It ONLY plays back DVD / HD-DVD's / CD's - it can not play games. It would stream much more slowly than the built-in drive. There's your verification.

Your best value would be Rainbow Six:Vegas. Shadowrun is fun (I have both RS:V and SR), but it doesn't have anywhere near the same depth as RS:V. Basically you play capture the flag in SR and that's about it. RS:V has lots of gameplay modes like death match, team death match (called team sharpshooter), assassination (kill a VIP on opponent's team), survival (last man standing), Co-op missions, etc.

In SR there is no character development, no single player story, no unlockable weapons, armor, gadgets, etc. In RS:V you earn points to unlock different armor, weapons, modifications to your appearance, etc. You actually appear unique in RS:V when online. In SR, you look the same as everyone else that chose the same player race. It's odd since SR would be the perfect game to have character development since it's origin was an RPG. Once you've played SR for a while and you get a bit tired of it, there's nothing to entice you to keep playing, whereas RS:V has so much more to try to earn over time.

So SR is fun, but RS:V is fun and has much more depth. I found the arcadey jump-around nature of SR made it more difficult for my style of gameplay as RS:V is much more tactical, realistic (one or two shots can kill) style. But you might prefer the frantic pace of SR, it depends on your taste.

These machines are pretty complicated hardware and can crash or overheat -- same as PS3, any PC, PS2, etc. There were more problems with early 360's but newer ones probably have no more problems than any other console. A lot of the problems are actually software issues where errors happen in the programming, causing a crash. Again, this happened more often with older games and rarely with newer ones.

Many people that complain that there is something wrong with their 360 don't realize that it's often just a bad software quality assurance problem that should have been checked by developers more carefully. NHL 2K6 is a prime example of this. It crashed in so many scenarios that I was sure something was wrong with my 360, until I tried some other games and realized it was just crappy quality assurance in the 2K game.

Before the days of video games there was this thing called "getting together with your friends and playing games" - games like checkers, Monopoly, Risk, chess, poker, etcetra. When video games began, gaming was mostly a solitary affair - man vs. machine. Now with the advent of broadband being widely available to the masses, again we may have this concept of "getting together with your friends and playing games" extended to a wide variety of video games. It's just a natural evolution of the product.

It will still take years for artificial intelligence to come close to playing like a human does. No matter how great the programming is, it just can't imitate the unpredictable behaviour of a real human, nor can it interact with us like humans can. With the extreme cost of producing games it makes sense that developers would focus on a great multiplayer experience instead of pouring hours of work into creating artificial intelligence that is still ultimately artificial.

Even if Blu-ray was winning or not -- I think the main issue here is the 32" TV. On a 32" TV, you will only notice a little improvement in colour saturation and contrast with a little more detail for most HD content. It's just not worth it for that screen size.

Of course, this depends on the content. Some stuff looks better than others. But most stuff would not look a great deal better until you get above 40" screen size or so. I have the HD-DVD add-on and some stuff looks fantastic (like Planet Earth) but other HD-DVD's just look better, but not so much better that I'd re-buy the disc again.

Picture quality wise, HD-DVD is great. Movie selection wise, it kinda blows. I have the add-on and I do enjoy watching the occasional HD-DVD on it (I usually rent). I own Planet Earth which is absolutely fantastic picture quality and really shows off HD-DVD. But beyond that, there just isn't much of a library.

I admit I have Blu-ray envy -- if M$ made a Blu-Ray add-on, I'd buy it and have both formats. I'n not gonna spend over $500 to have a Blu-ray. I'll wait for the price to drop before going multi-platform.

My heart sank a little when Blockbuster hastily announced that they'll only support Blu-ray. They were my main source for HD-DVD stuff. So if you rent, you'll need to look to alternatives like Netflix or whatever. But if you like the current HD-DVD selection and you plan to buy instead of rent, then HD-DVD is definitely worth it for picture quality - on a 60" screen it is much MUCH better than standard DVD.