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Halo 2 beats off Gears

Still number one on Live.

Gears of War is now the most popular Xbox 360 game played on Xbox Live, but there are still more people playing Halo 2 overall.

That's according to the latest top-ten lists for Xbox Live activity released by the service's director of programming Larry Hryb - or Major Nelson to you and I.

They reveal that Gears has leapfrogged the likes of Call of Duty 2 and Splinter Cell: Double Agent to the top of the Xbox 360 chart, but Hryb adds that if the list were combined with the original-Xbox list, then "Halo 2 would be the top Xbox Live title, followed by Xbox 360 titles".

It'll be interesting to see how much impact Gears' European release on 17th November has on the table. So far Halo 2 has beaten off all attempts to unseat it. Can Gears do it? Can it? We will let you know. Hold onto your Internets.

Meanwhile, this week's Live Arcade release, Contra, sits on top of that table followed by UNO and Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3, despite being really quite rubbish.