Pick Your Pack With A Fallout New Vegas Pre Order

The pre-order is a well-established ritual among gamers. You pop into your favorite retailer, lay down your five bucks and in a few weeks (or a few months) you get a phone call telling you that your very own copy of the new hotness has arrived and is waiting to be picked up. To encourage patronage, some retailers would occasionally team up with publishers to offer pre-order bonuses ranging from crap like “spy listening devices” to unique in-game items, which has inevitably evolved into a practice of offering different bonuses through different retailers. So it is that we now have four – yes, four – Fallout: New Vegas bonus packs available to gamers who pre-order from specific sellers: The Classic, Tribal, Caravan and Mercenary packs, each comprising a special combination of weapon, armor and miscellaneous items. I love pre-order bonuses – I have a treasured collection of the stuff – but I don’t care for this retailer-specific business. First, because it’s a violation of my hyper-anal completionist tendencies, and second, because I (and I would imagine a lot of other gamers) don’t really have a choice. I like the Classic Pack but is it worth a two-hour drive to get it? I don’t think so. Looks like it’s Walmart, and the admittedly not-a-bad-second-choice Road Warrior chic Caravan collection, for me. Fallout: New Vegas is scheduled to come out in October 2010 for the PC, Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3.