At Newsweek HQ, most of our colleagues are either boomers in name or boomers in spirit, which means there aren't many serious gamers among our ranks. One of the few and the proud is Rolf Ebeling, the art director for Newsweek.com, whose office is right next door to ours. Since we're on the road and away from our Xbox 360, we've asked Rolf to inaugurate our series of occasional guest posts by weighing in on Epic Games and Microsoft's week-old game Gears of War. Here's what he had to say:

I love it when hype meets expectations. I'd casually read the blogs and glanced at the spreads in magazine previews. And I'll admit Epic got me just a bit with the perfect-for-the-35-and-up-crowd-yet-hip- enough-for-the-Donnie-Darko-generation choice of the Tears for Fears song "Mad World" in the Gears of War trailer. Still, I was skeptical: how could something really look that polished and detailed, yet support the gameplay mechanics that would make the game my new favorite addiction? Or at least justify the $59.99 price tag? So I decided against rushing out to buy the game.

Friday night changed my mind. By the time the third blooping pop up from the Xbox 360 Dashboard interrupted my DVD viewing, I had to see why all of my friends were jumping online. Everyone--and I mean everyone--was in Gears of War and playing it on the setting "Campaign Hardcore". Everyone except me.

Two stores and 20 New York City blocks later, I jumped into the fray. My friend Ryan (who had broken down that very day and upgraded to a 360 to play Gears) and I spent the next two hours stomping around the planet Sera in our ridiculously oversized armor. We'd both been spoiled by Halo 2's slick first-person shooter interface, so it was rough getting used to Gears' third-person perspective. But once we mastered the use of the all-purpose A button, we were "roadie-running" at top speed, slamming into concrete berms for cover and laughing like two very happy knuckleheads as (minor spoiler alert) a memorably aggro lady Berserker chased us through the House of Sovereigns.