Game Swag

A lot of developers have been trying to eliminate piracy and a great multitude of ways. We've seen stuff like DRM and brick making Dragon Quest roms. While I think the brick roms are a fun idea, DRM hurts the consumer moreso than the pirate.

I personally feel that the best way to combat the 'yarhar' syndrome is on the side of the publisher. What I'm referring to is bonus goods and preorder bonuses. These days I don't buy many games due to a lack of interest in where your average videogame is headed, so sometimes the swag is what tips me off the fence on the side of a purchase. As I wear my Scribblenauts hat, I'll assure you this isn't going to be another of those "piracy versus morals" debates. Instead, I'm going to focus more on some of the awesome stuff I've seen or received myself with recent videogames.


When Konami released Castlevania: Portrait of Ruin, it was to coincide with the 20th anniversary of the series. To reward longtime fans, they included a menagerie of fabulous goods with a preorder of their most recent DS game. These included a stylus, artbook, cardcase, timeline poster, 40 something page art book and a soundtrack thrown together in a nice box. This one I personally missed out on even though I got the game. Unfortunately, I was unaware of just how awesome the preorder was and finding out about it insured that I would never skip on preordering a game I was interested in.


Fallout 3 was another standout game to me that came with a metric ton of awesome. In this we had a DVD that chronicled Bethesda's development on the game, an artbook rich with Fallout style and a Pipboy bobble head(Unfortunately, mine shipped broken). Now these things are cool, but the topper was the Fallout 3 lunchbox that the ensemble was held in. I don't have a need for a lunchbox really, but I was enamoured by the thing.


Soul Calibur 4 had some pretty jive stuff come with it too. I got a pretty sweet keychain with it(Like my pipboy, I received it broken), a nice comic book, an oversized T-shirt and a tournament poster with dry erase marker intact. Much like Fallout 3, it came with a tin box, but I thought it was rather limited in terms of lunchbox use. Still, I kind of enjoyed it even though I hated the game.


My personal favorite bonus so far has been the Persona 4 Social Link Expansion that Amazon offered with the release of the game. Here we have the second half of the soundtrack, another oversized tee, a calender and a stuffed plushie of the lovable Teddie character from the game. Now, if you stack that on top of the artbook and the first half of the soundtrack that already came with the game, you have some straight up awesomeness.

Atlus is usually pretty great when it comes to giving the buyer an incentive to buy a game they're unsure of. I'm eagerly awaiting my Demon's Souls collectors edition complete with soundtrack and strategy guide.

(As a little aside, last year I took three days off of work for Persona 4 and eagerly awaited the game to reach my doorstep. I actually slept in so I wouldn't have to wait for it to arrive hoping that I could just wake up and play. Well, when I awoke, I found the S-link pack but no game. Needless to say I was fuming for that entire day. "How could they send me the bonuses without the game, especially when I paid extra to have the items shipped together," I thought to myself. It wasn't until around 7PM that the game actually showed up after I had already written a complaint to Amazon for screwing me over. In hindsight, I feel kind of bad because it was really a negligable difference, but I wanted the game sooo! bad.)