In what may be old news for some of you, I just found out that Atlus is offering the Rule of Rose soundtrack as a pre-order bonus when you order said game. The good: the soundtrack features Yutaka Minobe, responsible for scoring games such as Skies of Arcadia and Panzer Dragoon Orta. The bad: it's not so much a full-length soundtrack as an EP. Six tracks, and only one extends longer than three minutes. Ouch. But, hey, maybe there's only eleven minutes of music in the entire game!

Still, it's good enough to get me to want to pre-order it. Although pre-ordering is always such a pain and I always have such bad luck with the bonuses. My pre-ordered copy of Fable? It arrived minus its bonus DVD (and extraordinarily late). That whole MGS3: Subsistence fiasco? Not only did I not get the edition I ordered, I didn't even get the Metal Gear Saga DVD that was supposed to be bundled with it!

But I digress. On the rare occasion that I do pre-order something, I used to do it through EBGames. Not because I received any sort of deal through them (I don't) and not because they're conveniently located (they aren't), but because you could pre-order on their website and pick your pre-order up in the store! It's ordering online without the contemptible wait for the postman!

Unfortunately they apparently stopped doing this about a year ago, and I have no idea why. Perhaps it was because of the Gamestop merger. Perhaps it was just a pain in the ass. Perhaps they wanted to force more people to have to go to the store to pre-order, so they'd have more opportunities to pitch more titles to you.

Since they dropped that pre-order method, I usually put off ordering until the last minute - if at all. I don't visit my local games store every week (or every month, or even once a season), and I can't stand to be a slave to the post when it comes to newly released titles. Let's see if this Rule of Rose CD can break this habit, and if it does, maybe I'll even be lucky enough to receive my pre-order bonus.