Well, I went to go buy my copy of MA at the local game retailer...

Only to be told that they no longer leave the game on the shelves, because its defective.

What??

Whats the deal here?
If I order it online, will it be defective too?

I'm just going on a hunch here, but I think you may have been victimized by someone's need to tell you something when they know nothing.

It is a rare thing for me to find someone at the local gamestop-eb-bestbuy-compusa that knows *anything* about games. For that matter, I'm surprised most of them can maintain autonomic functions.

Other than one case of over-zealous copy protection not cooperating with hardware, I've heard *nothing* about defects.

Yeah, that wouldn't surprise me to be the case. At any rate, now I have to order online, and wait another week to play this.
sigh.

They might have gotten a lot of complaints from people with older machines. I've heard the Copy Protection can be a bear on an older CDRom. In fact, to play it at work (yes, I play games at work. . .) I have to run the NoCD hack on that machine just to get it to launch, because the hardware in that computer sucks (a), and I don't have admin privledge on the computer (b) so every time I try to run it it tries to access the disc, fails, and tells me I need to reinstall it off the CD.

I've heard of other people having that problem, so I suppose if enough people complained they might ship it back, but.. that'd be stupid. I picked mine up at my local EB.

Me.

there was thread somewhere on forum like 2 months ago about the problem when a key for online mode was not present in some boxes with game.the game support was sending the key without delays to whose who had such a problem but probably some stupid buyers went to the shop yelling instead of calling support and that's because the shop decided the game defective....

I got mine from EB online. I had no problems with this copy.

My home PC has no issues with it, of course, it's my baby.

The one that I have at work doesn't like it at all, though. I managed to.. er.. coerce it to run the game...

Me.

I just bought my copy a few days ago from EB, it was pretty hard to find, actually, I had to scour the area looking for it.

I totally sympathize, I too have to order mine online. Unfortunately that means i will probably never get it. (I am a minor, and my parents refuse to buy things online...) So I hope I can someday find it in a store. Until then i wish those fools at EB had it.

I just called around to find out who MA in stock and found that Gamestop does not have it anymore. The gentleman told me that their shipment was defective. I asked if he could tell me if another nearby store had it in stock and he said this was a company wide issue.

The local EB is still selling MA though.

Qron