Now that Star Ocean 4 is available on the PS3, I was finally able to continue my long standing addiction with this particular JRPG series. After a few days of random playing I'm now about ten hours in and have come to the realization that I'm truly bored with the genre. Growing up, I spent countless hours conquering every Square-Enix game I could get my hands on, I've played multiple times through just about every RPG for the SNES, and since then I've tried to at least spend some time on all the popular releases to come out for the PS1-3... but all of this has just been leading me to one conclusion over the last few years: JRPGs are increasingly becoming more and more formulaic and are rapidly falling behind the innovative American RPGs to come out in the last few years.
 
So, what am I really trying to get at here? It's not that the last decade of JRPGs hasn't had innovation or even good games, quite the contrary, there have definitely been some gems, but overall the genre as a whole is completely stagnant when it comes to appealling to the same generation that made them popular in the first place. Those of us that grew up as young kids playing Final Fantasy 3 (6) are now around 30 years old and have witnessed the same rehashing of the original formula over and over again.
 

I've been holding off on venting my frustration for the last couple of months now, but I've finally had it with Gamefly, the self-touting "#1 online video game rental service." It's really a shame that they choose to run their business in such a shoddy manor, because with no real competition around (except for maybe Blockbuster) they could easily be as big as Netflix. Yet, time and time again they prove to be 100% deserving of a ride on the FAIL boat.

Having been a long time customer of Netflix, I've come accustomed to a huge selection, extremely fast turn around time, and hassle free issue handling. Naturally, when I decided to try out Gamefly six months ago I took for granted that I would be receiving the same level of service. Holy shit was I in for a surprise!

First off, let's compare the rental plans. I'm currently signed up for the three DVD plan with Netflix for $16.99 and the single game rental plan with Gamefly for $15.95. Understandably, games cost three times as much as a DVD, so the cost was one thing I wasn't too concerned about. The queue system also seemed to be the same, so I went down my list of wanted games, ranked them accordingly and ended up with about ten games queued with some exploratory fillers at the bottom. From there everything started to go downhill FAST.

The last couple of weeks have seen some interesting bugs creep up in the Songbird 1.1.1 release. First we had the annoying gconf popup with bug 15432, and then everyone quickly noticed that songs would hang after a plays, which was noted in bug 15401. Well I'm happy to say that these bugs have now been squashed and you can go back to happily listening to your ridiculously huge library of mp3s... except that's only half true, and so begins my rant...

As we soon found out, the bugs actually were never present in Songbird. They are, in fact, a bi-product of the package (rpm) building. I collaborated with a few different package builders from Gentoo and SUSE when we quickly realized that the bugs weren't in official Songbird builds, but were in every Linux package build.

What's the problem you say? Sadly, it's the way Songbird is developed. You see, unlike many other open source project in the Linux world, Songbird is built much like a Windows app. Now, that could be because it started out as a Windows app to begin with, or just because that's the particular model that the developers choose to go with, but the fundamental issue is that Songbird acts as it's own universe instead of fitting into the various popular Linux models out there. Much like Windows apps, it is all inclusive and provides everything it needs.

Recently I wrote up a rant about how Valve's latest game Left 4 Dead should have only been released as a multiplayer game since in my opinion the single player aspect was extremely boring and repetitive. As I usually do with games that don't appeal to me, I immediately posted it up on Amazon as used and within twenty-four hours had already sold and shipped it out to the buyer for almost the same price I paid for it. Normally that is where the story would end, but this time around I got fucked royally, and not buy the online transaction, but by Steam.

A few days later the buyer contacted me that he had installed the game but was unable to play it do to a "duplicate cd key" error. He had contacted Valve's Steam support about the issue and they had replied with the following:

We do not reset CD keys from auction sites or in cases in which the game has been resold by another individual.

The buying, selling or trading of Steam accounts/CD keys is a violation of the Steam Subscriber Agreement.

I recommend you return the game and inquire about a refund.