Worst Pre-Order Bonuses

I always liked RC cars growing up, so I can certainly understand why fans of Gears of War 2 would have been excited at the prospect of getting a free remote controlled centaur tank as a bonus for pre-ordering the limited version of the game at Best Buy. It’s important to manage your expectations when dealing with free items, but the miniature tank simply didn’t work. If you tried to turn the vehicle left or right, the tires would lock up against the chassis of the vehicle and stop spinning altogether. The thing also struggled to drive in a straight line, and it barely had enough torque to overcome the force of gravity. Anything thicker than a piece of paper may as well have been a Jersey barrier. It would have been hard to complain if it had been presented as a simple model, but the thing was useless as far as RC vehicles are concerned. It wouldn’t look bad sitting on a shelf, but it didn’t say “glorified paperweight” on the packaging. I suspect they were given away for free because someone was trying to offload faulty merchandise.

The Street Fighter series has a diverse roster of characters from around the globe, and a wide variety of fighting styles are utilized. For the release of Super Street Fighter IV, the folks at GameStop decided to focus on one of the few fighting styles that wasn’t showcased in the game. Thumb wars have been described as the miniature golf of martial arts, but the activity is mostly confined to classrooms and playgrounds. The “Super Thumb Fighters” that were available as a pre-order bonus were essentially tiny masks for your thumbs that featured illustrations of Street Fighter characters. I appreciate cosplay as much as the next guy, but dressing your thumb up like a video game character is just plain weird. Moreover, I don’t see any reason to add an extra step to the thumb war process, and the activity doesn’t warrant special costumes. The thumb masks are endearing in their own way, but they’re something you’ll use once and throw away. If I’m going to use my thumbs to fight someone, I’d just as soon challenge them to a video game.

Sports games are seldom mentioned on this website, but I’ve finally found a reason to talk about a Madden game. If you pre-ordered Madden NFL 17 and at least 2200 “Madden Ultimate Team” points from Best Buy, you’d be given a free challenge flag! (For the uninitiated, MUT points are a type of in-game currency that can be used to purchase in-game content.) I’m not sure why anyone would feel compelled to pre-order a sports game in the first place, and it’s not like they’re difficult to find at launch. The pre-order bonus wasn’t especially intriguing either. It looked like a simple red handkerchief, and there was nothing special about it at all. On the other hand, Best Buy was charging $15 for them if you wanted one without the game, so maybe I was overlooking something. The flags are essentially worthless today, but they actually held their value better than the game itself. Madden NFL 17 can be found for a couple bucks on the second-hand market, but the flag is trending closer to five. Remarkably, the challenge flag isn’t even the worst football-related item on this list!

Customers who pre-ordered Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney were rewarded with a free keychain. It would be pretty hard to ruin a keychain, right? To the untrained eye, the keychain in question probably looks like a vaguely-shaped blob of solder. In reality, it was meant to resemble Apollo Justice’s silhouette while he was in the midst of making an objection. (To put it another way, it’s supposed to look like a dude extending his arm and sternly pointing his finger into the air.) The whole thing screams “low effort” to me, and I actually wondered if I was looking at the back of a keychain when I first saw it. There’s no color and virtually no detail, and I reckon that even fans of the series would have trouble identifying they keychain as Apollo Justice if they saw one in the wild. It looks more like the deformed version of Florida… or a weirdly-shaped gun… or a really shitty version of Goofy.

When I think Resident Evil, I think zombies, mutants, blood, and guts. It’s a violent and visceral series where decapitations and dismemberments are commonplace. On the other end of the spectrum, snow globes are usually peaceful and serene. A Resident Evil snow globe makes about as much sense as a Mario-themed chainsaw would, but that didn’t stop retailers from offering up a snow globe as a pre-order bonus for Resident Evil 5. To be fair, the trinket could more accurately be described as a sand globe, and it sort of tied in with the game’s desert setting. Sand doesn’t have the same properties as artificial snow, however, so it’s not very practical. If you shake a snow globe or turn it upside down, the flakes will slowly float to the bottom and lightly coat everything on their way down. In contrast, sand sort of just plops down without fanfare. It’s not an effective visual, and there’s a reason why sand globes aren’t more common.

Customers who pre-ordered StarFox Adventures at Circuit City were given a special “Survival Kit” that contained a number of items. The contents had little to do with survival, however, and the kit was comprised of an assortment of random items. Included in the bundle was a double-sided door hanger, two air fresheners, six temporary tattoos, and a bottle of Green Apple Jones Soda for some reason. I don’t remember running across many apples in the game, but I guess the green color sort of played off the game’s dinosaur theme. Without question, the most peculiar item was a roll of toilet paper with “game tips” written on it. There are a lot of shitty items on this list, but this is the only one that you’re supposed to wipe your ass with. Needless to say, this is one item that you’re not going to want to buy used.

The Battleborn Collector’s Edition shipped with the game and one random bonus figure. The concept is basically the real-world equivalent of a loot box. An element of randomness is acceptable when you’re buying a pack of Garbage Pail Kids cards, but nobody wants to be surprised when they’re dropping $60 on a game. To make matters worse, the quality of the figures was exceptionally poor. They’re quite possibly the worst figures I’ve ever seen packaged with a game. (Just look at it!) The only reason why it’s not ranked higher on this list is because the Battleborn characters weren’t especially compelling in the first place. I can’t imagine anyone wanting to display a Battleborn figure even if it was well-made. The Collector’s Edition was available to those who pre-ordered the game, so the bonus figure was essentially an added freebie. Nevertheless, it was still overpriced.

For the release of Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag, Best Buy locations offered a mini football as a pre-order incentive. The game was set in the 18th century and focused on piracy in the Caribbean. I’m not sure what football has to do with the Golden Age of Piracy. The events of Black Flag unfold about a hundred years before gridiron football was even conceived! Who decided that tossing around a pigskin would be a good way to promote swashbuckling pirates on the high seas? I guess if you were really reaching, you could rationalize it as being an obscure reference to the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, but I assure you that the game makes no reference to football or any NFL teams. The most perplexing thing about the promotion was that it was offered in the United Kingdom! Like most places in the world, the UK couldn’t care less about American football. It would have been an appropriate bonus for Madden, but including a football with Assassin’s Creed was downright absurd.

Aksys Games released special pre-order watches alongside the first two Zero Escape games, so it wasn’t surprising that the final game in the trilogy was given a similar treatment. We’ve discussed these watches on our list of best pre-order bonuses, so you may be wondering how the Zero Time Dilemma watches wound up on this list instead. It’s a long story, so buckle up. The watches were made available as pre-order bonuses through Amazon and GameStop. Unfortunately, they were damaged during transport and the games were shipped without the watches. Things fell off the rails when it came time to finally ship the watches. GameStop simply sent the watches to anyone who had pre-ordered the game, but Amazon required customers who had previously pre-ordered the game to put in a separate order for the watch. The price of the watch was artificially inflated to $500 and customers were given enough promotional credit to cover the cost. This clumsy solution became even more problematic when the watches were actually shipped, and customers outside the United States were being asked to pay shipping fees and import taxes on an item that was erroneously valued at $500. Depending on where you lived, you could be forced to pay over $100 for an item that was supposed to be free. These fees were eventually reimbursed, but the process was unnecessarily complicated and nobody seemed to know what was going on. To make matters worse, many of the watches arrived in a damaged state. They had massive scratches, cracked cases, missing clasps, broken buttons, faulty displays… you name it. The whole debacle started because the watches had been damaged in transport, but it’s almost as if someone decided to ship the broken products anyway.

I don’t even know where to begin with this one. If you pre-ordered inFAMOUS: Second Son at GameStop locations in Italy, you were given two cans of Red Bull and a pack of glow-in-the-dark condoms. Energy drinks and gaming kind of go hand-in-hand, but I’m not sure why GameStop customers would need condoms. Like most of the other trinkets on this list, they’d probably never be used! I’m obviously joking and I’m sure everyone reading this gets laid all the time, but I honestly can’t see the connection between Second Son and birth control. (I’d be willing to bet that a lot of people who use condoms are actively trying to avoid having a second son.) The promotion centered around “explosions of energy” and encouraged customers to enjoy their “power,” but it was weird to see a video game retailer take such a strong stance against raw-dogging. This is another one of those items that will lose most of its value after it’s used.