Demo Roundup - 22nd to 28th Jan

With most of the games industry still hitting snooze on the 2008 alarm clock (if not choking on corn flakes and having to can half a dozen games and studios or fire the management team), it's been a relatively quiet few weeks for demos, but that came to a howling close on Thursday, 24th January as Capcom rode into town on a gleaming motorbike wearing PlayStations and Xboxes.

Said consoles were host to hard disks ablaze with the righteous devil-slaughtering of twin Devil May Cry 4 demos. With the game due out on 8th February, said trial versions arrived just in time to tempt the cash out of slash-happy gamers' wallets.

If you're a PAL PS3 owner though and can't find the demo, that's because it's a week late in these parts, so you'll have to either sit on your hands or use them to sign up for a fake US account so you can download it. If you have any time left over, you can read what we make of the game by checking out our most recent first impressions.

Otherwise it's been quiet elsewhere (hrm - tautology for the win), with just a Turning Point: Fall of Liberty demo on Xbox Live Marketplace and a PC teaser for Conflict: Denied Ops to test your shooty reflexes (the latter just in time for our preview, upon which note).

There was lots of "looking forward", though, with Super Smash Bros. Brawl set to include Virtual Console demos when it actually comes out (still no word, Europeons), while Eden Studios told Eurogamer to expect an Xbox Live Alone in the Dark demo around the game's May launch and Square Enix said a Final Fantasy XIII demo is planned for this year.

So, to wrap up: