Play Halo 3: ODST Early, Get Bent Over By Microsoft France

*update below*

Playing games early, it is joy for most games.  Beta testing to demos to early releases of games are all things that most of enjoy.  Every now and then someone screws up and releases a game early in stores and if you are lucky you get to get to the be the envy of your pals as you play in to the wee hours of the morning while they sit anxiously waiting for a game's official release.

There are tons of the Halo fans out there and some French gamers recently had a nice surprise waiting for them almost four weeks early; Halo 3: ODST was available for purchase.  I don't know about you but if I walked in to Best Buy tomorrow and Uncharted 2 was sitting on the shelf you could be damn sure that I would pick it up and go home and play it. 



The bad news?  Microsoft France isn't very pleased.  For some odd reason they feel a fitting punishment for retailers breaking a street date is banning the buyers from Xbox Live if they are caught playing the game.  Banning players for buying a game early, nice PR move there.  Wouldn't the logical choice be to keep the ODST servers offline or prevent connections to them via some sort of server-side feature instead slapping the spoon that fees you?

I can see being pissed that the game has leaked early as that may very well affect sales when it comes to piracy regarding the game and the easily-hackable 360.  But the gamers who pay legitimately shouldn't be dealt with in such a manner.  Announcing publicly that you will ban users from their paid Xbox Live is absurd.  Someone at Microsoft should come out and remedy this "threat" and go after the damn French for leaking it early. 

And lastly, why in the hell is the game sitting in store backrooms four weeks before launch?  Who's genius idea was that? 

ODST is probably going to sell a fortune regardless but those of you tempted by the Dark Side of pre-launch access should probably wait until September 22nd to pick it up.


** Stephen Toulouse from Microsoft has clarified that they will not be banning people who have legitimate copies of the copies.  Guess they think they can still tell Stealth'd discs from retail copies eh?  ;]  Glad to see someone clarify this.