i purchased this in april 2007 and to this day it depends what mood im in as to wether or not this is a console worth buying, so ill tell you what i think, the pros and the cons and leave it for you to decide.

first of all, it is HD gaming genius at its best, there are a lot more better looking and graphicly challenging/demanding games out for the 360 over the PS3 such as gears of war and forza 2&3 to name a few. and the difference is noticable between standard definition and HD.

i paid 300 pounds for mine and it came with 4 chart games and 2 wireless pads worth around 220 pounds individually plus the hard drive at the time was 70 pounds, plus it came with a headset so essentially because of the bundle price i didnt have to pay for it so all in all great value for money.

back then a 20gb hard drive was more than enough, now its a struggle to figure out what to delete to make room for new stuff. the soulution to this is to buy a bigger hard drive or do what im doing and trading in this console against the new 360 slim which has an integratred 250gb HDD :)

RELIABILITY- is the most unreliable console ever built. ive sent it away to get fixd twice now, the first time microsoft fixed it for free and got it back to me within a week. the second time they refused to so i had no choice but to fix it myself. Some people know that most xboxes suffer from a common problem known as the ring of death (3 red lights) meaning system failure basically. this is due to a soldering problem where microsoft saved 9p per console and cheaped out causing them to die, often within a matter of months.

but overally its highly addictive and a far better console than the ps3 in my opinion as long as you can see past the reliabilty issues.

i am only going to give this 3 stars even though i have spent well over 2000 hours playing it as the reliability porobles for me are just a complete disgrace especially when its a company as big as micro$oft.

lets just hope the new xbox 360 slim thats out this friday scores a better review from me.