Super FX Racer. Why so little games? Another old friend of mine had also an SNES and had an abundant number of games to play, so needless to say I was mostly at his house playing them.

I'm guessing it has been like this with the growing popularity of the internet back probably 1998-2000 and has sprung up numerous gaming related websites that does the reviewing job. Of course, prior to this, gaming magazines were available such as PC Gamer and Nintendo Power and the likes. However, with their subscription fees, I was quite reluctant to actually pay the $20 or so for the yearly subscription, especially when $20 actually meant a lot of money to me back in junior high grade school.

Also, I remember seeing a copy of Street Fighter 2 Turbo selling for $109.99 in London Drugs probably in 1994. Buying games back then wasn’t exactly cheap, and I would say the mean age of gamers would be about 10 years old with a standard deviation of 3 years. Now that the gaming population has grown up, I’d say that the games aren’t always cheaper than their predecessors, but the means of acquiring funds is more readily available due to part time jobs and the like. Basically now, my decision on getting a game (as I'm guessing with a lot of other gamers now) is just reading the reviews of various sites, playing copies at friends houses if they have it, and looking forward to put the money that would be on buying the game rather than renting it.

In this thread, discuss if you still do rent console games and if renting games will eventually become obsolete perhaps in a few years time (I think it's already pretty obsolete just looking at the barren shelves of various video stores).

Jam it back in, in the dark.

Thinking about it now on reflection, I'm going to preorder FFXII without any regards to the American reviews, partially because from my experience, most reviews are out on the same day or a day after the release date. By this time I would have ripped off the shrink wrap and pretty much jammed the damn thing into the PS2, ripped off (carefully) the wrapping for the walkthrough guide and probably not even look at the reviews until getting to the first save point. I can see it now...October 3, 2006 (date not confirmed from Lik Sang). Well there are reviews for the Japan version, and I wouldn't expect the US version to be that much different, languages aside.

In summary, I should have checked off the "Buy out of hype" column as well. However only a few games would fall in this category. See above paragraph for an example.

There's nowhere I can't reach.

Either option 3 or 4. I guess "liking a game" and "hype over it" could be mutually exclusive, hey.

This thing is sticky, and I don't like it. I don't appreciate it.