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So, the Xbox 360 launch was a success, right? Turns out the jury is still out—and early reports the morning after are not pretty.
From unconfirmed rumors of near-riots as employees apparently hoarded Xbox 360 systems in front of waiting customers, to numbers of pre-orders that went unfulfilled, some are saying Microsoft mishandled the launch.
But those who actually got the system in hand are breathing easy and living it up, right?
Some of them are. But others are posting a plethoral of problems with their brand-new 360s, from game crashes to hard drives that simply dont work.
One reasonable gamer lays it out like this: “Between my friends and I, we bought six machines at the Zero Hour event. Of the six, my machine has a dead hard drive, another machine is working but is rather flaky (seen some strange behavior—the drive may also be scratching discs, as my friends copy of Condemned is now unplayably scratched, but we dont know if the drive caused it—the machine has also had problems booting games and being turned off…), one seems to be good, and I havent heard yet about the status of the other three.”
Is there enough evidence to shout “recall”?
While there are plenty of stories in the games press and blogging scene this morning, many of them seem centered on one fellows experience—a poster called “Jsgongwon” on the Xbox-Scene forums who included pictures of his crash, which apparently happened repeatedly during Project Gotham Racing 3.
“So far havent been able to play one track without crashing … also got this crashing on Xbox Live screen and on startup too …” he writes.