Bargain Bins

[Liam]

I hate Curry's.

You can get games like Killer 7 and Psychonauts for a fiver each, they are pretty awesome. Check Gamestation for them two.

[Mattman]

The gamestation staff are complete arses.

*Do you have Call of Duty 4 on PS3 in stock?*

*No. NEXT!*

It was really busy, but still inexcusable.

I've had conversations with the Game staff, there all really helpful.

Edited February 27, 2008 by Mattman

[Cactus Drags]

See now, I've had the complete opposite experience, GAME is generally populated with fucking morons who haven't a clue about the stuff they're selling, while Gamestation employees don't seem nearly as pissed off and inconvenienced at your very presence, and actually know what they're talking about. And don't make up release dates when they don't know them.

[Mattman]

Well the Games near me are very good. I was in London a few weeks ago and went into a Game there to ask if they had a DS. I was told to look around because there'd be one somewhere in London.

I would of at least expected them to call the Oxford street Game which was fairly near, and ask them if they had it.

I've always had similar expierences with Gamestation. The one I mentioned before being the worse though.

[PkmnTrainerJ]

GAME staff have been fairly good to me over the years. It may be because I have the largest pre-order list there and come in every week. One guy (who doesn't work there now) got worried when I hadn't been in a month.

[Liam]

Personally, the GAME and Gamestation I go into both have good staff. I prefer the guys in Gamestation though, seem more up for a chat on your purchases and such.

[Scott McFly]

Gamestation staff always seem to be pissing around whenever I've been in. It's might not be busy, but surely the staff have something better to do other than 3 of them standing behind the counter, serving nobody, doing nothing productive and dicking around. I wouldn't mind so much, but the bloke serving me carried on his conversation with the people behind him (about hash it would seem) while he was serving me. The guys in Game had one guy patrolling the shop floor, one guy serving and one guy stocking up, and as much as I don't even like Game the staff are a thousand times more professional. They have uniforms, don't talk to people standing next to them so loudly I can hear them across the shop, and aren't pissing around when there's work to be done. Gamestation just seem stupidly overstaffed as they don't seem to be doing anything anytime I'm in. Nothing against Hamster, but that's just my experience.

EDIT: Anyway, on topic I got Trackmania United at Game for £4.99 a couple of weeks back. Great game.

Edited February 28, 2008 by Scott McFly

[Cactus Drags]

Gamestation has uniforms too...

I've worked at GAME before, those guys were the kings of dicking about. Plus, EA buys the Game charts. Probably goes on at Gamestation too, but I don't notice it so much, but we were always ordered to put EA stuff at the top of the charts, despite us having actual accurate charts to go by.

Edited February 28, 2008 by Dragsy

[stokeriño]

I've had interesting experiences with GAME staff. Like when I picked up a pre-owned copy of Lego Star Wars II: The Original Trilogy and some other game for the Xbox 360 in a 2-for-£20 deal. Got home to discover the disc I'd been given was the original Lega Star Wars (i.e. prequels) for the original XBox to boot!

Took it back to say "can I have the right disc please", and after a short search they said "sorry, we don't seem to have any copies of The Original Trilogy. We could sell you the Complete Saga for £34.99...?" To which my obvious response is "fuck off, I only wanted to spend £10" - but then I wandered around the store and picked out FOUR other copies of Lego Star Wars II, pre-owned. This left them equally stumped when I plonked the whole stack of them on the counter and asked "I guess these all have missing discs as well, huh?".

I don't know whether having five copies on the shelves of a game they apparently don't have, or the way they gave me the wrong game, for the wrong console in the first place is worse. Either way, pathetic.

That said, though. CEX is worse for service. The place is always a tip, random boxes strewn everywhere, the staff spend all their time searching through the piles of crap behind the counter that they've thrown down rather than sorting properly, so you have to wait for ages to get served as it is - before another 10/15 minutes while they try to find the thing you've bought. I remember once I tried to buy Wrestlemania X8 on DVD, which they searched for and came back to say "no, can't find it". "So, you haven't got a copy at all?" I ask. "Well," he answers begrudgingly, "there'll be another one in the back somewhere, but eh."

'EH'? 'EH'?!?

Took me ages of pestering him to make him actually go to the storeroom and get a DVD he knew was there, and he sulked the whole time he did it. Like it wasn't his job to sell me these things at all.

Gamestation guys = aok. Chatted with one about the pluses and minuses of the new features in Final Fantasy XII when I bought FF6 for the PS1 from there. (Y)

[Liam]

CEX is a nightmare, mostly because there is no quality control. I've had to take 3 games back due to the game being too scratched up to play. The bloke just kinda shrugged and went 'its a 2nd hand shop'......idiot.

THough you occasionally get some good stuff in there.

[Mattman]

Cex are in the middle of Game and Gamestation in my experience.

I agree that its too messy there. But most of the time the staff are alright. Well except for:

"Do you have guitar hero 2?"

"Yes"

*long pause*

"Well can I buy it please"

"No"

"Ummm.... Why not?"

"Because its at my house and I don't really want to sell it"

"What?"

Another guy that worked there overheard and told me it wasn't in stock while my friend laughed at me and chanted you got owned.

I still can't work out if he was joking or not.

[Timmoru Suzuki]

CEX must be universally the same. The service is terrible, they employ about 4000 people to stand around chatting and putting labels on cases rather than serve so your always queing ages. I hate buying from there because everything is scratched to fuck, though I do sell there a bit, and might buy something if it's SO cheap that it barely matters if it's a bit scratched.

[Cactus Drags]

Trouble with CEX is that because everything's so poorly stored, there's a constant queue and it takes forever to get served as they're searching for stuff the whole time. If they just stayed back an hour or so after closing for a week, arrange their fucking stock properly and tidy everything up, I'd about guarantee they could halve their staff.

[Farmer Reil]

The central Bristol GAME staff are awesome (the Galleries one, not the one in the high street, never been in there). But the staff in the Cribbs Causeway store are completely cunts.

I guess it depends on the store.

[Scott McFly]

See, I have no problems with my local (although it's a bus ride away) CeX. I took a whole load of stuff up a couple of months back, got it on a credit note, had a look around and came back with a mountain of stuff which they found really quickly. Been there a few times and the only problem I've seen was with the customers being assholes. As Reilly says, you're gonna get good and bad branches of every company, so people are gonna get vastly different experiences and have different viewpoints of each company. I like to think the Woolies I work at is pretty good, but obviously people will come on here and say their local branch is shit, and it probably will be.

And stokerino - they maybe filed it under Star Wars instead of Lego. I know that happens at my work sometimes because the "Star Wars" on the box is huge and some people miss the "Lego" bit when filing it. Granted, they work in a games shop so they should know the difference, or at least will have checked under S when realising it wasn't under L.

And if Gamestation has uniforms then they're either so bland I didn't notice the staff wearing them or they weren't wearing them at all. >_>

[GhostMachine]

I wonder if EB Games is the American version of whichever store Stokerino talked about being disorganized.

EB Games sucks, and I generally prefer to deal with Gamestop. You'd think things would have changed since Gamestop bought out EB Games, but they haven't.

EB Games = Games are usually disorganized on the shelves; more often than not, they're in no discernable order and it takes forever to find what you want when looking at their used games. And the staff tend to be idiots. Couldn't answer any questions whatsoever about a few games I've asked about the last several times I've been in there, and when I went to purchase Fire Pro Wrestling Returns, they had a new case open on the shelves and the dipshits spent 10 minutes looking for the disk and still couldn't find it. (I really hope someone shoplifted it) On top of that, their used games are missing the case and\or manual a lot of the time.

Gamestop = Games are almost always organized, except in the bargain bins (and that's to be expected, anyway), and I usually one of the two people that happen to be working whenever I have a question about a game can either answer it or tell me what they've heard. Never had a problem with the service there (ie, getting the wrong game disk or them not being able to find the actual disk if I've bought a used game - although one time it did take almost 5 minutes to find the actual disk), and when I called them to see if they had FPR in a couple weeks after what happened at EB, they only had one copy in and put a short (1 hour) hold on it so I could go pick it up.

I only willingly set foot in EB Games if Gamestop doesn't have something I'm looking for, and that's rare. (Both places have stores in the mall I go to; EB is upstairs next to the food court, and Gamestop is downstairs right underneath the food court - if they were on the same floor, there would be two, maybe three, stores between them)

[K]

CEX is slow, but I do love it. I mean, I don't play games anymore, but for movies it's great. The staff are friendly and knowledgeable, the music is good, and the 8ft tall woman at the Harrow store is fit as fuck.

[Mattman]

What was said about different branches being bad/good isn't entirely true.

After reading about rvdwannabee moving to Swansea I found out he comes from the same place as me. We've both had very different Gamestation expierences and (to my knowledge) there is only one Gamestation in our town.

[ChrisSteeleAteMyHamster]

Gamestation staff always seem to be pissing around whenever I've been in. It's might not be busy, but surely the staff have something better to do other than 3 of them standing behind the counter, serving nobody, doing nothing productive and dicking around. I wouldn't mind so much, but the bloke serving me carried on his conversation with the people behind him (about hash it would seem) while he was serving me. The guys in Game had one guy patrolling the shop floor, one guy serving and one guy stocking up, and as much as I don't even like Game the staff are a thousand times more professional. They have uniforms, don't talk to people standing next to them so loudly I can hear them across the shop, and aren't pissing around when there's work to be done. Gamestation just seem stupidly overstaffed as they don't seem to be doing anything anytime I'm in. Nothing against Hamster, but that's just my experience.

EDIT: Anyway, on topic I got Trackmania United at Game for £4.99 a couple of weeks back. Great game.

No offence taken (Y)

I generally make a point of being polite and helpful. If it's an older customer or someone clearly looking for a present for their kid I'll be all "sir, madam" etc etc and if it's a regular I'll be "mate" etc and have a chat if they want to. I'll offer my opinions and feedback from other customers who have bought games and if they've been returned. I'll go out of my way to help find games if needed. If only customers were more polite, friendly and patient sometimes.

Yeah, sometimes we are messing around behind the counter, especially first thing on a monday, tuesday or wednesday morning or towards the end of a saturday. They're days when, outside of serving, we don't have so much to process. We don't spend EVERY minute of quieter periods alphabetising or tidying shelves. We'll go out there a few times a day to straighten things up (it's a waste of time to constantly straighten, and all kinds of stores, such as Woolworths or HMV will be in a similar state to ours - not perfect but presentable). Also during the week we'll often only have three staff in, including whoever's in charge who will be doing paperwork, faulty returns or whatever.

When you're spending five days a week, 8:45am - 6pm in a shop doing the same things week in week out, you need "things" to pass the time. Believe it or not, the joy of serving moaning, rude and sometimes smelly customers (which Gamestation seem to draw in due to us offering money for games and selling cheaper pre-owned goods) isn't enough to take us through the day with a smile on our faces. However, customer comes first so we pause conversations to serve. Regulars will join in banter and jokes which is nice too. Our youngest male member of staff (he's 19) is known as "Cub" or "Manchild" and a number of our regulars will also call him that (including one brilliant old lady who brings us in chocolates all the time).

So the moral of the story is, a happy workforce, is a harder working workforce. We joke around, rip into eachother something chronic and mess around in quiet periods, but in our store at least, when a customer needs serving, we're on it.

So try out Gamestation Northfield....We promise we won't try to force sell you something, and will give you our own opinions on products..Unlike other stores.

Oh and Turok, Conflict Denied Ops and The Club? None are worth getting.

Patapon? Brilliant. Revenant Wings? Very good. Lost? Playing it at the moment and it's meh so far.

Wii? Brilliant for drunken parties, if you've got kids, families or Mario fans.

PS3? Brilliant for if you've got the patience for new releases and developments in 2008.

360? Brilliant if you want a console that's at it's peak right now.

PSP? Don't buy a preowned one as company policy on the quality of scratched screens is far too slack for my liking.

DS? Cheat the system. If you don't mind white, by the Brain Training pack for £120 and buy another game on top - works out cheaper than our other "bargain" bundles.

Also, one thing we have over GAME - Game don't take a preowned game back if you open the seal. We allow people to return all purchased games within ten days to swap for something else if you didn't enjoy it. You don't need to make up stories about "Someone else got my brother the same game for his birthday" or "It doesn't work" (so why are you wanting another game instead of another copy of the same game then?!) If it's within ten days and you don't like it (and you've not returned it numerous times already) just say "I don't like the game, can I swap it for something else please?" Easy, and we're happy to do it - doesn't bother us. Some other idiot will buy it

EDIT: Oh and we do have a uniform. It's a black polo with "Gamestation" embroidered on the chest with either "PLAYER" or "MANAGER" in white graffiti style underneath it. Unless we've got promo t-shirts such as the "Ask me about Turok" one we've got at the moment ("Certainly madam, it's sh*t") or the Devil May Cry one we've got, or the Zelda one we had, or Assassin's Creed, or Sega Rally t-shirt...Groovy freebie t-shirt bonus.

EDIT #2: Also, GAME have a no tattoo or visible piercing policy. That would mean that if our Gamestation store were GAME then out of our workforce of ten then six would be out of a job insluding our manager with a full sleeve and stretched ear, myself (labret), one full timer (half sleeve, big stretched ears), one Saturday staff (small tattoo on each forearm), and two part-timers (one loads of tattoos over arms, the other a girlie with nose piercing) would be out of a job. That's usually why such folk generally get employed by Gamestation and enforce the stereotypes between the two stores. Also explains the music differences and stereotypes, however any metal CD may be saved for the last half hour before closing. Our mornings our now generally filled with Sigur Ros, Boards of Canada and Mogwai, early afternoons with Kings of Leon, PJ Harvey, Queens of the Stone Age and The Clash. Go us.

Edited February 29, 2008 by ChrisSteeleAteMyHamster

[Cactus Drags]

See, I have no problems with my local (although it's a bus ride away) CeX. I took a whole load of stuff up a couple of months back, got it on a credit note, had a look around and came back with a mountain of stuff which they found really quickly. Been there a few times and the only problem I've seen was with the customers being assholes. As Reilly says, you're gonna get good and bad branches of every company, so people are gonna get vastly different experiences and have different viewpoints of each company. I like to think the Woolies I work at is pretty good, but obviously people will come on here and say their local branch is shit, and it probably will be.