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.

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.

At this very moment thousands of ignorant little Valve slaves are flocking to pick up the newest zombie horror game to hit the market--Left 4 Dead. Little do they know that they are about to get home and promptly shout a blood curdling WTF after playing the first chapter of the game. I'm not even going to try and fluff around the edges with this one. It sucks, it's boring, it's repetitive, it looks six years out of date, and it's little more than a bunch of multiplayer maps that can be played in single player. In fact, that's the game's only redeeming quality whatsoever. I'm not going to lie, I had huge expectations for this game, but the reality is a complete joke.

Yesterday like many other slaves to the market, I trudged over to the local Gamestop to pick up my reserved copy of Left 4 Dead. On the way home I was extremely pumped... partially from my recent Fallout 3 high, but also because I knew this was going to be some quality zombie killing action. Holy shit, was I completely wrong! After an hour I was already itching to turn the game off and after two I completely stopped taking the game seriously and started to just wander into zombies in order to let my teammates save me for fun.