A New Use for 360s

I guess you can't work in a game store this month without somebody bringing up the topic of Halo 3. It's like being a Star Trek fan and trying to avoid the Kirk/Picard question that will eventually be fired off at you. Hunter bought the game, and I was over there mid afternoon to check it out, and we said, "hey lets just marathon this sucker and bang it out." So we did, and six hours later the offline campaign was pwned. My "official" take on H3? This game serves the excellent purpose of weeding out true gamers from bandwagon/casual players. All the magazines, fanboys, Microsoft employees, etc. will tell you it's a 10/10 game, incredible, game of the century, whatever. All the "weened on a NES" players have been in agreement that Halo 3 isn't bad, it's just mediocre - same gameplay, same crappy level design, waaaaaaaay overhyped. I fall into this category. So when someone comes bopping in the store spouting off about how great Halo 3 is, my warning flag of "casual gamer" pops up.

The focus, however, should NOT be on how impressive or not H3 is, but rather what an unreliable system the 360 remains. Shortly after the largest entertainment launch known to man came the inevitable largest wave of warranty issues of Microsoft's equipment. From good ole' red rings, to disc read errors, even discs coming scratched right out of the box, Microsoft continues to dissuade me from actually buying one of their consoles by ignoring the design flaws of their hardware. And besides MS customer support, the people that bear the second largest brunt of this are the retailers. We constantly have customers bring back 360 and give us a hard time about it. Even after explaining that MS will fix the console for FREE, they state they don't feel like not being able to play Halo 3 for a month or two and want another console right this second.

Here is one good thing about not being a large chain like Wal-Mart who stocks hundreds of systems at a time. We rarely have more than one console, so the customer is forced to cross their fingers and hope MS can band-aid their smoking console back together. Remember, having the "greatest game in the history of the universe" doesn't do much good without a working system to play it on. If there is one lesson to be learned, both by this and the oh-so-many new bundles of consoles coming out, it's "Get things right the first time."

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- Postman