...has anybody else heard of this?

I was told about it this weekend and by all accounts the person using it said it was absolutely hassle free and there was no danger at all in using it to play online games. It enables you to emulate the DVD drive and as such all the current anti-piracy measures are completely ineffective against it, you can play online campaigns and you can play online MP, in fact the person that told me about it was playing MW3 from his HDD with no physical copy of the game anywhere to be seen.

Whereas I am adverse to piracy this device would fill a big criteria of mine, it would allow me to back-up my games to a HDD and actually play them from it, the other thing is that I currently have in my posession a) a spare Gold account, b) a 360 with a dicky DVD drive thrown under the bed and c) a 160gb external HDD. This means that I have everything I need to enable me to set this up in my bedroom and actually play my games collection without carting discs to and fro from room to room.

The only problem I foresee is that I have been down this road before, back in the days of the original PlayStation I chipped mine and then took full advantage of helping myself to nearly every game that saw a release. It wasn't long before I stopped playing games through to completion, merely playing the first 15 mins of them unless they were one of the AAA titles of the day and even then they didn't get that much play. Then with every game freely available to me I simply lost interest and stopped gaming.

I think that in my current frame of mind with gaming this could quite easily happen again, with all the will in the world if I set this up on my spare 360 the temptation to just get a game that I'm only slightly interested in would be too great, I know that if I had it now I would grab a copy of Ghost Recon and so the slippery slope would commence.

Why oh why can't Microsoft come up with a system where we can actually install the game to our HDD or better still price the download stuff more realistically, there's a good chance that without any of this happening I may be lost to gaming before the next gen sees the light of day.