Ahead Of The Curve With Gears

When Microsoft released its second-generation game console last November, many were surprised. The software giant had succeeded in beating its two rivals, Sony and Nintendo, to the next-generation punch with the Xbox 360. Now, with a full-year head start on the competition and, at long last, better games to display its formidable hardware advancements, Microsoft's new console is coming into its own.

Yes, the news of launch week was dominated by Nintendo's Wii Remote and the violence and high-priced auctions around the limited PlayStation 3. But let's not forget about Microsoft. The Xbox 360 has now sold more than six million units in 12 months. That figure is both good and bad for Microsoft: good because it's a hell of a lot more than the others guys, but bad because Microsoft has missed some early sales milestones the company set for the console. The ultimate goal, of course, is to sell 10 million consoles by the end of this year. Even if Microsoft were to lower the price of the console to a sub-Wii $200 for the holiday season, that number seems a long way away.

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Or is it? Amazon's Thanksgiving Day sale, which feature 1,000 Xbox 360s priced at $100, sold out in minutes. Even though rumors of a worldwide price cut never came to fruition, the Xbox 360 is certainly a cheaper and more available alternative than the PlayStation 3 for shoppers looking for premium HD gaming. Analysts now predict Microsoft will reach the 10-million mark by the end of the year. Even my colleague Aaron McKenna, who has long been skeptical of Microsoft's gaming efforts, recently admitted that the software behemoth is starting to win him over.

How is Microsoft making its charge? It starts with the software. A console can have all the hardware upgrades and fancy bells and whistles it wants, but unless there are some killer apps to play on the platform, it will die a slow death. The Xbox 360, in my mind, suffered from not having enough strong games to support the launch. Yes, Call of Duty 2 was a huge hit and has sold more than million copies for the Xbox 360, but I personally felt the title was a huge disappointment given its short single-player campaign, weak maps and generally unoriginal content. Games like GUN didn't seem to play much better on the 360 than the original Xbox, and Quake 4 didn't offer anything better than what FPS fans got when the PC version was released the previous month. Peter Jackson's King Kong was visually impressive but lack enticing gameplay, while Perfect Dark Zero was hardly the exclusive 360 title Microsoft needed.

All of that has changed. In recent months, the 360 has enjoyed the arrival of several strong, exclusive titles that have raised interest in the console. I usually don't take to sandbox-style games, but Capcom's Dead Rising won me over despite its noticeable imperfections. I may have found Saint's Row to be a hackneyed GTA knock-off, but it garnered strong reviews and sold a lot of copies. Similarly, I never understood the attraction to Dead or Alive 4, but the exclusive title had a strong effect for the Xbox 360. Those titles, along with Call of Duty 2, Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter and The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, built a strong lineup for the console going into the fall season.

But the biggest impact in the Xbox 360's short existence has come from Epic Game's Gear of War. I've been playing the game steadily now for about a week and here's what I think: it's not quite a classic, but it's a damn fine game. Gears of War isn't worthy of the perfect scores it's received from many critics - the plot is half-baked and unoriginal, the dialogue is laughably bad and the single player is disappointingly brief. But my goodness, Epic's design team did one hell of a job creating a visually stunning environment and impressive gameplay that looks like it's jumped right out of an animated movie. Gears of War is the game that finally live up to the promise of next-generation gaming. And it's a hard game - I mean, really hard - which is refreshing. I can understand why Gears has sold more than one million copies in about two weeks, becoming the fastest selling Xbox 360 title, and also displaced the longstanding Halo 2 as the top game on Xbox Live.

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