Everyone's heard the story about my bad experience with Mario Superstar Baseball and my local Blockbuster, so I won't recount that.
On a related event, when I tried to get that resolved months later, it was just around the time of Super Mario Strikers' release which proved to be another problem when I brought it to the till but they "hadn't received it properly" so I couldn't even rent it that first day.
This past week or two or whatever, I was really hoping to rent Super Paper Mario, of which they got three copies (you know, compared to their dozen Meet The Robinsons and dozen Flushed Aways and dozen Ribbit Kings and that sort of crap). I had an April coupon leftover that I realized I hadn't used, so I dashed over there after dinner and was delighted to see a copy of Super Paper Mario.
I brought it home, and guess what? It didn't work! I could see the cute Disc Channel animation, but I can't get much farther than the "Hold the Wii Remote sideways" screen before it gives me a disc error. Thanks a lot.
It looked like there were only minor scratches, but I'm guessing they were in all the vital places. My brother used the "smear on some toothpaste and carefully wash it off" technique as per Haley's Hints, which has helped us with some really scratched discs, like when I finally rented The Goonies and it looked like someone took sandpaper to the disc. That worked then. It didn't work this time, the error persisted.
I called the Blockbuster and spoke with a girl who looked for the other copy that was supposedly in (but as we would find out later, apparently someone had actually just returned the case but not the game with it). Otherwise, she said I could get credit for it and she would let me know when another copy came in. I went back to the store, and that girl had gone on a break, so only the other girl was there, dealing with some old guy about his credit card issues, while I waited like a knob for several minutes at the front because I didn't want to cross the alarm thingy. When she finally came over she was at a bit of a loss because the girl I spoke to went on a break and didn't tell her about my situation. A woman came up to the till so I said she could help her first, since it looked like a simple one. Yeah, well, she tried to use the May coupon even though it was April and then she was surprised that she got a free rental because she rented five things in the past month and then two more people came into the line-up. Rrrgh! Well, at least she knew she ought to be helping me so she did, and we looked for the other Super Paper Mario (since we didn't know yet that it would be fruitless) and then the girl I spoke to finally came back and cleared it up, gave me credit (the full amount to rent a game, too, not to be confused as the lesser amount because of the coupon I used) and since she works full-time, she says I'll be next in line the next time someone decides to actually return a copy, and a non-scratched one at that, to the store.
I guess I'll be playing it soon (unless she forgets, or loses my number, knowing my luck), but as I've never had problems with other games from Blockbuster except Mario's (come to think of it, back in the N64 days they charged me for keeping Mario Tennis for long when I know I returned it on time, grrr), I'm thinking that's probably why I buy (and should get back to buying) Mario games.
