It was a foregone conclusion that Warner Brothers and Rocksteady would release a collector’s edition of the upcoming Batman: Arkham City. Besides the fact that publishers love cranking them out, Arkham Asylum had a decent collector’s edition as well. I say decent because that Batarang shouldn’t have been plastic nor hard mounted to the display stand! Ahh but I digress. Yesterday, we had reports of Amazon and GameStop putting up pre-order pages for a collector’s edition of Arkham City. Just a description of the contents was posted, no picture. Well today is a new day and guess what? Yep that’s right, we have a picture!

All in all, it looks like Warner Brothers are putting together a solid CE with Arkham City. I’m reminded more of the set Ubisoft put together for Assassin’s Creed II than the one for Arkham Asylum. As if I wasn’t already excited for the next video game outing for the Dark Knight, now I’m even more pumped. Hit the jump to peep the pic and find out what exactly will be stuffed inside the box.

What can gamers expect inside? Well let’s see:

- A collectible art book

- A set of four collectible cards

- Early access to the Iceberg Lounge map and a Dark Knight Returns character skin

- Arkham City soundtrack download from WaterTower Music

- A copy of Batman: Gotham Knight, the 2008 animated movie

All of that will be stowed in a handy drawer built into the base of the custom Batman statue crafted by Kotobukiya. It also looks like the sides of the box fold down to make a display stand with the statue. My only concern is that it appears the game comes in a sleeve built into the art book. That would be fine with the PS3 version, blu ray has the built in scratch protection. The Xbox 360 version is Dvd based and easily scratched. Imagine repeated uses of the game, it could look like a vinyl record after awhile.

I’m still ready to pick up the Arkham City CE when it releases on October 18th, even though it’ll set me back $100.

Source: SFX360

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• Arkham City collector’s edition details sneak past the Batman (joystiq.com)
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