Just when we were about to open our wallets and reach out for the credit card!

A quick look at our Steam account gave us this sweet piece of news, which comes right around the exact same time Xbox 360 owners (except for the sad saps in Japan) will be able to join in and try to answer the lifelong question of what would happen to you in case of a zombie apocalypse. Now that the demo is out and open for all on the PC and Xbox 360, fire up your Steam accounts and get that demo ASAP, in case you have unlucky, stupid or broke enough to not get the pre-purchase and the early demo access.

You need around 3.2 GB of free space for the demo which seems to be quite on the heavier side. Time for our so-called broadband lines to choke on this. See you tomorrow evening in co-op. Me, I’m just looking for a rusty hacksaw or a zombie-on-a-diet to get rid of my ugly, useless thumbs.

There are games that are up there and on everyone’s radar – or indeed, in everyone’s face thanks to the large amount of marketing or advertising it gets (Halo 3 I’m looking at you) – games that everyone’s heard about and are looking forward to. But then there are games that slip under the radar completely – sleeper hits that somehow manage to miss the marketing train and instead come to your doorstep via bus.

Fracture is one of these games. Somehow I managed to miss all the marketing and road signs stating “TERRAIN DEFORMATION HERE” and being oblivious until the folks over at Penny Arcade mentioned it by putting up this video in their news. After seeing the rather viral excitement of the presenter, I realized that the Fracture demo had hit the XBL marketplace – the only logical action from this was to actually give it a run through. And let me tell you this: I’m really, really glad I did.

Hit the jump to find out why.

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With the games just around the corner, demos of FaceBreaker and Madden NFL 09 have just been released on Xbox LIVE Marketplace, with the former weighing in at 954.56 MB and the other at 1.09 GB. The FaceBreaker demo, which will be available on the PlayStation Network on August 7, features Sparrow, Ice and Steve as playable characters in addition to showcasing the Photo Game Face, which allows players to use the Xbox LIVE Vision camera or the PlayStation Eye camera to upload their mug shots for virtual destruction in-game.

FaceBreaker is slated for a September 3, 2008 release date while Madden NFL 09 will be on shelves August 15, 2008. As for when they will be available in India, your guess is as good as ours.

If the sole ambition in your life has been to get Darwin spinning crazily in his grave, Will Wright has come up with something perfect for the job. The Spore team came out with the Spore Creature Creator today, which has you unleashing your fertile imagination on the hapless organisms ready to climb up the ladder of evolution.

The demo version of the Spore Creature Creator lets you fiddle around with a limited tool set while $9.95 (INR 400) on the table will unlock the complete tool set. The demo weighs in at 200Mb which hopefully won’t strain our excuse-for-broadband connections too much. The demo as well as the full version of the Spore Creature Creator is available for both PC and Mac, here.

In the meantime, enjoy this video. You can download a higher quality version of the same here.

For those who haven’t been put-off by the negative publicity that DICE’s latest console-only offering managed to garner, June 5th is the day to look forward to as Battlefield: Bad Company (BFBC) will be having a demo on the Xbox LIVE Marketplace. The demo has already been out in the wild a full week in advance for all those who have pre-ordered the game. But thanks to EA, we managed to get our hands on it to see if the game will be able to earn back the goodwill that the Battlefield games have traditionally enjoyed.

The demo offers you a chance to test out both the multiplayer, as well as the single player aspects of the game. Being a Battlefield game and all, we promptly dove right in to multiplayer to see if the game stood a chance of standing up against Call of Duty 4 (COD4), the reigning king when it comes to online warfare. Jumping into a multiplayer match was easy and intuitive enough. Even though from India, the connection was established within minutes and we were prompted to choose our class. You have a selection of all the usual modern warfare classes such as Assault, Reconnaissance, Support and Demolition. Each class comes with its own unique weapon loadout that dictates what role will each play on the battlefield.

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Shortly after we previewed the PC version of Codemaster’s upcoming mix of arcade and sim racing game, Race Driver GRID, we had a chance to have a look at the Xbox 360 demo version of the game as well. Weighing in at 795 MB, the demo turned out to have more bang for the buck then other game demos that have been clogging our bandwidth but failing to deliver a gameplay experience that would justify the huge file sizes. With support for online racing in the demo via Xbox LIVE, it is pretty much ensured that this is one demo that you won’t be deleting any time soon, at least, not till the game hits the shelves coming June.

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I’ve been playing the Burnout Paradise Demo on and off for the past week or so, and the first thing I have to say is that, while impressive, the entire impression of the game is largely lukewarm. Almost every good feature (and there are a lot of them) of the game has an annoying or downright frustrating feature attached to or resultant from it.

Hit the jump for more.

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