Last week I bought an Xbox 360. I've been thinking of getting an HDTV recently, and I was bored, so I figured i'd get the console and it would be even more fun when I do take a dip in the HD pool. My experience up until now has been positive. And by "up until now" I mean now I'm not so happy with it.

I was minding my own business, playing Forza Motorsport 2, when I suddenly realized that in horizontal orientation, the green player indicator light on the front of the Xbox was oriented differently than I'd remembered. Then I suddenly thought to myself... Ooo, I bet it re-orients itself when placed horizontally or vertically. So, making sure to pause my game so as not to lose my current race, I walked toward the console. The child inside of me beckoned, Make it vertical, you know you wanna... And so I did. KCCCHT EEEEK. WTFOMG!!1!!one! I feared the worst. And I was right. El disco scratcho fantastico.

So the rhetorical question of the day is... Who makes a re-orientable consumer electronics device that doesn't play nice when you re-orient it while it is on? Obviously, the answer is Microsoft.

A quick search on Google brought up plenty of results, showing me that I was not alone. Some might call me an idiot for moving my Xbox 360 while a drive was spinning. I'd like to point out that, while such claims may be valid, this is not a universal problem for any optical drive. I can shake my laptop around while a drive is spinning and not have a problem. I can lay my computer on its side while a drive is spinning and have no problem. So what genius decided to put a drive in the Xbox 360 that will etch such a horrible scratch into your disc that it can no longer be read, by simply moving it when it's on? And taking that question a step further, why does the pretty green ring on the front re-orient itself? That's why I moved the damn thing, because I saw that it had re-oriented and I wanted to see it in action. So yeah, that might make me an idiot, but that's why companies are supposed to idiot-proof their products, and not create pointless tantalizing features that queue such "idiotic" behavior.

So, that ended my night of gaming... Hopefully tomorrow Best Buy will replace the disc for me, but I really don't know what to expect from that. I didn't buy the replacement plan for the disc (I mean, who screws up a disc?), though I did buy it for the Xbox 360 in light of all the overheating issues etc. that have plagued it since launch.

For the curious, here's a link to a site I came across on google when searching "xbox 360 scratch disc" - they talk about how it happens and even show a video of it happening.

The image above the result of searching for "the child inside of me beckoned" on Google Image Search.