Patching might not be too bad of an idea.. expecially in online games. Good god I wish Sega had the ability to patch their online games so that people couldn\'t exploit bugs or use cheat devices as easily as they did.
On the other hand, I do see the downside of sloppy releases and cheap expansions. The way I see it tho.. is all games are going to have some sorts of bugs in them. That\'s pretty much unavoidable as long as publishers are pushing games out the door and onto the shelf to make money before they\'re even truely done. You gonna think.. there\'s 1000x as many gamers looking for bugs to exploit as there are people on the staff looking for bugs to fix. The gamers have no time limit for their efforts.. developers do.
The difference is.. without a HDD you have to live with the bugs. With one, you don\'t.
Other than that.. it\'s a gimmick. MP3 tracklists, TiVO capabilities, Demo movies.. bah.. that stuff isn\'t needed or IMO, wanted. Sure, being able to surf the net on the DC was novel.. couldda been really nice if they had a HDD.. but in the end it\'s still nowhere near on the level of what a PC is capable of, which is pretty much were I\'ll always go to surf the net. The only other two upsides is more space for saved games and it\'s use for games like Blinx.