Despite the chance of getting into the Halo 3 beta if you dusted off your copy of Halo 2 for three hours on Xbox Live this past week, the top game on the service continues to be Gears of War, which somehow manages to get more unique users every week out of the ten million xbox 360s worldwide, despite the fact that there are more than twice as many original Xboxes out there, plus the fact that 360s with hard drives can also play Halo 2. I guess all that can be said is that if you were that hot for Halo 3, you were probably playing some Halo 2 every week anyway. Besides, everybody also knew that the mere 13,000 beta spots were going to get snapped up in the first few minutes of the registration form going live on the 5th, so perhaps many passed up the chance.

Of course, Halo 2 is a game that's more than two years old, and a lot of people are just "played out" on it. Furthermore, although Halo 2 is upscaled on the 360, it's not a "next generation" game; it doesn't have that shiny new.. shininess that new games have.

If Halo 3 comes out near the end of this year, Gears will be a year old, and Halo will be the new kid on the block. How will that showdown turn out? Will users flock back to the franchise that built the Xbox? Or will the B button beat out the mysterious X button, with Gears taking the mantle from the Halo franchise?