I think the magic YouTube fairies were trying to tell me to stop doing these "Haul" videos when had to record the video for March twice and both times screwed up. The first time, I had issues with my microphone and it was adding scrambled sounds in the middle of it. Then the second time, which I didn't get a chance to record until about two weeks later, the battery in my camera died halfway into filming. I really didn't want to do the whole process for a third time, hence my main reasoning behind bringing back Sarcasmatron by writing these up instead.
First of all comes my ordeal with Wherehouse.com. If you watched my February haul video, you heard me talk about a site called Wherehouse.com where I decided to trade in a bunch of DVDs that I had recently upgraded to Blu-Ray. The trade-in values were roughly double that anyone else was offering but unlike most other sites, I had to pay for my own shipping to send them my package, which ended up being about $9. Anyways, I ended up with about $25-$30 of credit and here's what I got with it.
First of all, I got a few CDs, coming to another reason I'm writing up these reviews. For whatever reason, it was really hard for me to describe about music, not to mention music that's not particularly mainstream. I wanted to edit in musical clips as a sample but my editing skills suck, not to mention I'm actually using a Slideshow program to edit my videos considering it was the only free program I could find that could playback and edit the .mp4 format that my camera records in without any issues. In fact, the couple week stint between recording my first and second attempts was spent looking for better editing software, which I couldn't find. But doing music "reviews" this way, I technically don't even have to talk about it at all. I can just post some YouTube links and let the music speak for itself.
Does It Offend You, Yeah? - You Have No Idea What You're Getting Yourself Into
Arsonists Get All The Girls - The Game of Life
Now if I may get on a nitpicky side-tangent, a big reason I probably won't use Wherehouse.com again is the fact that they put stickers on their used products. Now normally, I don't have too big of a problem if I can take them off with some Goo Gone or whatever but these stickers I could not get the left behind residue off no matter how hard I tried. On the jewel cases, it's not as big of an issue but with the Does It Offend You Yeah CD that comes in a bright green cardboard folded case, I now have a spot covered in dirt and hair from when I had it in my car for about two weeks. I know, it probably shows more about how clean I don't keep my car but still. And the thing that really burns me is that they usually repackage and shrink-wrap their used items...but they'll put the stickers on first. Why don't they do it the other way around so I don't have to deal with them? Whatever. Onto the rest of the list.
I also bought a new copy of the movie The Machine Girl on Blu-Ray, which in turn screwed up me getting this stuff any cheaper with the Buy 3 Get The 4th Free on used products, but that's my own damn fault. Anyways, I originally had gotten Machine Girl on DVD (surprisingly from Wal-Mart soon after it came to the States, of all places) but Tokyo Shock/Media Blasters are notorious for double/triple-dipping and soon after released an "Ultimate" version with a disc of bonus features and I think was also in a Steelbook packaging. Luckily, the Blu-Ray version includes this disc...but still on DVD. Whatever, at least the movie and some of the bonus features are on the Blu-Ray and look damn fine. I'd talk more in length about the movie but why do that when I can post the trailer?
The final item in my Wherehouse.com order was Borderlands Game of the Year Edition for XBox 360. I have a bit of history with this game as I had bought it new from GameStop for just $20 about a year ago. Awesome price, for sure. But when I pre-ordered Saints Row The Third, Best Buy was running a promotion where they add a 50% bonus as long as you pre-order. So I turned it in and actually MADE money off of it, getting like $28 for it. In fact, I got so much credit for my games that I wasn't only able to get Saints Row The Third...but a Blu-Ray player as well! I didn't get a chance to play Borderlands much and still wanted the game, particularly the GOTY Edition but no one was running a sale as good as that previous GameStop sale. So when I had my Wherehouse credit to spend, I bit on this, even though they were selling it for like $40 used. Yup, horribly overpriced but I had credit to offset it. It wouldn't have been that bad if it weren't a week or two after I got my package, GameStop decided to sell it again for $20 new. And the week after that, Best Buy also had it on sale. *sigh* Well, at least I don't have to worry about getting that game again.
In the end, after credit and shipping and whatnot, I spent close to $40 on those for items. In the end, I can't really recommend Wherehouse.com. Their trade-in values are good but you have to pay for shipping. They use the post office for shipping, which is fine if your postman is reliable (mine aren't because apparently apartment mailboxes confuse them), but they don't give you any tracking numbers, making it one of the few places I've bought from that use USPS but not tracking numbers. Their used products are in good condition but they put stickers on them that you can't take off. Their used games prices are horrible but everything else is decent. If you want to get a Blu-Ray from them, it's going to be hard to find as they don't have that section organized nearly as well as their DVD section. You just gotta look at the list, hope you find something you want and hope they actually have it in stock. All in all, I doubt I'll ever use that site again.
With March being Wrestlemania season, I ended up picking up a few wrestling DVDs. By the way, don't get me started on talking about this year's Wrestlemania (*cough*18 seconds*cough*) but I will say it was better than last year's, though not by a whole lot. Anyways, I started out by getting The Undertaker's Deadliest Matches at Toys R Us for $13. I don't think that's some sort of huge deal, I mostly just bought it because they had a few WWE DVD sets in stock and this was the only one of the ones provided that I didn't already have, plus I didn't want to go in just to buy a $3 camera case on clearance. I haven't been a huge Undertaker fan for years now but I've been jonesing for some early '90s stuff and that was when I liked Undertaker the most. This set has plenty of matches from that era, particularly the infamous Boiler Room Brawl against Mankind at Summerslam and a match before that between the two at King of the Ring. Those two matches alone are worth buying the DVD set for. Oddly enough, they completely ignore the American Badass-era Undertaker, which is fine by me because I never liked him. But it is kinda odd that they just skip a good five years without any matches. Not to mention when Taker came back to being The Deadman, he had some silly feuds like the Concrete Crypt Match against the Dudley Boys and the whole thing with The Great Khali, so those matches aren't all that great. But with matches against Mr. Kennedy, Randy Orton and Batista, quality of matches gets better by the end of the set. I'd probably recommend it more if I were a bigger Undertaker fan but it still a good set.
A few days later, I went to Wal-Mart and bought a two-pack of The Twisted Disturbed Life of Kane and Satan's Prison (aka the Elimination Chamber anthology) for $10. Six discs for $10 is a hell of a deal. The thing is I keep hearing that Wal-Mart is stocking all these wrestling DVDs but when I go to my local stores (I live smack dab between two Super Wal-Marts about 5 minutes in each direction), they never have them. There were supposed to be more two-packs for sale for Wrestlemania season and one of the stores even had one of the endcaps decorated for the sale, but didn't have the DVDs in stock, instead filling the endcap with a bunch of random crap. Not to mention Wal-Mart seemingly refuses to carry the Blu-Ray versions of anything WWE, save for the new Rock set.
Anyway, rant over. I actually had already bought the Kane set previously in the $5 bin at Wal-Mart but it was in a standard DVD case, unlike the original folded cardboard cover which I kinda wanted to have. However, since the two sets were shrinkwrapped together and the Kane set packaging is slimmer than the typical WWE DVD set, it kinda got beat up a bit. Ah well. As for Satan's Prison, it collects all the Elimination Chamber matches to have taken place up through 2010. Yes, even the abysmal ECW December To Dismember match. Oddly enough, I already have Elimination Chamber 2011 on Blu-Ray and I heard the Chamber matches from this year's PPV weren't all that great so really I have all the Chamber matches that matter. If you can find this bundle, definitely pick it up on value alone.
Finally, I got a few things at GameStop, even going so far as to trade in some games. Normally, I'd never trade in at GameStop due to their abysmal values but they were running a 50% bonus credit promotion, which they almost never due. And even then, I probably wouldn't have done it if I hadn't gotten a copy of Call of Duty: Black Ops from my buddy who I recently bought my 360 off of. I'm not a CoD fan and I don't play online anyways so there was no real reason for me to play so I decided to trade it in. The thing was I only had the disc, no case or manual. I figured I'd get docked for not having it, just enough to offset the 50% bonus. I don't know if it was supposed to happen but I did end up getting full trade-in value plus the 50% bonus, giving me like $24. After trading in a few other games, I had like $40 in credit. So I ended up getting WWE All-Stars used and Fallout 3 Game of the Year Edition new, and only paid $12 of my own money.
I always wanted to give All-Stars a try and I'm really enjoying it so far. I'm digging the arcade-y and flashy style and it lends itself well towards playing with friends. In fact, for a pre-Wrestlemania party, I brought my N64 with the legendary THQ/AKI games that my friends and I grew up with and All-Stars and we ended up playing All-Stars more. However, I am kinda stuck in it right now because they still haven't quite figured out to have a steel cage match in a video game where the computer can easily beat you, despite you having practically murdered them throughout the match. It seems to always go like this: I beat my opponent to "obliviacry" (Copyright Shane Douglas) and leave him for dead, go to climb the cage, opponent pops right back up like nothing happened, throws me off, climbs the cage, somehow I can't get up fast enough to throw them off, they win. Weak.
As for Fallout 3, I'll go on record that it might be my favorite game of the current generation. So it was nice to have the GOTY edition back. And though I didn't even really notice until after I bought it, somehow I got a "Gamestop exclusive" edition that comes packaged with posters. One of them is a map of the Capital Wasteland, which isn't that big of deal. But the other poster is called "Faces of Vault Boy", a group photo of all the Vault Boy pictures in your Pip-Boy whenever you level up and get a perk or whatever. If it weren't all folded up to fit inside the case, I'd proudly frame it and hang it up on my wall.
And that's all for March, but there'll definitely be more haul articles soon, especially now that the last brick-and-mortar Blockbuster Video store in Toledo is closing down. Stay tuned.
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