Gamemine is a competitive, New Jersey-based company with some interesting options and excellent customer service. They support all the major consoles, as well as offering a few PSP UMD-format movies.

Gamemine has a good selection of titles listed in 8 genres, and you can browse alphabetically or by release date, another one of their admittedly minor, but still interesting features. They display very large front and back scans of the game box, which allows you to see the screenshots and read the back. They also list a description, publisher, release date, genre, and rating, though we'd be a bit more impressed if some of these were hyperlinked--this is a minor thing which would be easy to implement and which most other sites already do. We are a bit annoyed that when scrolling through games of a particular console of genre, you have no idea how many pages of results there are, and can't skip to the middle or end for instance, just "next" and "previous" pages, very tedious for browsing, and why we were not able to easily total up the titles numbers for each console.

They have a very useful facility to speed up mailings called 2xSPEED, which becomes available after you've been a member for 90 days. Basically, you pop your last game back in the mail, and then, click 2xSPEED on the site, and Gamemine will send your next film without waiting to receive the titles, cutting a day or two off of transit times. Gamemine also ship Saturdays, a rarity among game rental companies, which should speed things further.

Gamemine also have the best set of parental control facilities we've seen, where you can set access according to ESRB game ratings, so you can block the Adult Only (AO), Mature (M), and/or Teen (T) level of games, with all blocked, this would just leave the Everyone (E) and Everyone 10+ (E10+) titles.

We were particularly impressed that they have a customer service phone line as well as the standard contact form. They also have a generous cancellation policy in their Terms and Conditions--you have 10 business days to return any outstanding games. After canceling, you cannot sign up again for another 4 months, presumably to prevent people from abusing their second month free policy.

Gamemine also has an option to buy used games at a low price, including the game you are currently renting. While many other game rental companies also offer this facility, it's just one of the extras Gamemine features; when taken together, we think the sum of these features make it an excellent choice in US game rental.

Prices: Gamemine has a no free trial, but does offer the second month free when you pay for the first month. Game plans are $12.95 per month for 1 game out (only $9.95 per month if you pay for a year up front), $18.95 for 2 games out (only $14.50 per month if you pay the year up front), and $26.95 (only $23.00 per month if you pay the year up front) for 3 games out. There are significant saving to be had by paying six months or a year up front, if you like the company after your initial two months, then we highly recommend you take advantage of these offers.