Of course you should purchase the original Xbox. It's superior to the PS2 and Gamecube. All the GTA games look and play better, the rally and racing games are also top shelf. Then you have Doom 3, Halo 1 & 2, I could go on forever.
Of course! they can be found for cheap nowadays at Goodwill's and amazon and EBay. Be warned, however, about the dvd drive. There are 3 models: the Philips, the Samsung, and the Thomson. The Thomson was the 1st drive in the Xbox and its also the least reliable. The Philips and the Samsung are on par w/ each other. here's how to identify each drive: http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-8vZi_ahUW.../VxcAyKOhyhM/s320/xbox_drivedetermination.gif Also some of the good games are Conker: L&R, DOOM 3, and Halo 1/2. Also be warned that if you get Panzer Dragoon Orta, some Xbox's, specifically the later ones (i'd say late 2004-2007/8) may render it incorrectly.
Whoops! Forgot about the Hitachi/LG! In my experience w/ Hitachi/LG drives they are eeehhh. I had an external LG drive and it lasted me for about 9 months at the most.
Yes, they are very rare. Actually the second Xbox I ever bought had one of those drives, so I guess I was lucky. The Xbox was made in July 2005, so It's a very late model anyway.
You could always build the hybrid version yourself. I got hold of non working Halo Edition for its shell and put my old MB with the Enigmah chip (only one I successfully completed after killing few), Samsung drive and 240VAC PSU from another broken PAL Xbox. Still works like charm and only thing it doesn't do is playing the backup as the Enigmah chip doesn't like the backup DVD+/-R but has no problem playing all the regions. Just the way I wanted anyway.
Case swapping isn't always perfect, some versions have a different stand off point. Usually 1.6 in a lower version case, doing this without knowing can cause you to short the board out. You could remove all shielding and swap it without an issue, however if you have bad cables you'll need that shielding.
Superior ports of GTA III & Vice City. Check out some screenshots vs the PS2 and even an un-modified PC version.
More importantly (to me!) the XBox one allows you to play your own songs (via the soundtrack feature) in the three GTA games, whereas on the PS2 and Gamecube, you're limited to the songs that come with the game. A few other XBox games allow this, such as Midnight Club 3, and Burnout 2 (can't think of a non-driving game that allows this, sadly), so you can put your own songs on the XBox (via the original CDs on a non-modded XBox, or if the XBox is modded then you can FPT them using a Windows program called "XBox Soundtrack Editor".
I think Tetris Worlds also supports custom soundtracks. In fact thinking about it, the majority of Xbox games support this.
