I've been playing Gears since the 8th (the collector's edition came in a day late to the local GameCrazy). I've beaten the campaign once and played online a bit and all I can say is WOW. This game is definitely GOTY material. The only thing close IMO is Oblivion, but I choose Gears. We'll have to wait and see about LoZ:TP, but Gears is so good I don't mind waiting to get a Wii until next May or so.

I had some headset problems related to the last autoupdate, I think. It was strange. I couldn't record voice messages and I assumed my headset was dead since I got no noise via headset and no speach icon ingame. I called 1-800-4MY-XBOX and went through their canned and live troubleshooting. They determined it was a hardware issue and the mic was out of warranty. Oh well, I dropped another $20 on a new headset. Same problem! I called back P.O.'d, and they tried again. This time we tried to send a Private Chat Invite, and it said that Family Controls restricted this. I went to family controls and was unable to change them since there are no child accounts on my 360.

Finally, an XBL support specialist stepped me through deleting the autoupdate temp files and that restored the headset functionality. I'm out $20 more, have a redundant headset, and got booted from too many games to count for not having a working mic for 3 days. Grrrrr! Well, at least I can play now.

Well, that's all for now: I've got to go play some more of strongest of the 2006 GOTY contenders!