God of War III Ultimate Edition: The Empty Box March 18, 2010

For those of you collectors out there, who just love collectors editions in every way shape and form, you’ve had to deal with extremely high priced ones with very little substance as of late.  Originally collector’s editions would be 10 dollars over the initial price, come in a slightly better package and include a second disc with behind the scenes goodies which would be well produced and informative and entertaining.

Within the past year, I’ve noticed that these CEs have become more fluff than actual content.  But recently the God of War III Ultimate Edition has earned my purchase.  I paid 40 dollars more than the initial price for a mostly empty box.  The box the game came in is quite beautiful, but it’s empty.  Other than the hardcover art book (which is the standard size and shape for most other CE artbooks I’ve seen, there’s nothing in the box.  The case the game comes in is identical to the standard edition, and the disc itself is identical as well.

The difference is (other than Pandora’s box and the Art Book, the only physical additions, and those alone would not fetch a 40 dollar price tag) that there’s a tiny leaflet included inside the game case with three download codes.  One for a downloadable skin and Combat Arena, both of which could’ve been unlockable game content, one for a downloadable documentary starring Peter “Robocop” Weller which is taking me over an hour to download and is going to use up the very last of my 60GB PS3’s storage space, and one for two soundtracks to be downloaded off the God of War site, which doesn’t work because the God of War site is no longer accepting logins or code redemptions, all attempts to do either are just frozen, and then met with an error message.

Is it that hard to make some CDs?  Is it that hard to do a second Blu-Ray?  You have to be kidding me if you charged 100 dollars for this thing that you couldn’t have done all that and still charged the same price?  Hell, I would’ve gladly sarificed having an empty Pandora’s box (which can’t fit the PS2 versions of the games, but can fit the God of War Collection if you need a place to put that disc) for having instead this content on physical discs.

I really like collector’s editions, but what’s collectable about revolving it around a leaflet with codes on it?  It’s a great empty box though.