d0rkorg

So I went out over lunch and bought a copy of Halo 3 Limited Edition. A couple coworkers went with me and bought the same editions. We came back to the office and one of them decided to open it up and start looking through the bonus stuff. His game disc was scratched all over (in the inner third of the DVD). This may have still been playable, but I expect better from a brand new $70 game. After he showed us his scratched disc, we headed out to our cars and brought in our copies to check them out. Mine was scratched just as bad and my other buddy’s was okay.

The case design is horrible. There isn’t much to keep the disc from sliding off of its spindle inside the case. Once it does slip off, it just rubs against the plastic that is supposed to keep the disc secure. The over all case quality was much worse than the limited edition version of Halo 2. The metal enclosure just feels cheap and some of the black paint actually rubbed off on my hands when I was handling it.

I took my copy back to Best Buy to see what they could do about Microsoft’s mistake. The guy told me that they’ve already had a bunch of people swap them so I decided that I didn’t even want to mess around with getting another copy with a shabby case. The customer service guy let me swap it for the normal edition of the game, so I ended up walking out of the store with a disc that wasn’t scratched, a case that I know won’t let me easily scratch the disc, and a $10 refund. I guess that is about as much as you can ask for Best Buy to do in this situation as Microsoft really screwed the pooch here.

My coworker didn’t have the same luck at Best Buy as I did. He wanted to keep the limited edition version so he had the customer service guy at Best Buy open three new copies looking for a disc that wasn’t scratched. Understandably, after the third he said that there was nothing he could do. He left with the same scratched disc he went in with.

Here’s some pictures of the case, demonstrating how easily it scratches the discs. Also, Microsoft has announced that they will be replacing the scratched discs for free. Unfortunately, you’ll have to be without your game for two weeks while you ship it in and they ship you out a new copy. I guess it is better than nothing though for those stuck with a scratched disc.