Guitar Hero Store

Full review
Want to rent video games and keep them for as long as you want?? That is the premise behind Red Octane, one of several video game rental sites, but the largest one that has been around the longest.

Red Octane is a game rental site, including games for playstation 1 & 2, XboX, Gamecube and Dreamcast systems. It runs much like Netflix (dvd rental site), only with games- you make a list (rental queue) of games that you would like to rent, rank them in order of how badly you want them (the one you want the most at the #1 slot and so on) and then Red Octane ships them to you in mailers that come complete with a postage paid envelope to send them the game back to them in. You keep the game for as long as your little heart desires and then you drop it in the mail and they will send you the next available game on your list. This is where Red Octane and Netflix differ greatly.

I only had a membership to Red Octane for a little over a month because of their lack of games. Don't get me wrong, it is NOT a lack of selection... they have almost everything and when a new game comes out, they grab that one up too... The problem is, they have so many members and only so few copies of the games that most of my choices (which were NOT all only new releases) were labeled "short wait" or "long wait" in my rental queue, meaning that I would have to wait to get the game. According to their site, short wait means usually available in 14 days, and long wait means the same only the wait time is upped to 30 days. Meanwhile I suppose you either choose more games until you finally pick a game they do have available with a status listed as "now" or you simply twiddle your thumbs (and pay for it.)

The other disadvantage is the time it takes to get the games. It seems, at least for me in Southern Missouri (NOT rural either; the site says a rural address can take up to an additional 5-7 days for a game to arrive,) to take over a week after a game it said to have been shipped out on their website. Netflix sends out their dvd's and I get them in about 3-4 days, much faster. The turnaround time for Red Octane seems to be kind of slow.

The packages you can get are three: you either have the choice of the "2-out" plan for $18.95/ month (billed directly to your credit card), the "3-out" plan for five dollars more, or the "5-out" plan for $39.95/month. (really for the price you might as well get the three out plan for five dollars more, and they price it that way on purpose. :) Right now if you prepay three months of the G2 program you can get a subscription to EGM (Electronic Gaming Monthly) for free, so that is a cool perk.

The other thing to realize is, game discs are used (inserted into machines and taken back out again) much more than dvds are and therefore these discs that Red Octane send you are sometimes pretty badly scratched up, causing glitches in the games... although, I suppose that could be true for any game rentals, online or not. But this way, if you get one that is scratched, instead of going back to your local Blockbuster, you have to mail it back and wait patiently for them to send you another copy, and that is if they have another copy of that particular game available, which pretty much all around sucks.

In the end, if you want to be able to rent as many games as you want to and keep them for as long as you want to (especially good for RPG's which have a long play time and cannot be finished in a mere 3-7 days), this is a good deal overall, but if you are going mainly to get your hands on copies of newly released games or even newer games under the cool idea you can keep them as long as you want(which is waht the other people renting do as well,) you could be waiting... awhile...