Almost a year old, and the Xbox 360 is STILL crying out for a ‘genuine’ killer app. "Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter was a killer app!" you cry. Piously we steeple our fingers and shake our collective heads knowingly. "Oblivion! Oblivion was totally a killer app title!" you scream passionately. We merely chortle to ourselves while flicking absent-mindedly through a well-fingered copy of ‘Misguided Monthly’.

Yet, it’s not that we at GamerSquad do not want the Xbox 360 to have a much-lauded killer app to rightly thrust in the face of Sony and Nintendo along with its six million unit sales fiigures. Far from it. We want it. We want it bad. And, thankfully, dear fervent reader, there might just be a killer app waiting around the corner.

According to Microsoft, the incoming third-person action spectacular Gears of War has sold enough pre-release copies and gathered enough advance support from retailers to be ranked second only to Halo 2 in terms of hype and expectation. Surely that’s killer app status.

Back at E3 2006, Shame Kim, head of Microsoft Game Studios, admitted, "I do think Gears of War is going to be that next big blockbuster." So, Kim has most recently told Reuters that demand for Gears of War is second only to Halo 2 (which sold 1.5 million pre-orders and shifted a further million units across the counter in its opening day), but he has been reticent to outline exactly how many pre-orders Epic Games’ sci-fi shooter has taken prior to its emergence on 07 November.

"I can say that the demand, at least in terms of pre-orders and support and demand from retail partners, has been outstanding all over the world," he explained. "For Microsoft Game Studios it is the number two behind only Halo 2. That’s a significant number."

To further enforce the notion that Gears of War will indeed be the Xbox 360’s long-awaited killer app, Reuters points out that a Google search for the game returns in excess of 7 million results—which is believed to be approximately 25% more than a comparative search for Bungie’s gargantuan 2004 sequel.

However, Kim is keen to point out that comparing any game to Halo 2 is to perhaps lumber it with an instant disadvantage. "It’s very unfair to compare any title to Halo, which is arguably the biggest franchise in our industry today," he advised, "Halo 2 is just an unfair comparison for any title because that was just a different animal."