This is why NO one should have had to WAIT for games, they had plenty, and planned on it.

People stood in line for an hour like many of you around North America waiting patiently to your hands on a Retail copy of Halo 3. Best Buy Toronto (downsview) location was the place to be, with 1000 of each Game available, and 400 of the Halo 3 Xbox Console. With less than 250 people in line, people can reasonably expect to get consoles and games when they woke up Tuesday morning here in Toronto. The Manager said BB Canada was allocated 15000 units per SKU across it's 27 Canadian Stores. With 1000 of each allocated to just the Downsview location, you can do some math and figure out what the rest of the Canadian shops are getting.

They had people show up around 1:30am after being in line at Walmart and FutureShop who did get a game, but didn't score much in the way of freebies. Best Buy had more than enough Free T-Shirts, Wall Graphics and Camo Headsets for all that wanted one.

Shocking though, was the number of Collector's Tin found to contain defective/scratched disks. when people left, the manager on hand for the event reported a 1/3 defect rate for the tin can collector's edition. Fortunately, BB was awesome, and allowed everyone the time to open their games, (regardless of edition) to determine if an on the spot swap was necessary. The Legendary "Helmet" edition had a few people pissed off, but that was more in the area of 1/20 defective. Kudos to Best Buy for the good service. The best bet for a guaranteed game experience was the basic no-frills edition.

Reportedly, some of the big losers tonight appear to be those who went to EBGames stores, and either found no midnight launches, or did and found not enough was available to meet even pre-order allocations.

Keep in mind this is a reflection of the Canadian market, not the good ole' USA, and specifically the Toronto area.

I did tested my copy (I bought two at Best Buy, no LIMIT per customer either), and it works just fine, so no big deal here. Also?  No Pre-Order crap for me, I knew they would have more than enough.  They probably just doubled the pre-order speculation, good going there.