When Loot Ninja first heard of a video game rental service with no late fees, no mailing fee, and a virtually unlimited stock, we jumped all over it. To be honest, we were one of the first people to sign up for it. We are well within the Level 3 rewards and been there for a few years now. Gamefly was a godsend in the current generations(PS2, Xbox) because there was such a huge stockpiling of games past, present, and future that “out of stock” was almost never seen. Now that Gamefly has become more popular with the huge growth of the gaming industry, they have tried to keep up, but so far have done almost a sub par job.

Gamefly has made some very positive changes over the last year. They have opened a new shipping center in Pittsburgh to help lessen the shipping times and has just recently included New York. They have also remedied their once archaic “in or out of stock” inventory system. Now they have broken it down into Available, High Avail, Medium, Low, and Very Low. This system is beneficial because it does give the user a general idea on whether they will receive their game. Alas, the praise ends there.

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Rayman Raving Rabids is a bit of an older title for the Xbox 360, but what can I say this is what Gamefly is sending me lately. I decided to give it a shot and play through to see what the game was all about, I had heard a few things and new about all the commercials with the craved bunnies and of course Rayman from the olden days. Rayman Raving Rabbids boils down to Rayman facing off against these bunnies in various mini-games, he travels from arena to arena and squares away with them in order of ree himself.

Presentation and Graphics: The graphics in Raving Rabbids is fairly standard and really did not do much to impress. The visuals are very much cartoon inspired and pretty basic with much of the emphasis going to the bunnies and making them funny by dressing them in odd costumes. One of the biggest annoyances of the game was the long load times and constant loading in between stages. 2 of 5

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According to EB Games, Lair has been delayed until September 4th from it’s previously scheduled August 12th release date. Gamefly has also changed it’s release date, but they’re showing September 6th (most likely to account for getting enough copies in to rent to customers). Screenshots taken in case they change it back (EB Games above, Gamefly after the jump).

We’ve previously heard the game has gold gold directly from Sony. What could be causing the delay? Either they pulled the game to fix a last minute issue or they ran into some production problems. Either way, this doesn’t bode well for Sony.

The game looks now to be releasing on the same date as Heavenly Sword. If this rumor proves to be true, Lair will certainly get overshadowed.

[UPDATE] Sony just confirmed the new September 4th release date on PlayStation.Blog.

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I just got a pleasant email from Gamefly, letting me know that all of my games will now be shipping from the East Coast Distribution Center.

Your area will now be supported by this new Shipping Center. Depending on inventory availability, you may continue to receive some shipments out of Los Angeles. We expect your shipping times to improve over the next few months.

I’m going to LOVE not waiting a week for games to get shipped from L.A. To anyone else in New York, welcome to faster shipping!

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They’re getting there, but not all the way there yet. In an effort to minimize shipping times, Gamefly recently opened a new distribution center in Pittsburgh, PA to go along with the main center in Los Angeles, CA.

Previously, the new East Coast center covered Connecticut, Washington DC, Delaware, Indiana, Kentucky, Maryland, Michigan, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Tennessee, Virginia, and West Virginia. Not a bad start.

Today, Gamefly has announced that they’ve added the following states to that list: Illinois, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, and Vermont.

Still no New York on the list, so myself, taz8080, and tons of other gamers in the Empire State are SOL. Hopefully we’ll get the shorter shipping times soon…

After watching this and hearing about this game, I want to take a crack at it badly. Too bad Gamefly.com didn’t send it to me, instead I got Forza and Metal Slug Anthology (it’s just as good, hehe). Maybe I will go out and buy this one unless someone over at Microsoft wants to make a donation to the Loot Ninja staff, ::wink wink::.

Sierra Online has released FreeStyle to the public on a preview disc as of yesterday. FreeStyle is a new PC only game that reminds us all of the NBA Street style games, where you can play street style basketball games from 1 on 1 to 3 on 3. It is being considered an MMO PC basketball game, not sure how that is going to work out, but it sounds interesting, you can level your character and upgrade his gear to gain more experience (although some gear is rumored to cost you real cash). It is also going to have the obligatory hip-hop soundtrack and Marc Ecko clothes. If you have a GameFly account you can actually score a free copy of the preview disc through them, which I will comment on as soon as I get my grubby hands on it.

If you have a GameFly account and you manage to refer 5 friends you could earn yourself a Wii or 1 year of GameFly service. Nice upgrade to their last promo, which would have given you a DS. Check it out.

Gamefly recently added a nice new service for its members called “Fast Return”. This new service is in conjunction with the US Postal Service and is a feature that scans the returned rentals through the USPS and sends a notification to Gamefly that the games are in transit. Gamefly will begin to process your next request even before they physically receive the game back to their warehouse. In essence this cuts a couple of days out of the waiting time for your next game, unfortunately this isn’t available everywhere, but I think is a great idea and worked great for my last couple of games. Now you get games with less wait time.