...

I must live in the last normal city in the world.

I'm pretty sure the 'shortage' is artificial. If you can't get your hands on it you only want it more.

Yeah, I'm betting they got them stockpiled and will slowly release them onto the market. That way people will pay ridiculously high prices for them (I think a friend quoted something around $1000 on Ebay). Plus then Microsoft can fuel the Ebay market and make tons of money that way.

A friend of mine saw one go for almost fifteen hundred on the 22nd. Ug.

I'll happily unload the paper weight into your capable hands Kas...once I return to the US.

A word of warning...the only games I know of that you can get around the disk read error with are ones that have a 'save anytime you want' ability. Granted it doesn't 'always' get the error (I'd say about 50% of the time and only occurs when you have to load an area.), but it's very annoying when it happens.

Man, I don't know what the deal is everywhere else, but there's plenty stock o' the damn things here in Bellingham Washington...of course I can't afford one though...

Take a loan and sell them on eBay. ;)

I don't understand it, though - Microsoft doesn't make any money off the idiots selling these things on eBay... they make money when stores sell them. The more they move out the doors of Best Buy, the more money they make.

Although Titus might be right about the artificial shortage there...

Y'know, I don' think the PS3 will top the money made off of PS2 (or the coolness upgrade in gaming), and the Nintendo Revolution scares me. At least the controller, anyway...

Microsoft is loosing money on the 360 units themselves, they'll make money off of the games. The shortage will help build hype, IMO. That's probably about it.

I'm really excited for the Revolution. I have a lot of friends who don't do video games, but I can see them playing on the Revolution.

Slas, great! Let me know when you get back to the US and I'll wire you some cash. I'm kinda handy with fixing that kind of thing, I could probably get it to work. Fixing broken stuff is the only reason I got a good DVD player and VHS tape deck for free.

I've seen the Revolution and I have the sense it's going to go the same way as the Sega Dreamcast. The Dreamcast should've by all rights done well (heck, it came out before it's time IMO with it's graphics and it didn't have a bad game library by many means), but fell apart.

So is my prediction.