As promised, I'm back with another "special edition" reveal, this time for Soul Calibur IV. I'm looking ahead at the release schedule and not sure what the next one would be - so if you have any suggestions, pass them along.

Click on through if you want to peer into the guts of this $80 package...

First of all, preordering the Xbox 360 version ("Hi, my name is Gary, and I'm an achievement whore...") at Gamecrazy also nets you a choice of faceplate. The choices were a bluish one with an image of Siegfried's crystaline Soul Calibur on it, or this greenish one with Yoda, the Star Wars character "exclusive" (for now, presumably) to the 360 version:

As I mentioned in my GTAIV unboxing blog, I'm not really a faceplate guy. But I am into seeing people's custom characters in Soul Calibur IV. Send me pictures of the hottest pirate and/or ninja hooker you can come up with, with the subject "You'll want to seize this booty!" The creator of my favorite gets the Yoda faceplate and some Joystick Division swag (a set of the way-cool buttons I passed out at Comic-Con just recently). Two runners-up will get buttons, too.

Okay, back to the unboxing.

The Premium Edition package is a slightly big metal tin that fits inside a semi-transparent plastic sleeve open on both the bottom and the top. This is what it all looks like together, both from the front and the side/back.

You'll notice the back has a lot of non-English on it. I'm not 100%, but I'm guessing it's French. I can't be sure because I didn't take French in school; instead, I spent two years on the much more practical Latin. Ahem.

Slipped out of the case, the tin and sleeve look like this:

The tin is really cool to look at, bold colors with nice, crisp imaging. It actually opens from either side, the front or the back, suggesting there are two compartments in the case, but there aren't. Everything's in the same place.

Right up front is the actual game case, identical to what you'd get in the store. the only thing worth noting about it is the manual itself, which inexplicably has... um... well look for yourself:

How does this happen? I'd love to have sat in on that meeting at Namco, just to hear the logic firsthand.

"Sir, I think perhaps we could benefit by putting some fast food coupons in our Soul Calibur IV manual."

"We've never done that before, it makes no sense at all, and my first instinct is to ask you if you've been drinking, Johnson... I'm intrigued. Go on."

"Well, I had a friend over at Church's Chicken. I bet we could work something out with them. Because nothing goes with videogaming - and $50 videogame controllers - like greasy finger food."

"I think it's the most asinine idea I've heard this quarter. But having just finished Who Moved My Cheese?, I know that I'm probably just being shortsighted and fearful of change. Let's take this idea as far as it can go."

Here's what the Premium Edition looks like exploded, sans game. As you can see, they've stuffed quite a few thigns into the tin, though when you really starting looking at each thing individually, you see it's more quantity than quality. (Something that could also be said of the game itself, but more on that in a week or so.)

One thing that is at least a little cool, though, is this card: the back has a code you can enter via Xbox Live for some free character customization parts for the game. That's handy.

Everything else is a bit of a question mark. First there's the "Tournament Kit", a tournament bracket poster, pen to write on it with, and a prize. The poster is reversible, one side a SCIV poster with a few characters, Yoda and Vader on it, the reverse the actual tournament chart.

The image on the poster is pretty nice, but since it's been folded up small enough to fit in the tin, it would be ugly as hell on a wall. The only thing that really has any value here is the "prize" for the tournament kit, a Soul Calibur IV t-shirt that's folded up and wrapped in plastic.

Looks like it would make a better prize for a pie-eating contest. I guess the size doesn't really matter, nobody's going to wear it anyway... I mean look at it. It has a girlie-looking knight and Yoda on it. For the sociopathic parents out there, a simple get-rich-quick scheme, courtesy of Joystick Division:

1) Take out life insurance policy on son
2) Send him to school wearing the SCIV Premium Edition prize shirt
3) Profit

Lastly, there's the comic/art book.

About 50 pages, it's fairly skinny. Half is a mini comic depicting SCIV characters Mitsurugi and Hilde briefly teaming up against foes like Tira and Astaroth; the other half are design sketches of SCIV characters.

The comic - obviously, being only about 25 pages long - is brief, and not too interesting. The drawings are good and the coloring better, but otherwise it's destined to be flipped through once and then never read again. The art section is better, but only slightly: some characters are ignored completely, many even forced to share a (DVD case-sized) page with others to better make room for things like a full page of "Ivy's ass in a thong" sketches (I'm not joking). Again: hard to get excited (maybe if the ass pictures were bigger...).

The Bottom Line

The Soul Calibur IV Premium Edition package goes for $20 over the standard SKU, $79.99. Most places are sold out of it to boot, which means you're going to pay more if you resort to the Amazon Marketplace or eBay.

Simply put: not worth it. The only thing here that's indisputably nice is the tin itself - every other item in the package is either useless or something that'll be little-used.

If you're a huge Soul Calibur fan, then maybe it'll seem worth it just for the tin. If you're a literally huge Soul Calibur fan, then you might even be able to wear the t-shirt. And if you're a literally huge in part because of an affection for deep-friend foods, maybe you can even consider the $1-off at Church's coupon a sort of rebate for fatties.

But otherwise, none of this stuff amounts to twenty extra dollars. Save your green.

Till next time...

gwh