I’m a fickle gamer. I love games, but I don’t have much time to play games, so when I do sit down with a controller I want the game to be great.

For years, I just bought games new from the local Circuit City. Often, though, I’d get a game home and realize I hated it, and I was out $50. When GameFly started, I thought, this’ll be cheaper than buying the games, and I won’t have to worry if I get a game that I hate–I just send it back and get another.

I’ve been a GameFly member for more than three years now (since January of 2004), and overall I’d give it 3/5 stars. It does work as advertise–they mail me games, and I send them back postage-free in the included mailer. They’ve always given me whatever game I had at the top of my queue, including games that would have been hard to buy in stores. They sell used games at very cheap prices ($20-$35) for the few occasions that I want to buy one.

GameFly has its flaws, though. I live on the East coast, and it literally takes TWO WEEKS to get a new game after I send one back. Actually, sometimes it’s a little shorter–they have a clever service now where the postal service informs them that i’ve mailed a game back. That shaves a couple of days off the round-trip time, but it still takes at least 9 days to get a new game. Plus, they don’t get the notification every time.

Also, I’ve had a lot of games disappearing lately. Literally, since I’ve moved to my new town, about 75% of the games I send back never arrive at GameFly. Either someone is taking them directly from my mailbox, or someone at the post office is stealing them. This happened once or twice at my previous address, but now that it happens most of the time, I have to be suspicious. I’m going to have to start returning them to a post office box (which reduces the convenience factor).

Out of the maybe 40 games that I’ve rented over the last several years, two were damaged. GameFly sent me a replacement promptly (they don’t wait to receive the game, but ship the replacement out as soon as you notify them of the problem).

I’ve tried to find a similar service that offers faster distribution to people on the east coast. GameFly does have several competitors, but none of them are as well-reviewed as GameFly, and people still have the same shipping time complaints. NetFlix, which distributes movies instead of games, has distribution centers throughout the country and so offers very fast turn-around. Unfortunately, there’s no real “NetFlix for games”.

If I do ever cancel GameFly, I’d just buy games used from eBay and then resell them. That’s more trouble, but given the small number of games I play, it’d be much cheaper. Though, if someone at the post office stole a game I bought, I’d be on the hook for it, I suppose.

Add a comment if you have an experience with GameFly or a similar service.

I’ve used Vonage for voice since August, 2004. Voice was okay; it was never great. There was always some delay/latency. Sometimes it wasn’t really noticeable, and other times it was very distracting–it seemed like a whole second between the time you spoke and the time the other person heard you speak. You’d be surprised how awkward that makes conversation, because you’ll often be inadvertently interrupting the person you’re speaking to, and you won’t realize it for a second.

I decided that I needed some Quality of Service (QoS) so I replaced my router with one of these D-Link GamerLounge routers. That series of routers has a much more aggressive QoS than other routers, because it will constantly break large, lower-priority packets into smaller segments. See, while QoS will prioritize realtime traffic like Voice over IP (VoIP) over traffic like Web transfers (say, HTTP and FTP), it can only prioritize queued traffic. That helps, but if the router is in the middle of transferring a large packet, it can’t be interrupted with a VoIP packet, and the VoIP packet has to wait the few milliseconds it takes to transmit the large, lower-priority packet. The GamerLounge routers minimize this effect by fragmenting all large, low-priority outbound packets so that the interruption will be less.

The GamerLounge router did a good job of reducing the latency. Unfortunately, the model I had was awful at handling VPN traffic. When my wife started working from home regularly, this caused real problems for her. So, I upgraded to a D-Link Xtreme N Router. It has QoS, but it doesn’t do the fragmenting thing, so the voice delay got worse again.

In December of 2004 I added a fax line to my Vonage service. Before that, I had been using one of those eFax services. That’s great for receiving faxes, but I don’t receive many faxes. Mostly, I need to send signed contracts. It turns out that the quality problems with voice, while annoying, absolutely kill fax services. Most fax transmissions died after 2-3 pages, requiring me to send contracts in multiple calls. Nonetheless, I don’t fax that often, and I’m lazy, so I just dealt with it.

This week I finally reverted back to a Verizon land-line to use for faxes. I’m faxing more regularly now, and I need it to be reliable. Vonage made cancelling my fax line an absolute nightmare. While I added the line with just a few clicks on their website, they forced me to call them to cancel the service (just like every other online service, they want to make it difficult–I’m talking to you, Sirius). Then, they tried to convince me to keep the service at a discount, convert it to a virtual number, convert it to a second voice line, convert it to a virtual number (they asked me this twice), etc.

Well, that’s my experience with Vonage. I continue to use their voice service because I don’t make many voice calls and it’s only about $18/month. My favorite Vonage feature is that it rings my cell phone at the same time, so I don’t have to give people separate office and cell numbers–one number contacts me even when I’m not in the office.

Share your own experiences in the comments.