Where Are the Demos?

Playable Xbox 360 on Xbox Live are welcome, but they seem to be arriving at a poor rate.

Yesterday Eidos announced that a playable demo of Tomb Raider Legend would be made available on Xbox Live some time during the day. One day later the demo still hasn’t arrived. Where is it? And why bother announcing the release if it’s not going to happen on time?

This isn’t the first delay to a demo on Xbox Live. I applaud Microsoft for the wonderful way that gamers can try games on the Xbox 360 before wasting their money on rubbish like Blazing Angels. But the actual release dates for the demos seems rather off.

Most demos arrive well after a game was released, negating much of their use. This is not always the case, the aforementioned Blazing Angels demo arrived a couple of weeks ago and gave ample warning to anyone awaiting the game that it featured some terrible graphical anomalies and appalling voice acting – both of which made their way into the finished game. The demo for Fight Night Round 3 was released before the game too and probably helped sales due to how impressive it was.

But demos for games such as Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter seem to arrive so late that anyone vaguely interested in the game has bought it already. The same problem exists with the Ridge Racer demo too. And now we have the issue of the Tomb Raider demo. Is it going to be released today? Will it get released before the game on Friday? We’ll just have to wait and see.