I'm not talking about the usual complaints. This is not a rant about hard selling strategy guides, or trying to fleece the ignorant into spending twenty pounds on an HDMI cable. What has me worked up right now is the incredibly poor service these places offer, and the abysmal standard of their staff.

I was in Game in Leicester yesterday. They have a huge poster up plugging the collectors edition of Mass Effect 2, a game I will be buying at some point, and I was curious about the price difference between it and the standard edition. So I asked the girl working the checkout how much the collectors edition was going to cost.

She turned round and scanned the games in the glass cabinet behind her, obviously looking for Mass Effect 2. Then she turned back to me and asked "is it out yet?". After a moments stunned silence, I explained it was due out at the end of month. The rest of the exchange is too tedious and painful to go over again. Suffice to say that she had clearly never heard of Mass Effect.

OK, so what? Surely one ignorant till monkey is no big deal. Well actually, it is, because it reveals an awful lot about their hiring practices. It is impossible for anyone who reads a single video game blog, news site or magazine, to have not heard of Mass Effect, so clearly this girl has little to no real interest in video games. Actually, given that the place she works in has a poster up advertising Mass Effect 2, maybe she can't read.

Obviously, Game do not consider knowledge about video games a prerequisite for those working in their video game stores. And hell, it seems to be working. Profits have been going up for the last few years, largely, it seems, due to used game sales. But with publishers increasingly looking for ways to restrict used game sales, from one use only download codes, to full on digital distribution, the second hand market might well have peaked. The pawn shop business model of Game and Gamestation might be a shrinking market.

If so, you will need to find a new way to entice customers into your stores. Friendly, knowledgeable staff might be a good start.

As of my writing this, Game are taking pre-orders for the PSP Go at £230 pounds, while a PSP 3000 will set you back £140, including a bundled game. So what do you get for your extra £90, besides a lack of a free game?
Well, you get a smaller and lighter PSP, 16GB of flash memory and a download only distribution model for games. Now as far as the smaller and lighter part goes, only you know whether or not you need it enough to spend an extra ninety quid. But the rest of it? The PSP Go is a rip off of the highest order.
16 GB of internal flash memory is nice, but if you really need storage space, dabs will sell you 4GB memory stick pro cards for £17.50. That means that a PSP 3000 with 16GB of memory and a copy of  Tekken: Dark Resurrection will cost £210 pounds.
Looked at like that, the Go may not be too much of a bad deal. A £20 pound premium, and no bundled game, in exchange for the small, lightweight version.
Except that the PSP Go lacks a UMD drive
UMD might be rubbish format, but there thousands of used UMD games sitting on the shelves of Gamestation, none of which will run on the Go. The only way to buy games for the Go is via the PlayStation Network, as digital downloads. Maybe that's not a problem for you ( it is for me, but that's another story). Maybe you only want to download games, maybe you have been eagerly awaiting the dawning of the digital download era of game distribution. All well and good. but not a reason to buy a Go. All the existing models of the PSP will have exactly the same access to the Playstation Network, and will be able to download exactly the same games, as the Go.
The problem with the Go is not the price itself. After all, Nintendo just released a minimally improved version of the DS for an extra £50. The problem is that, memory and size aside, the PSP Go is actually inferior to a PSP 3000. The Go is stripped down PSP 3000 with some flash memory bolted on. They should be selling it for less than the other models, not more.