AP image. Being an AP photographer must be great

It sorta crept up on us, but Microsoft released Halo 3 yesterday. Peter came, saw—I don’t know if he conquered, but he seemed pretty shocked to see real people (as opposed to fake people, natch) waiting in line to buy the game. But that’s nothing. People called in sick in order to get the game as early as possible. (Don’t they do that in Japan when a new Dragon Quest comes out?) USA Today found a bunch of Halo maniacs and got them to admit to taking the day of from work, school, hanging-out-in-their-room-all-day, etc. Everyone goes home happy.

Unless your disc is defective. Then you complain on various message boards. Lather, rinse, repeat.

Yup, it turns out that more than a couple discs in the collector’s edition of the game are busted. One report suggests as much as 1/3 of these discs are defective. One solitary report is never enough to set off a run on the banks or anything (you know what I mean), but hopefully we’ll learn more as the days go by. I’ll be trolling the appropriate forums, to be sure.

Some gamers plan to be ‘Halo’ sick [USA Today]

Best Buy Allocations for Halo 3 and Defect Rate [Xbox-Scene]