So I played the Crackdown demo. It's pretty awesome. There's a few concerns I have with it, namely how the skill progression will translate into the full game since in the demo, it's all accelerated. A limit of just 4 stars for each skill seems a little silly, because it doesn't seem like the difference between each star is enough when you can only level it up four times. Regardless, that doesn't make jumping around on rooftop any less fun. Or throwing cars around. Or hey, even driving them if you're more traditional. The impressions of the visuals from people I've talked to have been mixed to negative, but personally, like them. The comic-book style graphics obviously aren't as demanding as realistic ones, because the game runs very smoothly with an incredible draw distance. Which is one of the key components to just why rooftop travel is so damn fun. You can pretty much see as far as you could if it was real life, and shoot that far too. It's a very, very nice change of pace from Oblivion as far as pop-ups and texture loading goes.

In the demo you can play Co-op over Live too, so I got my brother to download the demo, and we dicked around together for an hour. We would have happily kept playing, but it cuts you off after an hour. That hour was possibly the most fun I've had with my 360. It was definitely the funniest hour I've had. The things you can do are pretty ridiculous, and make for some great laughs.

So my question is why MS felt the need to throw in a Halo 3 beta invite to sell the damn game. I almost don't want to buy it just so MS doesn't think their little trick worked and got my $60 because I want to play some beta for Halo 3. Sure, it's a nice plus, but you're getting my money because I want Crackdown. You're getting my money because Realtime Worlds did a kick ass job, not Bungie.

It's a little frustrating, and on February 20 when I buy the game, I plan on emailing the Crackdown boys and just say, "Hey, I bought the game because you guys did a great job with it. Not because of this Halo sh*t."

In other news, I've had mixed impressions with the Midway demo. The first thirty minutes or so that I played the game, I was utterly lost in the controls and fundamentals, but even after getting a grasp on the basics, I'm still not enjoying it that much. The controls are still fooling me, and I can't seem to hit sh*t. I plan to play the demo some more, because I DO want to like this game, I love the premise of the whole thing. And a competitive multiplayer experience that doesn't involve unbalanced submachine guns or crazy chainsaws would be refreshing.