The PS3's potentially a good choice. It's a $100-200 more than the cheaper Blu-Ray players, though its quality tends to be a bit higher, since cheaper players will tend to come with perhaps a crappy ARM knock-off CPU, slashing decode quality compared to what you'd get from a good processor. (the Cell being a prime example of that)
Game-wise, it's perhaps comparable to the Xbox 360; very few solid exclusives exist; FF XIII left, though FF vs. XIII still remains... There's also Ratchet & Clank, GT5, GOW3, and perhaps a couple of other "big" exclusives left... And at least for now, it also has MGS4, though I'm strongly predicting that the re-release of it (like MSG2: Substance and MGS3: Subsistence) will also hit the Xbox 360, since the PS3 didn't sell 5 times as many units as the Xbox 360 like happened with the PS2/Xbox, and any claims that Blu-Ray would actually be necessary for any game that could run on hardware as "weak" as the PS3 or Xbox 360 are greatly overblown. (the vast majority of MGS4's disc space is taken by FMVs, which could easily be spanned across discs)
Still, if you don't already have a system that could handle most/all of the games you're looking at, and you can actually tell the difference between high-def DVD content on your screen and standard DVDs, (scarily enough, there seem to be a lot of people that can't tell the difference.
) then the PS3 would be a very good choice. Of course, if you're after the absolute best graphics, then you'd know well enough to skip consoles and go straight for a PC, since modern PC graphics cards can best a console for about $100.
Oh, and yeah, the PS3's failure rate is around the 3% mentioned, compared to the estimated 25% for first-generation Xbox 360s. Though the more recent "Xephyr" revision of the console switched from 90nm to 65nm chips, cutting down heat and also greatly reducing failure rates... And a lot of those "failures," though, as Seamus noted, are less-than-lethal overheating situations; in some cases, simply unplugging the 360 and letting it cool for a couple of hours will restore it back to life.
For a game with really no replay value:
_____ hours of gameplay x $2 = cost of game
I'm FAR more of a miser than that... Though I generally don't quite measure in hours so much as months I keep at it; for a particularly good game, I'll pay as much as $5 (American dollars, too, if it makes a difference) a month for it. On average, that'd mean perhaps a minimum of 20 hours to be "keeping at it," so that works out to 25 cents an hour.
