Halo 3 Great, Except When Generally Not

Microsoft can clearly take Halo 3 to the bank at this point ... kinda literally in fact. It has made a truckload of cash for a company which just shelled out big time for warranties due to overheating units.

A shame some of that cash might not, apparently, have been spent on actual Halo fans:

"I'm on my third copy of Halo 3," said Matt Gibbs on the Bungie user forum. "After my second Limited Edition copy was found to be scratched I upgraded to the Legendary Edition hoping it would yield a clean disk, and it did. The surface is perfect.

"But... I'm still getting read errors intermittently at various points... this is happening on a spanking new Xbox 360 Elite -- four days old."

Some owners reputedly exchanged their copies of the game two or more times in an effort to bypass the disc read error to no avail. Others fared even worse.

-- Halo 3 believed to cause disc errors, possible 360 failures (thanks Glinkster)

Apparently the big debate right now is whether Halo 3 is actually crashing 360's or whether it just gave them an excuse to turn on their machines again to crash them. Not really great news for the console just voted to win third place in a no win console war.

Shall we add that the one the best ways to play the game, online, is crashing left and right and in the meantime a debate flares up as to whether the game even runs in anything resembling a high definition mode? That last point possible being more of an indictment on the whole concept of "true 1080P" than anything else, mind you.

OK, so the game hit some snags. The one I'd really lay at Microsoft's feet is the manufacturing. Seriously, who fell asleep at the QA wheel there? 360's make better toasters than game consoles sometimes and you can't ship a game without a profound number of scratches?

Time to fire the one year old puppy from doing quality assurance, Redmond. Might be cute - but here's a free tip. Customers don't care.