There has always been a sense of entitlement about the way Kiss handle their affairs. The defiant looks on the band's faces - especially that of larger than life bass player Gene Simmons - peer out from their promotional photos as if to say, "We slugged our way to the top more than once and now you owe us."

Hence an ever-growing barrage of merchandise (comic books, action figures, t-shirts, and in an apparent statement on the age of their fans, a Kiss coffin) and now franchise opportunities (do a Google search for Kiss Coffeehouse), which will strain the wallets of even the most casual of fans.

Simmons and his partner-in-petty-larceny Paul Stanley seem obsessed with their legacy, as much as they are obsessed with their own images (I can think of few bands that would have three multi-DVD sets worth of filmed material archived at their disposal). So obsessed in fact, that it took them until this volume to sneak in a disc of a 1973 performance, one of the first featuring the four in their now signature make-up.

I would like to believe the claim that they waited to release it for quality reasons, the film being out of focus and faded after 34 years of vault sitting, but the truth is that their performance is off-kilter, unsure, and downright awful in spots. Quite the contrast from the blindingly bright polish they bring to the more recent material brought out here.

And therein lies the biggest issue this DVD set brings to light. Over the course of the first three discs, there is close to nine hours of material to wade through, the cumulative effect of rendering each song indistinguishable from the next. Only during their so-so Unplugged performance do they take different shapes, simply because the technical limitations of an all-acoustic set forced them to dip deeper into their catalog than they might have dared before.

What moments stand out from the morass are, to be fair, pretty ridiculous - the scantily clad women brought on stage during the November 1993 performance of "Take It Off", the dreadful "countrified" take of "God of Thunder" for the Unplugged show, the fans in 3D glasses gamely taking part in the multimedia cluster bomb that was the Psycho Circus tour, and any time Paul Stanley decides to speak into the microphone.

The most telling point of the whole set, however, the one that sets up everything that the band turned out to be over their career, appears on the fourth disc. Two women, moved by either alcohol or hormones, find themselves at the foot of the stage, dancing to a middling version of "Strutter." Even amidst the fuzzy black and white image, you can see Simmons as he plants himself at the front of the stage to leer at the young ladies, immediately marking them future conquests and future consumers.