Buy games, play games, trade-in games, buy games, play games, trade-in games...

The existence of GameStop and my lack of self-control creates an endless cycle in my life wherein I buy a game, finish it, trade it in, and then buy it again a year or five later. It's just so convenient to drive over to GameStop, have them give me money for my games, and then buy used games from them. That way I don't have to have real money. But this way, I also end up spending more money in the long run.

I sell a game to them and then a year or so later, I really want to play it again. So I take games that I think I won't miss, sell them, and get games I traded in a year or so earlier. Then I miss the games I traded in to buy the games that I missed that I traded in. I always tell myself that I won't trade in anymore games, but then there's a game I really want and I'm broke, so I think, "Oh, I won't miss these games anyway."

The thing is, GameStop gives you significantly less for trade-ins than what you originally payed for it, so you are losing money each time. A PS2 or original Xbox game will get you about 25 cents in trade-in value currently, and if you opt for real money instead of in-store credit, you get even less.

The good thing about GameStop is that you can actually find all those old games you traded in (or lost or broke) and not have to wait to get something from Amazon or eBay that may not even work (though they definitely cost less online). If it hadn't been for GameStop (EBGames at the time), I would never have found the cheap copy of Resident Evil 2 that I was looking for when my original copy stopped working. I could have found it online, probably, but that was before I was really an online person (GameStop was still EBGames and they still sold PS1 games, so it was a good seven or eight years ago).

I also love the atmosphere. The store is full of people who share my interests. It's a wonderland of video games.

I hate GameStop.

Over the deal-heavy Black Friday weekend, I saw an ad on the DTOID Show for OnLive. Now, normally I don't pay much attention to the ads, but I decided to check it out. I had heard about OnLive before, but I wasn't sure exactly what it was all about. So, I went to the website, and saw that they had a deal going on where you got your first game for free when you sign up (signing up is free, as well). Never one to pass up the opportunity to get (basically) free games, I signed up for an account, installed the program on my laptop, and began to search through the games. I had been wanting to play Homefront for a while, so I decided to get that for exactly one dollar. Right after I bought it, I started the game up, which took less than a minute--no downloading or installing necessary. I plugged in my Xbox 360 pad, and it worked perfectly right away (we'll pretend that I didn't have to uninstall the driver that made it work on my Mac before).



Needless to say, I was impressed. The specs of your computer don't matter--all you need is a decent internet connection and you're all set (you can also run it on your iPad, and they make a device you can buy to play it on your television). It ran perfectly, just as if I were playing it on my 360 and not on my entry-level MacBook Pro. I could definitely tell it was streaming, though, due to it being a little grainy. As for lag, I've only experienced a little; but that's probably because my internet connection has been a little crappy lately.



I have bought a couple other games (I used the code from the ad on the show to get half-off Guardian of Light). When I signed up, they were also having a special on Red Faction: Armageddon where you could rent it for five days for free, which is why I haven't played any of F.E.A.R. 2 yet. They have some pretty nice deals. I got F.E.A.R. 2 for 10 bucks, Guardian of Light for about $8 (with the code from DTOID), Homefront for $1 and rented Red Faction for free. So far it has been nothing but great.



A feature that I think is pretty cool is the Arena (pictured above). It allows you to watch any game being played by someone else at the moment, and thumbs it up or down ("cheers" and "jeers"). This also means that anyone can watch you playing at any time, and if you have Spectator Chat turned on, you can talk to each other.

There are also Brag Clips, which are ten second videos you take of yourself doing something in a game you think is worth showing other people (whether other people agree or not). It also shares what games you are playing and achievements you've earned on your Facebook wall, and takes videos of certain achievements automatically and shares them to Facebook. The picture below is a link to a video of me getting the "Three Birds, One Stone" achievement in Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light that it made and posted to my wall.



Overall, I've had a great experience with OnLive. I am very impressed by my whole introduction to cloud gaming and I recommend it wholeheartedly. That's not to say, however, that I think cloud gaming or downloadable console games should replace physical media, but that's a whole other topic that would take another blog post to talk about.