Tales of Vesperia
I got really excited that Tales of Vesperia was finally coming out (come on, a wolf with a pipe that fights with a sword, what more can you need?). I played Tales of Symphonia on my Wii, since it was listed as one of the all time best GameCube games and I really liked it, apart from it's obvious dated graphics. So when the news were that there was to be an HD version of that game coming out, I was all excited. Oh, foolish me.
In fact, I was so excited that I went out and bought a new 60 GB Xbox, an HD cable and the game. After connecting all the cables I started the setup, migrated my Xbox Live account from the old xbox 1 and then started to play the game in glorious HD. First impressions were that while the HD was nice, the frame rate was awful. During video playback it might have been like 15fps. At most. Not impressed. But heck, the game is not moving so much anyways, so it might be ok. I played through some tutorials. Still very riveted. I liked the game so far, but suddenly this very loud noise is starting do disturb me. I finally realize that it's from the xbox itself. After some more puzzling I realized that it's from the disc spinning in the tray! So I decide to change the xbox from standing upright to lie down. I do that and screeeeeech!!! A very bad sound is coming from the drive and I have a sinking feeling that it's game over. I eject the disc and unsurprisingly there is a circular, very noticeable scratch all over the disc. After trying to relaunch the game, I'm met with a "Disc unreadable" message. Total play time: about 30 minutes.
So far I can't say that I've been impressed by the xbox experience. Now, in eagle eye hindsight I should have googled "xbox eating discs" and realized that there is like 1.3M hits as opposed to "ps3 eating dics" which have about 4100 hits.
At this point I see little choice than to go out and buy yet another copy of the game, but it seems more like throwing good money after bad. I am not a happy customer. I'm $450 down the hole and no game to play! Another $60 tomorrow for yet another copy of the game. Ok, the $60 price tag on a game disc suddenly becomes noticeable now. If I'm probably scratching one more disc, this game cost me $180 dollars to play. That's in comparison 7 months of gamefly.
On another note, even while the Tales of Vesperia game was initially very nice, I couldn't help to cringe a little bit over the English voice acting. I use the term acting very loosely here. I don't know what the heck it is, but the Japanese voice acting is almost always better than whatever shitty translation they got from. I would have loved to have the option of switching to the Japanese voice acting with the English text. But I guess they didn't have the space on the disc... they should have gone with Blue Ray.
Resources
Gamespot and IGN on Tales of Vesperia.
The Xbox disc replacment program. Unfortunately only valid for Microsoft published games.
A long thread at neogaf about Tales of Vesperia.