The primary benefit of a laptop is portability; it's computing on the go. I can go anywhere with this wonder of modern times: a coffee shop, the park, or out in the middle of nowhere if I feel so inclined, and every program and document I could ever want stays no more than a hair's breadth away. Right now, I'm parked in front of the TV (being able to surf the Net and watch television at the same time is one of the strong pleasures of our day and age). The problem that I'm running into here, and I'll be perfectly honest with you about this, is that I'd really rather play Gears of War than write this thing.

My 360 controller is right there, literally no more than six inches from my hands. It would be so, so easy. I'm pretty much just talking myself into it at this point. Gears of War is really fun.

In the interest of fulfilling my duties as a freelance journalist, I'll tell you a little about the game before I rush off to be with it. Brevity is my specialty, after all.

It takes two to mangle

Gears of War is a story about some guy who's in prison for something and who breaks out to fight an alien race over a thing. Yeah, I just summed it up nicely for you. The plot, what there is of it in the first place, is pretty interchangable and poorly told. That doesn't render the single-player offline mode unplayable, it just leaves it to serve as more of an introduction to gameplay mechanics than anything. Thankfully, Gears features a fully fleshed-out cooperative mode that you can play either online or off. The story is no better, but the game is entirely different, and much better, when played with a friend or wellwisher. This isn't almost every other co-op game ever, where Player 2 is just added to the normal single-player mode, Gears is built entirely around being a squad-based cooperative game. It's more tactical than it is run-and-gun, and so having an (ideally) intelligent teammate makes all the difference in the world. The co-op AI in the game is pretty good, but it is prone to making dumb mistakes. Provided you can find someone with the motor ability to not stand in front of you while you're shooting at things, you've already taken a giant step forward. The enemy AI, on the other hand, is relentless, especially at the higher difficulties.

What Gears lacks in a cohesive, compelling story, it more than makes up for in machine guns with chainsaw bayonets. It makes a person sad to think that we live in a world where we can put a human being on the moon, but where people still go hungry and our guns have no chainsaws attached to them. Fortunately, through the magic of interactive entertainment, this utopia can be yours. Someone getting all up in your grill? Hold B to saw them in half. I promise you � short of certain pleasures of the flesh, you will never find anything more visceral and satisfying than melee combat with chainsaws. You will lie on your death bed wishing that you could have one more taste of that delicious fruit.

That's the key to making any game of any kind. You want to give the player a feeling that's as close as humanly possible to the action they're performing on screen. Most games don't do that very well. This one does it very well. It's also a gorgeous game. It features pretty typical post apocalyptic settings, but the attention to detail and quality of the visuals give it a flavor of its own. It's gritty without trying too hard. The soundtrack is mostly forgettable, but functional.

Mayhem on a large scale

We've touched on the single-player and cooperative aspects of the game already, but no matter your perspective, bringing death upon a polygonal image controlled by preset commands is just that. The real joy is in destroying a polygonal image and knowing that somewhere in the world, someone with a controller in his hand is weeping because of it. Your sixty dollars will be paid back to you in the misery of others, and that's a wonderful investment.

Nearly every game with a gun, knife, or club in it has some kind of multiplayer mode attached to it, whether out of intention or the sheer necessity of expectation. Usually, they're perfectly acceptable, if for nothing else than the fact that it's fun to kill others. If you have solid gameplay, it's easy to throw together a few maps and toss a handful of people onto the arena and make a decent time of it. It's quite another thing when a company takes the time to tailor a multiplayer mode to the game play, as Epic has done here.

The most important, and impressive, aspect of what Epic has accomplished here is in the maps. The developers understand that the dance floor is just as important as the music. Each one is designed to perfectly complement the pace and style of play. They put a lot of time and testing into their designs, and it shows. Each map presents several opportunities for hiding, flanking, or direct combat; whatever your situation calls for. In an environment like this, both close-quarters combat and battling it out from a distance become viable and satisfying. Whether you're sniping someone from across the street or sneaking up on someone in his hiding place and sawing them in half, you'll have a good time doing it, and one style of play doesn't hold any inherent advantage over the other.

What does hold an advantage is being able to find a few decent teammates. The crux of a squad-based shooter is being able to play well with others and finding others that will play well with you. Get caught too far away from a squad mate by two or three members of the other side and you're probably very dead. Conversely, get a few guys who are able to provide a distraction while you're able to sneak in the back door, and you might come out victorious in the same situation. Xbox Live has a certain reputation for being a wasteland of human life, but I have found that it is actually possible to find a decent group. I know - I was surprised too. The fact that running and gunning is the quickest way to the grave seems to keep some of the riffraff on the Halo 2 servers and well away from Gears of War.

What more do you need to know?

I spoke before of brevity, and in its name I will bring this fun to a close. Gears of War is the game to have if you traded your labor for money for an Xbox 360. It's the first game to really show what the new generation of video game consoles can do in terms of both aesthetics and artificial intelligence, and it does it while being tremendously fun to play.

And it has chainsaws. On guns.

· · · Derek Durham