Although I recognize that it seriously conflicts with my carefully-crafted hipster gamer image, I tend to buy and enjoy the annual Call of Duty game. I don’t feel a lot of shame for this – they’re unabashed celebrations of testosterone, and as much as I fill my life with pink plastic ponies I am still a male-type person and allowed to enjoy a few hours of shooting unambiguously Bad Guys right in the head and rappelling down exploding buildings before doing a backflip into a helicopter which then also explodes for no fully explored reason.

Also, playing the just-a-little futuristic bits in CODBLOPS II had me seriously stoked for an entire game of just-plausible-enough future military hardware, so I pre-ordered CoD: ADVANCED WARFARE pretty much the day that preorders opened. In a rare display of optimism, I even dropped the extra 20 bucks on the “slightly more executive edition”, which Amazon had to me by Monday morning.

Well, they actually went a little above and beyond and sent me two copies.

I didn’t NEED two copies, so after I checked my credit card statement several times and confirmed that I’d only been charged once, I got in touch with customer service and explained the situation, whereupon they thanked me for my honesty and sent me a link to print a return shipping label.

I drove over to the nearest UPS store, dropped the package off and figured that I was done. Then I went home and enjoyed myself with some time spent shooting Bad Koreans.

As an aside, virtual future Seoul looks Fantastic and the game actually lets you stop and look around instead of killing you the moment you stand still, unlike Ghost. If you buy it, I recommend you spend a little time immersing yourself in the details.

Today, I checked my CC statement and realized they’d refunded my money as soon as they got the package I sent back.

This is about the point where I stop trying to sort things out. They clearly think I shouldn’t have to pay for CoD and I can’t fault their persistence in the matter.

So, um, thanks a bunch Amazon. I will enjoy my game in your honor.