At Newsweek HQ, most of our colleagues are either boomers in name or boomers in spirit, which means there haven't been many serious gamers among our ranks. But from the increasing number of game-related conversations we've had with our office mates, it's clear that this is starting to change. Our de facto Xbox 360 correspondent Rolf Ebeling, who in his day job is the creative director for Newsweek.com, posted here yesterday on Logitech's Harmony remote control for Xbox 360. Today, he tears himself away from the dog-eat-dog world of Xbox Live to share his thoughts on the decidedly single-player game Crackdown.

Mail delivery at Level Up central has long been the blog equivalent of magic hour. Most of the ideas for my contributions to this enterprise have come from serendipitously discussing the latest, greatest or lamest in gaming while N'Gai sorts through his Jenga-like tower of packages just outside my office door. Take my off-the-cuff reaction when he asked me what I thought of Crackdown, the new sandbox title from Realtime Worlds and Microsoft Game Studios: "Honestly, I don't like it all that much, but I've been playing it every night."

There is a lot to like about Crackdown. There are the superhero-level 'parkour' type abilities you quickly gain--it's deeply satisfying to leap from a tower block across an intersection and end up dangling from a balcony, and it's the closest any of us will get to living out our "District B13" fantasies. Then there's the ridiculously overpowered ordnance at your disposal coupled with the minimal consequences of unleashing explosive chaos on the streets; even a scornful rebuke from the narrator isn't enough for me to stop indiscriminately carpet-bombing the city with the grenade launcher.

Still, as much as I've enjoyed several nights of patrolling the rooftops, the experience feels a bit empty, as though certain things are missing. Why, for example, are there no super criminals lurking about whose skills match my own? (I took out the Los Muertos top boss by simply setting him on fire and kicking him off a balcony--no joke.) Wouldn't it be more intriguing to spy on elaborate crimes in progress or investigate mysterious distant explosions seen from the rooftops, instead of just bumping over and over into the random clusters of Volk goons that pop up only for me to wipe them out? And what about Oblivion-type subplots, where I could overhear conversations or radio chatter that would send me off on an interesting side adventure?

That's not to say that I won't be playing it again tonight. Crackdown is a weirdly appealing and addictive change of pace from my usual night's activity: frenetic online multiplayer. Put simply, it's relaxing to play a game where you don't have to think too much about what you're doing. If I botch a jump or my rocket launcher attack goes wide right, the only results are hilarious concussion animations and comical explosions--not verbal abuse from teenage Soldier of Fortune wannabes halfway across the country.

A postscript on a bittersweet occurrence at Level Up central: I've been reassigned to an office down the hall, and N'Gai is transferring to a suite of command bunkers one floor below. It's churlish to complain about getting more space for our respective operations, but the daily mail delivery bullpen sessions will be gone--for now. Come to think of it, maybe you can do me a favor: if anyone is looking for me, say around 3PM weekdays, just tell them I'm "in a meeting"...