According to a forum post at retail site Fatwallet.com, a few Sam's Club warehouses in the US are selling dirt-cheap Microsoft Xbox 360 HD-DVD drives to interested parties at the low price of US$ 72.54, far below Microsoft's suggested retail price.

The external drive that allows the playback of high-definition discs is officially listed at US$199, though Sam's Club's legitimate channel samsclub.com offers a discount that reduces the retail price to US$ 181.42.

The HD-DVD drive was created in conjunction with the impending US release of the Microsoft Xbox 360 Elite package which has HDMI and a 120GB hard drive bundled in.

HD-DVD is one of the two competing formats for the next generation of storage media. It was created by Japanese electronics giant Toshiba and is supported by the Microsoft Corporation along with Hewlett-Packard and Korean firm LG.

Its rival format Blu-ray, created by Sony, is the more high-end of the two, sporting a much bigger storage capacity. Blu-ray currently holds a 70-30 market share advantage over HD-DVD due in large part to the fact that all Sony PlayStation 3 game consoles sold are equipped with a Blu-ray drive. HD-DVD is supposedly the more preferred format, leading the competition in stand-alone player sales. However, users get Blu-ray automatically when they get a PS3, making it hard for Toshiba to cope up.

Business and consumer computer solutions provider Hewlett-Packard, graphics industry contender NVIDIA, Microsoft's PC advocate Games for Windows initiative and even broadband game publisher Trion World Network released a whoosh of hostile air against the next-gen consoles.

They were probably outraged as many other hardcore PC fans were at the 2007 Game Developers Conference's "PC Gaming in an Age of Connected Consoles" panel discussion. Instead, the PC industry leaders formed their own panel, bringing in Microsoft's Games for Windows initiative's boss Rich Wickham and Trion World Network's founder Lars Butler, among other representatives of leading PC industry entities.

Lars was also quick to comment, "I believe the days of the console are numbered. There is one more generation of gaming consoles and that is it."

Backing Butler, NVIDIA's VP Roy Taylor upped the PC's ante by stating, "Our advantage as developers is we know what is coming. And what is coming is far ahead of the console. You will see a huge difference between what you can get on a PC and a console."

In line with this, Hewlett-Packard plans to enter the hardcore gaming market by rolling out a new line of gaming-related hardware, possibly even hobbyist PCs, within the year. It's even claimed that they plan to even provide a curved computer monitor for not only widescreen effect, but for full FPS immersion.

Whether or not the PC industry giants can deliver, we cannot tell, but with PC enthusiasts who know exactly how to make full use of their PC's power and console piracy looming over the horizon, consoles may never be able to say "the PC is dead" ever again.

Many have speculated that the Wii's advent to the gaming realm has sparked a revolution in gaming (pun unintended), as it has pushed developers to think of more innovative features to games (such as substituting a Wiimote for a baseball bat or something).

Sure, it has opened lots of possibilities for gamers, which is quite exciting really. Now, computer hardware company Hewlett-Packard is setting its sights on gaming as well, and it seems that they're upping the ante on gaming innovation further. HP VP Philip McKinney recently showed an intriguing video at a "major telco con in Hong Kong" that features kids playing a scavenger hunt using handhelds and "racing along alleyways and backstreets of the real world collecting clues posted on walls and other places to find the prize."

And it's all thanks to a nifty open-source platform called Mediascape, something that HP programmers have been working on. Whether we'll see this technology in the near future, we're not really sure. But it's exciting to know that devs are exploring new horizons in gaming.