Be Excellent To Each Other

Weird. My dad ordered L.A. Noire from Tesco for my uncle's xmas present, and the game turned up in its correct box and with the official manual, but the discs are all Tesco-brand CD-Rs. Copies.

dodgy member of staff, or sold a return the customer had copied? Either way a letter explaining the details to head office should net a refund in vouchers.

Apparently Tesco can print their own cheapo Xbox games. The manager called it 'afterburn', or something equally stupid - tightwad stock replenishment. Got him to swap the offending item for a proper one in the end, though.

What the what?

Surely he's pulling your leg? That can't be right, can it? Contact whoever the games developer is, or Microsoft, and ask them if it's legit.

I thought he was bullshitting, but then I saw this parody Half-Life 2 item:

http://www.gamebanana.com/sprays/52282

Googling 'Tesco afterburn games' or Tesco afterburn just brings up sun lotion products. Nobody else on the Internet has mentioned this. I just can't bring myself to believe this... Pleeeease find out from Microsoft, etc, as if it IS dodgy, it could be a bit of a big story...

Just... How annoyed would I be if I bought a game from a legit seller to find a Tesco branded CDR. I mean, there's no chance if resale there.

You can't just run off copies of 360 games on any old DVD writer, so they must have an official setup for duplication.
I bet they're meant to use those printable discs and print the right label on as well though.

Which is more likely -- this is true and the Internet has no word of it? Or some customer service rep lied on the phone?

That's ludicrous! He's telling porkies I reckon.

I guess so, but it's a bit audacious!

Absolute bullshit I say.

To the grass-up-a-tron!

Lied in person! It wasn't the manager, come to think of it. The manager came down later and basically said "oh, just fucking swap it" to the chap who was umming and ahhing (and bullshitting?) about it. He was clearly massively uninterested.

At the time my dad just couldn't wait to leave the shop, having wasted too much time to be pressing the guy any further about it, but given how difficult it is to find any mention of this on the net, it might be worth following up...

Hmmm http://www.tescoentertainment.com/store ... rgonBuster



Still hard to imagine them doing this with 360 games in an actual store, admittedly, but there's a grain of truth there.

I would be quite miffed if I bought a game and a copied version turned up.

Only if you noticed - if the disc had been printed properly you probably wouldn't.

edit: think this deserves its own thread, no?

Yes. Someone might have experience of it.

So, would they seal the games too? With the official Microsoft sticker and the cellophane?

No. Because I can guarantee it isn't doing this for Xbox 360 games, which cannot be burnt on a commercial disc burner but instead need special pressing machinery. Think about it. Is Microsoft really going to entrust branches of Tesco with a device that could bypass at a stroke the 360's anti-piracy measures?

Wow, I can't actually believe this is a real thing. Tweet @XboxSupport about it!

If only YOG had tried the copied version in his 360 we'd know the answer to that

edit: also, re-reading the OP, this was from tescodirect, not bought in a branch. It's not outside the bounds of possibility is all I'm saying.

Why did the uncle open his present before Christmas Day?

Well yes, I agree with the Doc. The whole scheme sounds ludicrous!

What's to stop Tesco buying 1 copy of a game per store and then just duplicating it a few thousand times to save them money? Nah... I don't get it.

I reckon this sounds like a Christmas temp who's got the wrong end of the stick. Like the time I heard a Christmas temp tell a customer in GAME that an N64 cartridge can hold more data than a DVD.

He didn't, it just wasn't sealed when it arrived at my dad's. This was alarm bell #1.

I might set up a Twatter, then. Thanks, chaps!

So can I copy all my games and take them back to Tesco for a refund? The extra cash will come in handy over Christmas.

Better than that, you can copy them and sell them.

Did you ever hear back from Tesco over this, YOG?

That's mental. Surely the disks won't play in a normal Xbox anyway?

It has been done legitimately before. I bought Mercenary on the C64 from WHSmith's and I had to wait while they copied the disk. Really really unlikely that Microsoft are letting Tesco do it, though.

Ah EDOS. We used to supply them with the blank media so when it all packed in, my colleague ended up with boxes and boxes of Amiga floppy disks. He gave me one of them..



I think I only bought one EDOS game - Captain Dynamo.

How can a game ever be not electronically distributed?

On tape?

As a print out of the source code?

Rounders?

I can certainly attest that, buying Amstrad CPC games in John Menzies circa 1990, the girl at the Games/Music/Videos till would get the original out of the drawer and copy it on a high speed tape duplicator (took about a minute) and then I got a blank tape version (with a fancy full colour inlay which at the time I assumed was real but was presumably a photocopy) which I would write the name of the game on at home with a pen.