Halo 3. Most anticipated video game of the year. I preordered it, picked it up yesterday, and sat down for an Xbox 360 game-fest last night. I worked my way methodically through the first mission, about 1.5 hours of play. The game dutifully notifies me of passing checkpoints. I just finish the first mission, and a dreaded message appears on my screen: Your disk may be damaged or dirty. Hardly, it came out of the DVD case and went into the console. I say to myself "that sucks," and restart the game. Only the game has lost all track of my 1.5 hours of play. That's right folks, it doesn't autosave and it bailed on me after the crash. I was so pissed that I darn near invented new swear words all rhyming with "duck," except that boy was seated next to me and I had to demonstrate control instead of a firey outpouring of cursing like I wanted to. Someone somewhere within Microsoft has a spot reserved in hell for them for this happening. My "gaming experience" here is very very bad.