During the week I helped my eldest nephew 'pen' an email to Microsoft's Xbox 360 support team.  I had a chance to read through their generic reply and their generic advice.  Neither helped but it at least taught my nephew a valuable lesson... Don't waste too much time typing up an email to such companies as they probably won't even take the time to read it!

So what's our beef?  Well my niece and nephews got their 360 for Xmas and as much as they like it, there's one slight problem.  What is it?  Their...

...Xbox 360 eats games!

It's 'eaten' two so far, and they're rather expensive treats that we can't afford to keep feeding it!  I kinda blamed myself for the first one, even if it was something that had never happened to games in either the PS2 and Wii that we've used extensively over the last couple of years.  The second one, however, was 100%, without a doubt, the console.  How am I so sure?  Check out these posts on the subject and you'll see that we were far from the only ones suffering SDS (scratched disc syndrome)...

Kotaku:

Microsoft sued over scratched Xbox 360 game discs

N4G.com:

Microsoft knew about all of the 360's problems in 2005?

CVG:

MS accused of ignoring scratched disc problems

...and again in EDGE (they're both owned by Future, which I didn't realised until now!)...

EDGE:

MS accused of ignoring scratched disc problems

Shacknews.com:

MS - Xbox 360 disc scratching affects 'less than 1% of owners'

Microsoft, seriously dude, what the fudge?  We love your console, as do clearly millions of others, and yet it's made in such a way that those 100-in-1 console/controller thingamajigs they sell for a fiver down the market are produced to a higher standard!  I mean, how difficult is it to make a console that doesn't scratch to death the expensive games we place into it?

Now we have to figure out what to do next.  Do we RMA it, lose all that's on it and have the kids' forgoe theit console for a few weeks/couple of months?  Do we take it back to the shop and get an exchange/refund?  Anyone?  Right now I'm tempted to suggest that we get a full refund, flog the games off at CEX and plump for a PS3.  Sure it's expensive.  Sure it has far less games.  Sure it's not perfect - but, as far as we know, it can do the job of playing video games without er, damaging them!  It's the B&O of consoles, whereas the 360 is the Matsui!