Collector’s editions⁠: They’ve burned me before, but still I keep coming back. Even with a magpie-like drive to collect tchotchkes and a love of FromSoftware, however, I couldn’t see myself dropping 230 clams on the collector’s edition of Armored Core 6, let alone four Benjamins and a cheeky Ulysses S Grant for the “Premium” skew.

Alright, well what are we getting for our money here? Both packs net you the requisite art book, stickers, and soundtrack, but the centerpiece and source of all the cost, like most mondo-editions of games (looking at you, Hogwarts Legacy floating wand) is a showstopper central collectible. For both premium AC6 editions, it’s a 19 cm-tall statuette of one of the game’s signature mechs, all kitted out with his bad ass rad guns. The $200 difference, then? You’re buying his house.

That’s the only thing separating premium from collector’s, as far as I can tell⁠—the former includes a 32 cm-tall industrial garage for your guy to live in, complete with cute little catwalks for theoretically even more wee people to observe him from. For context, this is almost the cost of a PS5, but still nowhere near the cost of one of those minifridge-sized new GPUs you need to run ray tracing in anything.

And you know what? I respect the Armored Core 6: Fires of Rubicon Premium Edition. It has gumption, an audacity that speaks to me. At this point, I honestly find the $230 pack to be a cowardly and embarrassing half-measure⁠—you would deprive this little man of his little home, leave him shivering in the cold on your bookshelf? If you’re gonna shell out for a red flag display piece, all I’m saying is that you should shell out.

Whatever the case, this is one frontier of consumer spending I will not be partaking of myself, though that Fires of Rubicon gameplay trailer was sick as hell⁠—it got me wanting to grab a 19 cm-tall mecha figure and fly him around while making explody noises with my mouth.