Hey look everyone a new SOMETHING came out. I will now take 100 photos of every detail of the box then send them to some site like 1Up or Engadget so that I will be eternally remembered as the guy who bought something, took 100 photos of it and sent them to a website!

I know, it sounds totally insane to me as well, but it's true and it happens every time SOMETHING comes out. Even crazier is the fact that these sites and so-called 'journalists' post all one hundred photos and then rave about it as if it were really news.

Why all the hype? Are gamers truly interested in what the fancy pictures on the box look like? I mean will the Xbox 360 Arcade version of the packaging suddenly become valuable and a collector's item? Highly doubtful. So then why all this hype about it? Even my friends in the packaging materials industry are not this interested in their own products.

Let's look at the facts shall we. A box is generally cubic in shape. As such it would have a maximum of six sides, though some boxes have been of unique shape. So that should theoretically require six photos, three if you cleverly positioned the box. Of course the bottom of most boxes is blank so really that's only 3 to 5 photos required. With today's digital cameras of more than 5 mega-pixels the one photo would be so large that you wouldn't even need to take separate photos of each quadrant of the main faces of the box. But if you had a lower end camera OK then say 4 to 6 more photos for 'close ups.' So that is a maximum of eleven.

But do we really need even those eleven photos? I mean after all it is just a box. The real thing of interest is inside the box.  So what is that really? Some packaging junk? Apparently yes. But we don't really need a series of photos attempting to make the curves of the Styrofoam alluring do we? We don't need to see how the hard pieces gently fondle, caress and embrace the unit do we? It's just nonsense. Yet there they are, all over the web, for people to see.

After the large packing junk is stripped away we are generally left with a prophylactic which has but one purpose, to prevent the unit from getting scratched while in transit. We don't need an 'off the shoulder' pose of the unit falling out of its protective wrapping do we? Again even the people I know in that particular industry just think of it as a foam-lined bag.

Now we have the unit free of its binding and protective layers and lo and behold it looks just like the previous units because this is simply just a repackaging of the product. It is not a new version, a new generation, it is simply the base unit with some specific feature. Well we had better snap a good thirty photos of it just in case the angle of depression on the main power button is 0.0003% different shouldn't we? That would be huge news indeed!

If it were to be a genuinely new product that was just being launched, then I think a dozen or so photos would do it some justice and be reasonable. But at most twenty because once I see all the sides I don't want  to climb inside it and stare at its rectum. I don't want it posing with a ham and cheese sandwich and I certainly don't want to see it stroking its own controller while it looks at advertising photos of its family members. It's just sick. Some units have even been seen to pose for ten different styles and colors of mood lighting. How perverse can you get?!

Oh but wait, there are accessories to go with the unit. We had better not leave them without their own centerfold layout. Unless there is something groundbreaking or actually newly configured or colored, one shot maximum of all the extra stuff is really enough. If it comes with some sort of disc then maybe a nice shot of the label. Not a shot of the label, a shot of the data side, a shot of it in the sleeve, a shot of it half out, fully out, next to, on top of the sleeve. Definitely not a shot of you holding it, placing it in the unit tray, the tray fully open, half closed.  None of that nonsense is necessary because in this day and age pretty much everyone on the planet and surely everyone who would buy one of these knows what the disc looks like and where to stick it.

Well of course once you take the unit and the accessories then you need to combine them by plugging everything in and take twenty photos while you do that. One snap for the power, first controller, audio left, audio right, video out cables. One snap for the now connected controller in front of, on top of, next to (left), next to (right), at an angle, standing on it's side, standing on its head, with the unit horizontal, the unit vertical, the unit at a forty-five degree angle in relationship to the controller. No. How about none of those.

So I have now boiled the whole unboxing process down to ten photos haven't I? That should pretty much do it. Like I said if it is a totally new version or generation then maybe twenty or so. But please no cheesecake, spread eagle, positioned for the staple to cover the naughty bits pics. After all it's just degrading to the unit and the accessories now isn't it?

So it's time for the so-called journalists to report news. Not the Fox, CNN, over-the-top, twelve-colors-of-homeland-security, holy-crap-everyone-is-a-terrorist type of news, simply the facts in an interesting yet tasteful and informative presentation. Is that too much to ask? 

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