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looks like grandma's old Betamax

I have one of these and use it for what it was intended - a HTPC case. It's a little large for the purpose but works well.

Still don't know why HTPC case is kind of high priced than regular case. No remote, no display screen- there is not much difference than a tower case. Material used is about the same but price is way higher.....

It's the horizontalification process that makes it so expensive. Don't know what else it could be.

Regardless, it's a good case if you have the room for it. Big enough to install a huge heatsink and a big, slow, quiet fan.

Gotta disagree with #4 about the "huge heatsink" part. It might barely fit an Arctic Cooling Freezer 7, which I wouldn't classify as huge, but it won't fit the larger Zalmans and it's doubtful it could fit any 120mm heatsink/fan combos. There's just not enough vertical clearance for it. As a rough measure, just compare the height of this case with the width of most tower cases and you'll see it's about 4.5" versus 7.5" inches (on my Antec P180B).

When PC industry starts- there are most desktop cases- the manufacture should have more experience on the desktop case than tower case. BTW, normal HTPC case are narrower compare with tower case- that means less material used. Sure they have to mount the HDD/DVD ROM cage is different direction. But the problem has been resolved since 286/386 era. So there is no technical difficulty at all. But the price for HTPC is still MUCH MUCH more than regular cases.
HTPC case was not build for high power- energy eager processor or system. So they don't mean to build the case to take large fan/heatsink. Cooler master Gemini heatsink is specially design to overcome the head clearance problem but not selling very well...

#5 true. you can't fit some mondo fins like the scythe 120mm i have in my antec nine hundred. i was going for more of a relative 'huge' compared to stock heatsinks. i have a vortex 752 with a 92mm fan in this case and it keeps itself below 18db while cooling a 4850e 2.5ghz x2. i keep the rig sitting right under the tv and don't even notice when it's on.

some of the really compact htpc setups use those godawful mini screamer fans

This replaces Antec's Final Solution line, which had some issues with internal temperatures.