The way the service is supposed to work is like this: You pick out a bunch of games from GameFly’s fairly comprehensive inventory and add them to your “GameQ”, which is basically a big list of all the games that you’ve indicated that you want to rent so far. GameFly sends you the first two available games (more about this later) from your “GameQ” and they come to you via USPS. You can keep the games for as long or as short as you want with no late fees, and once you are sick of a game, you send it back in the provided prepaid envelope and GameFly sends you another game from you “Q”.

Sounds simple right?

…It’s not that simple.

<BEGIN RANT>

1. Games are NEVER available! When I signed up for GameFly I had these visions of getting all of the newest, biggest, and baddest games delivered to my doorstep, and that I would rush home slip them into my XBox and kicking alien ass in no time. The reality is that new games are almost never available until weeks, if not months after their initial release. You can add them to you GameQ, but when it says “Availability Low” it means it. The first two games that I received were the two games lowest in my Q, and they were both so ancient that they smelled like my Grandmother’s attic.

2. The games take forever to arrive. One of my favorite things about NetFlix is that when they ship me a movie, it arrives the next day. This is not what happens with GameFly. Most of the time I receive an email notification that a game has shipped 4-5 days before the game actually makes it into my mailbox. The thing is… I could’ve walked the game up from California by then. I suspect that they send out email notifications long before the game hits the mail.

3. The games are not in good condition. They just aren’t. They’re scratched and cracked and some won’t even play at all, which is preferable to the ones that play and then freeze as soon as you are having fun. This is called the GameFly Fun Detectorâ„¢… it can detect when you are starting to have fun with a game, and it triggers the GameFly Freeze Initiatorâ„¢ which hard locks the console. It’s very scientific, I won’t pretend to understand it.

4. Once they recieve a return it takes them days to ship you a new game. That’s right…. DAYS… like 4 or 5, when you add this to the additional days that it takes for the games to get back to them in the mail, it becomes almost 2 weeks from the time I send something back to the time that I receive a new game in the mail. It’s funny because they are never late in debiting the $23.99 from my bank account every month, at least they can do something in a timely manner.

5. The customer service sucks. First off, there is not customer service phone number. When this happens I start to act like my father. I get all bewildered and say things like “Customer service just isn’t what it used to be…” and “In my day you could talk to a human being on the other end of the line….” and then I get sad, cause technology is supposed to make our lives easier. Let’s face it folks, email support blows, typically IF I get a reply to a website’s “Contact Us” form, it has little (if anything) to do with my query. This makes me think that there’s an email monkey who’s job it is to cut and paste responses to these things at random, which makes me happy… because I like monkeys.

To illustrate my point here is what happened recently when I contacted GameFly’s email monkey: On December 28th I dropped a game in the mail to return it, I received an email on January 5th saying that they have received it and would ship another game from my Q. On January 9th, having heard nothing, I sent an email to their customer service team stating that it had been 4 days and they still hasn’t shipped me my next game. Finally, on January 11th an email aplology hit my inbox telling me they had shipped another game from the (bottom) of my Q, which not-so-prompty arrived 4 days later. That works out to a full 18 days in between the time the game left my hand until I had another one. At $23.99 per month – 18 days = $13.93!

6. They’re the only game in town. Most of their competitors look so shady that I’m afraid to give them my credit card number, I would gladly leave GameFly is there was a suitable alternative. Recommendations anyone?

< /RANT >

File this under: Things to Do While Wasting Time at Work. Game Trailers is running a 13-part video retrospective on the spectacularly popular Final Fantasy series. The videos explore the central themes, characters, plot lines, and music of all of the FF releases, including the ones that never made it onto American consoles.

This is required reading for fans of the series.

The only thing I hate worse than movies based on video games, are video games based on movies.

So, I was a little freaked out by how excited I was by the trailer for Jumper, the game based on the movie and the teenybopper novel by Stephen Gould. I mean… if done right this game could really kick some serious ass, I totally wanna teleport someone into a shark tank… I mean, who doesn’t? Apparently the game follows the Jamie Bell character Griffin, who desperately wants to be a ballet dancer, but his father wants him to be a Boxer, blah, blah, blah… TELEPORTATION!

I should have stopped after watching the trailer, cause now I’ve gone and ruined the surprise for myself. This game looks like it might really suck, and gloriously so! Developed by Brash Entertainment, the same development powerhouse that brought the cinematic masterpiece Alvin and the Chipmunks to the PS2! Take a peek at these screens, the frosted side of me is holding out hope that they’re from the PS2 version and the 360 version will actually look like a next-gen game, but the wheaty side of me knows it isn’t true. It looks like they’ve just reused the graphics and combat engine that made Matrix: Path of Neo nearly unplayable.

Seems like the game relies upon Griffin’s teleportation skills which allow him to “jump within hand-to-hand combat range of an enemy to start dishing out devastating blows” using a “exciting and intense layered combo fighting system”, Griffin can also use finishing moves to “instantly teleport enemies to exotic perilous locations to finish them”. Meh.

Trailer after the jump.