by Matt Bird

Created on: March 30, 2009

To buy or to rent? Good question.

In the old days I would have said rent without hesitation. What's the point of buying a game you'll only play a few times anyway? The days of the NES generally had few games wherein you could save, so owning a copy wasn't that integral a thing. If you wanted to play a game, just go rent it for a couple bucks and you were set.

Now, though, I'm not so sure - and that's partially the fault of increasing prices. Now to rent a game I usually find myself facing $6 to $8 in rental fees for only a couple days of play. Given that games eventually drop quite astronomically in price, why not just wait for a while and buy them? Depending on how addictive the game is you'll probably save money in the long run.

Yet that raises another problem. What if the game isn't very good? You may be out thirty or forty bucks with no great reward to show for it. In such a case you'll wish you'd tested the game, thus wasting a great deal less money, rather than blindly shelled out the cash and being disappointed.

In other words, there's a strong case for either side of the equation. So I have to advocate both renting AND buying. Yet, with either, you'll need to do a little homework.

Back before the Internet existed information on new video games came from two places: word of mouth and gaming magazines, perhaps most famously from Nintendo Power. Other kids gave their opinion on how often a game was, and this advice could be rather hit-or-miss. Nintendo Power usually provided me with a more balanced review of a given game, yet wasn't always completely accurate. (It's a bit difficult to account for the tastes of thousands of different gamers in one review, after all.)

But now, as I hinted, we have the Internet. A vast repository of opinions. If you've got net access then I suggest researching a game a bit first before trying it out. What are people saying in general? Is there a consensus as to how good or bad a game is? Does it enjoy universal accolades or suffer from widespread condemnation? If the former is the case then you might want to just buy it (though I'd advise watching some videos of the game in action to see if it's to your liking before shelling out cash).

And there's still room for renting in this equation. Perhaps the gaming community is split on a particular title. Some people love it, some people hate it. Such situations happen more often than you might think. If this is the case then you should definitely sample the game before laying down your hard earned bucks. Renting comes in handy in these situations.

I'll readily admit that I don't rent nearly as often as I used to. I prefer owning my games these days. But there's always opportunities for rentals to come in handy, and they can definitely save you a lot of time, aggravation and moolah.

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