Excellent post, balanced comments, well thought out. I totally agree with you.
Bubbles for you dude..
I'm loving playing The Orange box at the moment, its a great package and huge value for money, but it's not 10/10 material.
The main game, Half Life 2 and its additional episodes, all suffer from really frequent loading screens.. it's very annoying and intrusive..
Portal is fantastic, flawless but short.
Team Fortress is superb but again has only 6 maps and suffers from lag, drop outs and glitches.. needs patching.
8.5 or 9 out of 10...
There would have to be 2 versions of it, one for Blu-Ray and one for HD-DVD!
Seriously though, the HD format war proves this if nothing else: Greedy companies will never work together for the greater good.
and what you say is true Waffles..
I too used the guts from a official 360 pad (wired = £20), bought arcade quality parts (joystick and 9 buttons = £38) and then wood, perspex and photo enlarging for the graphics (£20).. Total cost without sundries (glue, solder, wires) = £78 ($160?) And thats without labour! $149 seems pretty reasonable.. I wouldn't sell mine for less than $200, which of course no-one would pay!