Via one of our insiders comes this helpful list of the 18 Best Buy stores which will be having midnight opening. There will not be any midnight launches for the Wii as most stores will open an hour early when the Nintendo console goes on sale. Hit the jump for the midnight PS3 launch Best Buys. Brian Ashcraft

• Park Lane, TX
• West LA, CA
• Chesterfield, MO
• El Cajon
• Superstition Springs, AZ
• Chapel Hill, OH
• Richfield, MN
• Galleria, TX
• Butterfield RD, IL
• Wester Hollywood, CA
• Ann Arbor, MI
• Gwinnet, GA
• Hialeah, FL
• South Tampa, FL
• Mt Laurel, NJ
• Manhattan NoHo, NY
• Landmark, MA
• Manhattan Midtown, NY

Lately most focus has been upon Oblivion honestly, and getting the new hardware certified. MS has been breathing down our necks to get it approved. Rumble Roses just got finished yesterday, it is pretty much garbage. 99 nights will arrive next week for its first pass at certification and approval. I am fairly sure it will be the Japanese version but that is unknown. Oh yeah, the DOA4 patch that was released was for online lag since so many people whined about it. All the testing is done on closed networks so lag is never noticed, too much of a security risk to do real world testing. Top Spin 2 just finished certification as well. Blazing Angels hasn't even come in for certification yet. Enchant Arms has come through and been rejected already. Its damn fun, goofy story however. Right now a lot of work is being done of Street Fight 2 because the lag is very bad and they are having trouble getting it playable online.

Oh yeah, and testing the new hardware revision.

Will wait before voicing my opinion on the validity of these claims. But as always, thoughts, comments welcomed.

Xbox [Official Site]

I received a frightening email this morning from a guy who claims he was a beta tester for the 360.

The extensive email outlines a slew of launch issues and ways to crash your 360. I'm hoping to God this guy isn't on the up and up, but I have a feeling he is, especially since I've experienced some of the problems he outlined and have had emails from people who experienced other issues.

OK, so here's the list, by category:

Games
Tony Hawk's American Wasteland
Described as the most problematic of the launch titles, the Micromole says you can nearly always cause a crash with a well-timed pause. Early in the game, in Beverly Hills he believes, you come across a
tagger guy doing graffiti. Go and talk to that guy one time, wait until he disappears and shows up in another part of town. If you pause the game right after you hit the button to talk to the tagger, the game will crash every time.

I've also received reports of the game not booting or the soundtrack skipping, though I've never experienced this.

Madden 2006 The game has problems playing on Live, according to the Mole and some consoles and hard drive configurations would not download roster updates correctly for the footballer.

Halo Try this game of profile hide-and-seek. Create a profile with the hard drive attached. During gameplay remove the hard drive and the 360 will reboot. Reattach the hard drive again and the system will reboot for a third time. Look for your profile saved onto Hard Drive, it will often disappear.

Hardware
Guide Button Try pushing the big silver button during a game's load screen, this can cause your system to lock-up. Try it during Project Gotham Racing 3 and see what happens.

DVD Drive Unrecognized DVDs should display a message that says the disc is unrecognized, but often doesn't.

Moving your 360 during gameplay may lead to the scratching of discs.

Playing of console horizontally is not advised and could lead to scratching of discs.

Live The number of classic games you have downloaded will not always correspond to the number your 360 says. Also "Zuma"
may be listed twice for some reason.

Backwards compatibility The top 20 sellers for the Xbox were supposed to work without any problems but several games, including a Tom Clancy title had some major problems. (I do remember reports of Splinter Cell disappearing from the BC list shortly after it went up on Xbox.com.) The Mole goes on to say that "virtually everything they said is a lie" about BC.

Here's what we need from you: Try and test out as many of these rumors as you feel comfortable testing. Don't do anything you think will mess up your 360. Anything you find out about the rumors email to us and we'll keep track and update on this page.

A Best Buy employee pinged me a few days ago saying that the internal rumor has it that the man, the myth, the legend, Mr. Bill Gates himself will be appearing at a Best Buy in Manhattan on launch night to promote the living bejeezus out of the 360.

He will be giving out free promo items, showing off the system on an enormous display and, I don't know, doing a little soft shoe to the tune of Tea for Two?

Since this is a rumor of a rumor I just can't put a lot of credit in it (thus that extra ? in the headline.), but thought posting it might be a way to get more details either way.

Because of this rumored link with Bill Gates, Msoft will also be giving Best Buy stores a much larger piece of the shipment pie, according to the mole.

Why don't some Manhattan BB employees do some digging for us and let me know what you find. You'll make me smile

The Weazul the Kotaku mole first sent word of the 360's melted hard drive last week, now he follows up with pictures of the damage. This is what happens when you put a strong light way too close to a 360. Kinda makes me want to cry.

My earlier post explained how this came to be:

Apparently, one broke after just a day of use. The other died after some genious thought it would be cool to light it up and put a lamp right next to it, perhaps even in the case. The heat from the lamp apparently melted the case in one place and warped the harddrive. Ouch!

Demo 360s Crapout [Kotaku]