Yet the game really is awesome. Indeed, it is staggeringly, derangedly so. I popped Gears of War into my Xbox 360 and sat in a cybernetic haze for three straight hours, emerging with my stomach in fist-size knots, so emotionally and cognitively depleted that I had to consult the instructions on the side of the box before I was able to cook a bag of microwave popcorn -- which, come to think of it, was my only meal for the rest of the evening because I had to go back and play until I collapsed.

Normally, I am the first guy to complain about the lack of creativity in today's games. I've argued many times that games are being held back by publishers who refuse to experiment -- and insist on sticking to the same five or six numbingly familiar genres. Shouldn't we be breaking ground with risky new forms of play? Do we really need yet another run-and-gun shooter?

Well, Gears of War convinces me that jeez, maybe we do. That's because creativity does not come only from a daring, new art form or weird new genre. It also comes from a dog-eared, well-worn genre that is proven to work -- and is constantly tweaked by artists who love it.

Consider the sonnet. It's been around ever since Italian poets invented it in the 13th century, and it's deeply formulaic. But it's never gotten boring, because poets keep on finding surprising new ways to hack it. The Earl of Surrey remixed the sonnet's 14 lines into a new stanzaic structure, turning it into a four-part argument and spurring Shakespeare into an orgy of creativity. Then e. e. cummings tore the sonnet into tiny shreds, splaying the words across the page while using the rhyming structure to hold each poem together.

A more modern example is the three-minute pop song. The verse-chorus-verse structure is as repetitive as you can get. But for music fans, part of the fun is wondering how a band will do something unique and fresh with it. Lame songs fail to surprise; superb ones somehow manage to push the cultural glacier forward an inch or two. The point is, the music relies on our longstanding familiarity with its tropes.

Thus it is with Gears of War. Every element is simultaneously totally familiar and a bit surprising. Sure, you have to dodge enemy fire, just like every shooter in history. But the mechanics of hiding behind objects are executed with iPod-like elegance. A single button lets you feint from object to object, and a single trigger lets you pop out to fire off a shot before ducking back again. The ease of dodging transforms each rubble-strewn scene into a spatial puzzle: What can I hide behind? Where can I scootch over to get a better shot?

Virtually every element in the game has been similarly torqued. You know how the aliens in most shooters always sound like the squealing demon-pig noises of The Exorcist? Well, that's precisely how the Berserker sounds in Gears of War ... except that the audio engineers have somehow produced an acoustic atrocity that scrapes like Satan's own fingernails across the blackboard of your mind. I pretty much wet myself.

I could go on. The camera work is nifty: When you break into a tuck-and-run military dash to scurry across an open plain, the camera zooms out low beside you, as if you were being tracked by a panicked CNN videographer. And there's a machine gun with a chainsaw on the end, which transforms the gun into a clever, metaphoric gloss on the age-old bayonet ... as well as, y'know, transforming it into a gun with a chainsaw on the end. Hell yes. It's the little things, people, the little things!

So forgive me if I suspend, for a few weeks, my strident insistence that games break new ground, innovate new forms, revolutionize the nature of play. Gears of War doesn't, and it doesn't need to. It's the same old, same old -- made wonderfully new.