When a problem occurs such as this, the management of the store needs to have the power and common sense to return someones money to save the customer and avoid destructive word of mouth hell fire that occurs afterwards.   A search on Technorati came up with 521 blog posts at the moment about Target, Ipod, and rocks. 

 I was able to play the first few chapters Friday night without having to return to Best Buy immediately.  After the fourth chapter or so, I started getting errors and gave up for the evening.  I returned to Best Buy the next morning and was met with smiles as I passed store associates as they clearly knew why I was there. 

When I arrived at the customer service counter, the associate asked if they were scratched, I told him they were and he explained that it’s been happening with most of the Limited Edition boxes that have been sold.  He then proceeded to grab a stack of 7-8 boxes and proceeded to open them.  Everyone of the boxes had the dvd’s floating around with scars on each one.   Finally I decided to just get another edition that doesn’t come in the metal box and went on my way. 

I really appreciated the service received at Best Buy.  They didn’t try to get me to deal with Microsoft through their replacement program, or give me the run around on how the discs got scarred.  This minor design flaw by Microsoft is going to cost them a fortune.  Worse than that, think of the costs and strain on the retailers this is going to have.  If one in a dozen are actually good, they are shipping back thousands of these boxes and will have to reconcile the returns process with Microsoft. 

The folks at Best Buy I talked to didn’t know if Microsoft was going to do a recall, but clearly they should.    I’m surprised more retailers haven’t stopped selling this edition at all. 

 I found the following Microsoft reponse to the issue. 

Microsoft Responds – We have identified that there are some instances of blemishes on discs as a result of the packaging of the Halo 3 Limited Edition. It is related only to the Halo 3 Limited Edition version of the game. This is a small fraction of the total number of Halo 3 games shipped and sold, and is a limited production version of the game. We are currently investigating the scope of this situation and notwithstanding the outcome of the investigation, we have implemented a plan to address it. We encourage anyone experiencing these issues to go to xbox.com/support and click on the Halo 3 Limited Edition disc replacement link. We will be replacing these discs and apologize for the inconvenience.