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. Rolf posted here a week ago about how peer pressure forced him to buy a copy of Gears of War. Today, he writes about why his Halo 2 skills haven't translated to success in Gears brutal multiplayer mode.

I'm not feeling very good about my multiplayer self.

One of the best features about Gears of War is that you can play the entire story mode co-operatively, with a friend, via the Xbox Live online service. But it's not easy being in a long-distance Gears relationship. There's a time difference--3 hours--between me (Marcus Fenix) and my buddy Ryan (Dominic Santiago), and our day jobs distract what should be our focus: completing Gears' story mode by ridding the planet Sera of the Locust horde. To stay sharp between our co-operative Campaign sessions, I've jumped into dozens of random four-on-four Warzone and Execution matches--and experienced nothing but humiliation.

Now, I'm no slouch when it comes to deathmatches on Xbox Live. During The Great Cheating Scourge of 2005 in Halo 2, I once dropped a flag carrier mid-jump with a battle rifle--he had illegally modded his character so that he could flea-hop across the entire Coagulation map--to save the game. I've sniped a healthy share of pilots out of their Apache helicopter seats in Battlefield 2: Modern Combat. Even ignoring the tutorials and waltzing into a field in Argentan, I was able to put the fear of God into the 12-year-olds playing ze Germans in Call of Duty 3.

None of that matters in Gears of War.

Most matches have played out something like this: I roadie-run and slide into cover. I see nothing of other team. I hear bursts of fire periodically shatter the eerie silence. Then I watch myself get brutally sliced to pieces by someone who's crept up right behind me wielding a chainsaw. In the lobby, I'm forced to relive the agony of defeat as the winners cackle like hyenas and loudly denigrate my gamertag.

But repeated casualties have their advantages. Between rounds, I've had plenty of time to cycle through the camera viewpoints of other players and think about my favorite action movies, in order to formulate a plan. Instead of turning to the run-stop-shoot tactics used in the climactic bank heist in Michael Mann's "Heat," I'll beg, borrow and steal from the works of John Woo. Because Gears of War is not about distance and accuracy. It's a game of inches, a high-speed bumrush to get right up on your opponent before blasting him with your shotgun. You can't win playing like Robert De Niro fending off the cops with controlled bursts of fire behind stopped cars, you need to be Chow Yun-Fat tumbling over cocktail tables in "The Killer," taking advantage of split-second opportunities. Games are won by getting the drop on players fumbling with smoke grenades, reloading their sniper rifles or trying to nail their opponents with the Hammer of Dawn orbital laser.

But even though my copy of "Hard Boiled" is en route from Netflix, I need a quick pick me up. And I know just the thing. Message to the COG team that danced on top of my corpse, firing its weapons in the air: that wasn't polite. So here's a challenge: pick up those controllers again and fire up Battlefield 2. I'll be the guy single-handedly holding your tanks off at Flag Four on "Bridge Too Far." I'm the twitchy sniper hidden in the hills of "Backstab." Pleased to meet you. Hope you guess my name.