Renting games is illegal in my country.
By Yanngc33 18 Comments
I live in France. A beautiful country with good food, good wine and fine women. Sounds great right ? Not when your a gamer.
France has some really weird, dumb laws. For example, a certain number of french songs must play on the radio every hour, because American music is so dominant that the french music industry couldn't survive without the government forcing us to listen to dumb french rap (trust me it's awful). France also has another law, one that's clearly written on the back of every game box: in no case can this game be rented.
Why does this suck so hard ? First of all, renting is like a prolonged demo. Reviews can only tell you so much about a game, you still need to play it to find out if you like it. If I had only rented Naughty Bear, I could've known that It wasn't all that great.
Second reason why no renting sucks is the price of the games. We pay about 10 to 20 dollars more than americains do. This means, like in most cases, buying a game is an investment. And when I finish a game in less than 5 hours, that's what I call a rip off. Now if I had rented it, I'd feel a hell of a lot less cheated and wouldn't cry everynight thinking of my empty wallet.
My final reason is a much more personal one. I'm fluent in booth French and English and I like my games in Shakespear's tongue. "Remember... No Russian" sounds alot cooler in English than in French and since the language isn't written anywhere on the box, you can only hope for the best. My favorite example of this weird trend is Halo: Reach. The menus are in English but the game is dubbed in French with English subtitles.