broom's blog

My Experiences of GameFly

After moving to US I bought a new XBox 360. Then I became a “legal” gamer from a pirate. Basically there are 3 reasons:
1. It’s not easy to crack a console in US. I don’t want to buy devices for cracking console. And such service providers are in the dark and may be caught by cops.
2. Games are relatively cheaper here, 60$ is 3~4 lunches in US and over 10 lunches in China.
3. XBox live connection speed is much more faster. By my experience, it was a torture to use XBox/PS3 network in China.

I bought a few XBox games in last Thanksgiving season. Then Skyrim occupied my game time for over a month. I traded it in to Amazon after getting all achievements. I got that game for 60$ and traded it in for 20~30 bucks. Skyrim was a really long game. But some games are really short, like CoD if you don’t play online. And some games may turn out not to be my dish after trying it out. Dark Souls is a good example… So I decided to give game rental services a try. There are not many choices so I picked GameFly easily.

I started with a one-game plan, which means I can keep one game in my hands. Then upgraded to 2-game plan for a month. When the 2-game plan was about to end I tried to cancel, but GameFly website said they could give me one extra free month. OK, why not? So I enjoyed one more month 2-game plan then cancelled it…

So here are Pros and Cons of GameFly, by my personal experiences.

Pros:

As I said above, it’s a very nice service to try “short games” and “potentially bad games”.
The system is pretty transparent. You can view game availabilities. New titles are available on time, though you need to be very lucky to get it at the first time.
Lots of promotions: the introductory price and the extra month before you cancel made me feel guilty..
Good if your gaming style is one by one. Not good if you like to play a few different games in parallel.

Cons:

Shipping time is long for NYC. It’s surprising that they don’t have a shipping center in NYC. Most of my games were from Pittsburg. Usually it took 3~5 days to arrive, and 3 to 5 days to return. Well if you’re on a 1-game plan, that means 1/3 of your money may be wasted.
The “GameQ” is tricky. If you put lots of games in it, you may never get the game you really want. But if you only put several your really desiring games in it, you may need to wait for a few days if they’re hot.
Usual prices are still expensive. 15.95 for the 1-game plan and 22.95 for 2-game. It would make more sense if the shipping is as fast as Amazon Prime.
It somehow makes you want to rush because you’re “renting” the game. At least I don’t want to spend a month to get all achievements of a game I rent.

Anyway I have to say console games are fading out. There are a few super titles and some great titles which still have lots of fans. But the whole market has been sliding down so much in the past 10 years. Mid-tier and independent productions are totally moving to mobiles. This market is now much less prosperous and lack of creativity compared to the golden era of console games. Coming back to game rental services, I found there are actually very few games I wanted to rent. My queue was never more than 5 games and only 2 or 3 when I cancelled the service. I may consider to restart the service when the summer or Christmas game season comes, but not now.

FFXIII-2

Beat FFXIII-2 last night. About 50 hours game time. It was a nice journey with old friends from FFXIII.

FFXIII-2 to FFXIII is kinda like FFX-2 to FFX, a mission oriented continuation of a story oriented origin. I gave up FFX-2 after 1 hour because I didn’t like Yuna’s costume in that game. On the contrary, Sarah in FFXIII-2 is very lovely, even better than Lightning , who is a little bit “neutral”. And the bikini DLC pushed the joy to a new level…

FFXIII-2 is a typical time travel story. Heroes jump among different eras, save people, prevent disasters. Not very interesting, you may even say it’s stale. So the whole attraction of this story is what happened to Lightning/Snow/Fang. Therefor, it’s VERY annoying to see “To Be Continued” at the end of this game! I know there are some more plots scattered here and there, after finishing the main story. But the main story still feels way too incomplete. Or let’s put it more directly: the ending CG is too SHORT! Come on Final Fantasy, where is your 5 minute ending CG??!

The fighting system is quite close to FFXIII. It’s fun to collect and grow monsters. However most fighting fun is probably left to the after－ending play, because when I beat the game, most monsters I used are “Early Peaker” style. It requires some farming to feed those cool “Late Bloomer”s. I don’t really like a Japanese RPG that requires you to farm. Well, maybe I’ll get back to it some day.

Music of this game is definitely a wonderful part. Lots of woman voices are well used. My favorite track is the Dying World theme.

In sum, I would recommend any FFXIII player to play this successor, any Japanese RPG fan too since there are very few good Japanese RPG games today. It’s not a good choice if you’re neither of the 2 types above.

CoD:MW3 and FFXIII-2

These games have really long names, ha.

MW3 single player campaign is as short as it was criticized. I started it around 1pm and finished it at 1am. Total play time should be less than 8 hours. In fact it was a very nice experience, to fight in NYSE building, watch Eiffel tower collapsing and shoot enemies with super modern weapons. I can imagine some player would be pissed off if they bought this game for single campaign. This is a game designed for online play.

I tried it on Xbox live the next day, and found it wasn’t a game for me. It is so easy to kill or be killed in this game, 3~5 bullets, less than 1 second. Usually even before you realize which direction you’re being shoot, you’re gone. It’s very different from GeoW3, in which those “Gears” are much more tough and can eat more bullets. I’m not a CS lover so I’ll just return this game and continue my FFXIII-2.

I’ll talk about FFXIII-2 later after I beat it. So far it’s better than I expected. Time travel plot is always attractive to me, though I’ve prepared for a broken ending because it’s quite difficult to make a time travel story logical.. The battle system is OK, and Sera is good-looking. What else do you expect from a “FF*-2”?

Super Mario 3D

最近通了3ds上的mario，总的来说相当失望。个人认为是敷衍之作，跟ds和wii上的mario正统作品比相差太远。

手感应该说还是保持了水准，3d操控方式，视角转换也没什么问题。致命的缺点就是几乎毫无新意。依靠3d特性做出来的机关都相当无聊，关卡里面视觉效果是更加3d了，但玩法没什么变化，感觉就是在玩一个有3d效果的旧mario。而且由于3d的原因画面还没有以前的作品亮丽，我感觉是得不偿失。

再说游戏内容，整个游戏几乎只有狸猫和乌龟两个变身，远逊于ds的巨人和小人变身的乐趣。马银里面奇思妙想的关卡和boss战也不见踪影。更不要提wii上的多人配合。3ds上第一作正统mario只有这个水平实在让人失望。我要考虑把3ds出掉了。

First Dental Experience in US

My top wisdom tooth was broken 2 weeks ago, actually right after I had that wonderful pizza. A small piece of it fell off. Then the sharp edge at the broken place had been bothering me until this morning.

I found a list of dentists on AETNA(the insurance company) website, then picked a close one based on reviews on Yelp. On Tuesday I called them and made an appointment on Thursday.

The treatment experience was better than I expected. I got the broken wisdom tooth extracted, then took a teeth cleaning. I had been worrying if it would be super expensive or the doctor/hygienist would be inexperienced. It turned out those worries were nonsense. They have very good manners and skills. No pain at all when the doctor took out the tooth. And the cost is just about 60$ (teeth cleaning covered by insurance).