Recently scientists have confirmed the purpose of a mysterious device, the Antikythera mechanism, found in the belly of a sunken Roman ship off the coast of an island near Greece. The machine, an elaborate clockwork of bronze gears, is being labeled as the world's first computer, and shows just how far ahead of their time scientists of the day were. It would be over a thousand years before machinists in Europe discovered the lost technology of the "gear".

In November 2006, another thousand years after its first rediscovery, the power of the Gear was once again realized.

If I was making ad copy for Gears of War, that's something like how I would start it.

Not at all coincidentally, in November 2006 I was discovering new technology myself. On a whim (and a 'no interest until 2008' credit card) I purchased for myself a rather fetching 40" Sony LCD TV and an Xbox 360. As it was the new release of the day, I grabbed myself a copy of Gears of War as well.

If you want me to be completely honest, I had the lovely Misses work her feminine wiles on the typical asocial GameStop employees to secure my copy on the Tuesday of its release. Despite games (even big ticket games) normally being notoriously hard to find on their Tuesday release dates, I didn't have to do more than stroll down the block from the Circuit City where I made my large purchase and plop $60 down on the counter. After (ethereally) spending nearly three grand on TVs and game consoles the money seemed like a mere pittance.

I hemmed and hawed on the way home, realizing that Gears of War had co-op and I had neglected to purchase an extra controller, but fortune smiled upon me and whilst opening the box I realized that the good folks at Circuit City had furnished me with another wireless Xbox controller completely gratis. Things were looking quite good indeed!

Though I was momentarily entranced by the 360's robust system menu, and it took awhile to lug away the 200 pound behemoth of a 35" CRT that was previously serving as electronic entertainment, it wasn't long before we were plugging in those component cables and watching us some genuine high-definition, progressive scan in action. Being able to pick out every creepy, wispy bit of facial hair in Jack's beard on Lost is a little creepy, but otherwise I am excited to relate to you there are few things in this life that look as good as progressively scanned television, and there are probably few better things than Gears of War to have as your first foray into high def.

Dinosaurs from the center of the Earth have kidnapped the President's daughter. Are you a bad enough dude to save her?

From the commercials you wouldn't be able to tell that Gears of War was anything more than a by-the-numbers shooter featuring a cover of a rather catchy Tears for Fears song. While in parts this is true - the game revolves around killing some very same-y looking enemies for its entire eight or nine hour length - what really makes Gears of War shine isn't what you're killing, but HOW you're killing them.

Around this time last year I wrote about F.E.A.R., and said that the generic character models and generic guns were mostly tertiary to the game. The joy of the firefight was the reason you should look into it. The same can be said of Gears of War and its (mostly) never before seen cover system. Even with a co-op buddy to maintain covering fire, you'll be spending the majority of Gears of War with your head down, finding sanctuary behind whatever burned out car or busted up dresser is most convenient. You'll wait with eager anticipation for when the dust settles and the enemy drops his guard, for that is the time when you'll truly be able to shine. Shoot your head up, little fella, pop out from behind cover and nail your opponent with a stream of automatic fire from your chainsaw machine gun.

That's what makes Gears of War such a hoot, and one of my sole worries is that the next shooter I play that DOESN'T have such a brilliantly realized cover system is going to strike me as sort of lame, regardless of what it actually brings to the table. There's something magical about the thrill of holding down the run button and watching the camera's perspective change to a herky-jerky view of your character, as if there were a war documentary being filmed and there's an actual person behind that camera, following you along as you hustle from broken formation to broken formation. It's much like living through the first scene of Saving Private Ryan, though with slightly more surmountable odds, and much more dinosaur-looking evil doers than the Spielberg film.

That's kind of where the visuals hit you in the face, where they really convince you that you're so much better off playing this game on a real TV rather than some namby 13" Sorny box. Gears of War redefines the use of a limited color palette, with enemies, backgrounds, and NPCs all sharing a similarly limited palette of gray and more gray. But I am not lying to you when I say that this is the finest looking gray I've ever seen, and when you're hauling ass through a war zone while your co-op buddy is pinned down by chain gun fire you're not really thinking about how Cliffy B could've snuck in more green into the scenery. Seeing an enemy's head burst into a spray of brain matter just looks BETTER in widescreen, you know what I mean? I feel like I could freeze frame it and pick out every tiny bone.

And the award for the best use of gray goes to...

All that really holds back Gears of War is the somewhat muddled control scheme. Developers have been doing the best they can with console controllers since computer games like Doom were ported to the Super Nintendo, and nowadays the use of two analog sticks has become second nature to most players. The only real problem is the developers assigning "run" and "take cover" to the same button. By holding down the A button your character crouches down and starts his breakneck trek across the threatening terrain, but that self-same A button is the one used to hole up below a window, or press yourself flat against a pillar. Every once in awhile you'll steer your running character a bit too close to the vacuum zone of a certain piece of cover and, more times than not, this can result in a gruesome and untimely death. It's a thankfully rare occurrence, but it happens.

Otherwise Gears of War is a game that's worth all the hype surrounding it. It's short and it has a terribly stupid story with terribly stupid looking beefcake characters spouting terribly stupid and cliched one liners, but that's par for the course in the genre. What ameliorates these problems is that the game is so obviously aware of its flaws. At least, I hope the designers knew what they were doing when they put a black ex-pro athlete with biceps the size of my head in the game. Maybe it's just easier to believe that the game is lampooning itself, but that hardly seems to matter. The story, down to every last little cut-scene, is wholly skippable, and you tend to forget how ridiculous your creatine-juicing avatars are when they're relegated to being tiny character models in a great big world of shelled out buildings and underground dinosaur bad guys with rocket bows. There's no way the second act, for example, could be so derivative of Vin Diesel thriller Pitch Black without knowing it. Honestly, when a hostile Locust leaves the light and you put him on his knees with a well placed shotgun round, the sheer feeling of success while he's eaten alive by rampaging bat creatures isn't really dampened? with the knowledge that this has already been done before. Gears isn't that kind of game.

With his (relatively) small physique, Dom was quickly labeled the sissy of the group.

It's been way too long since I had a game that had me so enthralled that I'd sit around at work, thinking about how much fun it'd be to play it when I got home. My roommate and I were only able to play an hour or so every night, and even with that it only took us about a week and a half to beat it, so the game doesn't have much more than ten hours of juice it in, but WHAT a ten hours those were. Anything more and I think the realization that we were doing the same thing over and over would've probably come to us. By juuuuust hitting the double digits we found ourselves in the middle of a very satisfying game experience, albeit with a pretty weak last boss.

I'm not gonna say that seeing Gears of War was worth dropping two month's worth of paychecks by itself, but there's a whole new world of High Definition programming out there, and this game was an excellent ambassador to just how good things can look. I used to scoff at those people who complained about standard definition games, but now I find myself having a little difficulty playing a couple rounds of R-Type on my PS2 without wondering what it'd be like in the full splendor of 720p. Gears of War isn't going to make everyone a convert, but it sure as heck got me.