Gaming blog Kotaku’s
correspondent from Down Under reports that EB Games of Australia has issued
a recall on all of its Xbox 360 Premium consoles.
According to the report, EB Games managers were instructed late
June by head office to test every single one of its consoles, but are now
ordered to return entire inventories from stores. Managers were also told to remove
all 360 promotional material and dummy boxes from their stores.
New, quality assured Xbox 360 Premium consoles are
supposedly now entering channels, and will be in stores by Wednesday.
Currently, nearly every location listed by the EB Games Australia website shows
the Xbox 360 console as “Sold Out.”
Strangely enough, the supposed defect that afflicts the
recalled Xbox 360 consoles has nothing to do with the dreaded “Red Ring of
Death,” but rather is assumed to be related to the hard disk drive. Consoles
without a hard disk drive bundled – the Core systems – are not part of the
recall.
Earlier this month, Microsoft stunned the industry by
announcing that it would extend the warranty on
Xbox 360s afflicted with the Red Ring of Death to three years following DailyTech’s
report
on Xbox 360 failure rates. Xbox 360 defects have also been reported
to be related to the optical
disc drive scratching media.