We are one sleep away from the official launch of Crackdown, the second highly anticipated 360 release this year. If we can keep up the pace of one big game released per month, we'll all be happy gamers. While I still have some concerns about how much variety there will be in the gameplay, I'll still be picking Crackdown up tomorrow. Some people have been lucky enough to find stores that broke the release date last week and their impressions, along with solid reviews from the various game publications, have convinced me there is a lot of fun in store. I look forward to recreating the mayhem I've seen in various YouTube videos so far.

I'll also be picking up NBA Street: Homecourt tomorrow as well. I was a big fan of NBA Street V2 on the PS2, so I'm excited about seeing what they can do with the gameplay combined with next-gen visuals and Live multiplayer. The demo took some getting used to since the control scheme is a little different from what I remember, but its still a ton of fun.

I also found out today that MLB 2K7 is going to be available next Tuesday, February 27th, one week earlier than it's original release date. I'll want to play the demo before putting this one in the must buy column, but it looks like a winner so far.

It looks like I'm going to have plenty of legit points to harvest in order to meet the Old Spice Challenge. I decided that it wasn't worth renting or buying any of the older games with easy achievements since the total value of the Level 1 prizes is $5. I'm not dying to play Contra, so if I don't reach 1,500 before all 70K codes are gone, I'll live. So far, I have racked up 340 points since signing up for the challenge last week. MyGamerCard.net has a handy "XBox RewardSpy" which tracks how many points everyone has gained if they signed up for the challenge. According to the site, 520,101 gamertags have signed up for the program so get cracking if you are dying for an Old Spice T-Shirt or Fusion Frenzy 2.

Most of the 340 points I've gained have come from Frogger. Outside of the Complete Level 5 achievement & the 30K co-op achievement, I unlocked all the points in this game in one night. Thankfully I hooked up with Bugaj75 who is a Frogger master. He has helped over 200 people get the co-op achievement and is a super nice guy. As long as you can survive the first 2 boards, you are guaranteed to get it with him. After I died, he only had one frog left, but he scored over 50K additional points! He also gave me some tips on how to beat Level 5, pointing out the holes in the traffic pattern which was an immense help. Thanks to him, I now have all 200 pts out of Frogger (the 4th game I've completed 100%). If you could use his help too, just send him a message on Live and he'll set it up.

I received Frogger for free along with Robotron & Joust from a promotion I signed up for when I registered my 360 back in November. I finally received the email with the codes on Friday. I already had Robotron from the vision camera bundle, so I gave that one away to a fine friend. Now I think I'm going to give away Joust as well. A combination of not having fond memories of the game from my youth along with its difficult achievements has left me pretty indifferent towards it. If there is someone out there that is dying to get their ostrich battle on, let me know.

I hope to meet up with some of you fine Gamespot people on Live for some co-op Crackdown, NBA Street or anything else. Playing with friends is always more fun than playing with random people. Enjoy yourselves!