Bioshock Infinite and the return of Gamefly

I started back up on Gamefly and managed to get Bioshock Infinite about the time it came out a couple weeks ago. It took me about a week to blaze through the (roughly 12 hour campaign) on Easy difficulty. I played it quickly for one, because I'm back on the "time is money" when it comes to games idea. But also because I was enjoying it so dang much.

The world they create is beautiful. The sounds of the world and UI are familiar but consistently great. The visuals are like that too. It's really a great job of creating something that's at the same time believable and unbelievable. A lot of the sounds and cues will be familiar to players of the first two games. Which is a good thing. In fact, and I can safely say this without spoiling anything, there's a few pretty excellent callbacks to the first game in the ending sequences of Infinite.

As for GameFly, lets just say it was targeted e-mail marketing at it's best. They still have my e-mail address, of course, and they've been pretty good about not sending me too much annoying crap. So when I got a note that said there's a new shipping facility in Kansas City I thought pretty hard about signing up again. That the first month would only cost me a dollar was just gravy. If you'll remember from before, one of my biggest complaints about them was the terrible shipping times. I would typically go for a week of dropping a game in the mail before getting another one. I knew that Netflix had a KC shipping facility and knew how much of a difference that could make. As for queue management, I still don't think they're nearly up to par with Netflix, since the second game I got was down near the 9 or 10 position since all the other, more popular games were unavailable. Both the PS3 and 360 versions of Tomb Raider were in there, and that game's been out for a month or two. What gives, Gamefly? But maybe it's not an entirely fair comparison since games cost so much more than movies. We'll see how it goes.

So my next game up is Paper Mario Sticker Star. Something that looked sort of interesting, but mainly just gives me a reason to use my 3DS. I've had trouble finding a lot of reasons to do that. I played through most of the first party Nintendo stuff that they've put out, but the new Castlevania: Lords of Shadow game is the first 3rd party game that I've enjoyed. I liked most all of the 10 hours it took me to finish the story in that one. Aside from me wanting to scream "Dammit, Dracula!" (spoilers! Well, sort of) a few times towards the end, I had a lot of fun with it.