There I sat a mighty lump on my broken couch/bed. Tired as all hell from 7 days in a row of work and wanting to play some games and enjoy the night but just completely unable...or pehaps unwilling, to leap into anything heavier than a light Animal Crossing session.

Somehow I managed to make it until the wee Pacific Time Zone hours of 4am (give or take) and I was suddenly hit with a voice party request. After some initial 360 Elite headphone issues which rendered the voice of my unknown companion something akin to an alien attempting to declare war, I discovered my new XBL friend wanted to do a little DOA4 boosting and chat a bit.

After that was all done for the "night" I initially was amazed that there had been no lag despite the fact that my friend was located in Great Britain. Determined to at last go to bed I suddenly discovered that after many days of little to no activity the folks at XBL had uploaded quite an array of demos! Reeling with the fantastic knowledge of not having to go anywhere for the next two days I jumped right into them.

Here are my rough and poorly written impressions.

Wanted - Weapons of Fate - The game takes off directly where the movie left off as you play Wesley Griffin, master assassin and something of a one man army. The game is a 3rd person shooter which utilzes an engine similar to the cover and shoot method found in Gears of War -- but a bit faster thank goodness.

The demo was okay and I found it easy to navigate and shoot my opponents down like the dogs that I have to presume that they are in order to justify my love for violence. I found it odd that for a film that pushed the concept that the whole "bending the bullet" skill was the key point of the movie it isn't even mentioned in the demo as a skill. I figured out where it was but I didn't find too many places that it would be any more effective then to just gun or stab them down. I had mixed results as far as effectiveness goes as well but that may just be a case of not being overly familar with how to best utilize the skill.

Acceptable shooter but somewhat plain and the demo didn't bring much excitement. It basically cried "Look at me! I totally work okay!".

WWE - Legends of Wrestlemania - I have to admit that I was initially excited at the idea of playing around with Andre the Giant so I was really looking forward to this demo. There are two basic modes included -- exhibition mode with Andre and Hulk, and a Wrestlemania event with The Rock and Austin.

In the exhibition mode you are pretty much left to do whatever you want with no agenda. I played with a manager and without and I was mightily amused to see my manager come up and distract my opponent so that I had a free opening. I wasn't initially happy with the engine as the slightest hit seems to completey stun your character and one of the things I can't stand is losing control of my character. I learned to be careful however and pretty soon I was mauling the Hulkster like there was no tomorrow.

The engine left me fairly unhappy. It's a bare bones affair and it seemed like a huge step back as far as technical wrestling is concerned. There are just a couple of canned ground grapples and ground strikes when your opponent is down and this disappointed me greatly as I am a big fan of submission wrestling.

The reversal system is somewhat easy to perfom as it is just initialized by a series of quick-time event button pushes, but I was confused by it as it seemed to randomly come up and somewhat beyond your control. Perhaps you can increase the movesets and ability to reverse more often but from what this demo offers that wasn't clear and I was somewhat let down.

The Wrestlemania matches have an agenda in that you gain extra points for reenacting key moments with those wrestlers. Those goals were kind of fun and not too hard to pull off but the overall ease of doing so made the goals not too challenging.

There might be fun to be had but to me it looks like a pretty bare bones affair.

Wheelman - I really didn't have much hope for this demo. It's from some of the team that brought us the Driver series which is a series I really, really dislike. In this game Vin Diesel replaces "driver" and his job is to infiltrate the mob in Barcelona and help bring them down.

Good lord the key story vehicle combat is really bloody good fun! You can slam cars chasing you with a simple flick of the right analog stick and if you time it right they wreck with quite a satisfying crash. The basic controls of the car are intuitive and easy to just pick up and gun your way into action. You can shoot your opponents as well as perform special vehicle attacks in which you spin your vehicle around in order to gun down you pursuers. Fun stuff indeed!

Then I hit the side parts of the game in the form of racing and chasing and...yeah, not so happy.

Your opponents in racing all take off like crazy leaving you to play the catch up game. The ambient traffic seems to clearly have it out for you and do whatever they can to attach themselves to your bumper. You opponents seem to move somewhat tron-like in the turns and the whole process just seemed to be a recipe for big frustration.

The chasing elements weren't too bad once I got used to jumping from car to car but again the ambient traffic is just a big, big pain. The cars you chase seem to turn better than they should and their ability to accelerate no matter how large the vehicle is was quite annoying.

The core game was fun but the side missions and racing left me scared and annoyed for a purchase.

Watchmen - The End is Nigh - It's a basic wandering old fashioned beat 'em up with some nice modern touches. You play as either Nite Owl or Rorschach and you pretty much have 30 mintues (in the free demo version) in which to run around and beat the hell out of a bunch or rioting prisoners.

The game starts off REALLY basic at first with very few moves other than light punch and heavy punch combos. You pick up icons that give you more moves though and before you know it you're grappling, evading and counter attacking your way through the unruly pack of thugs. As you get more abilities and get your opponents in various aspects of being stunned or knocked down/back, you are often give the opportunity to do some very brutal attacks with the simple push of a button which was quite satisfying.

Overall I had a great time playing it and I'll probably buy it. It's nothing amazing but it's a fun beat 'em up and I'm always a sucker for those. One annoying aspect however -- the game is bloody dark. Even on my 1080i TV I had a hard time seeing my characters in certain environments.

The Chronicles of Riddick - Assault on Dark Athena - Basically a rerelease of one of the best games on ye olde original XBox and one of those pesky games that couldn't be backwards programmed to work on the new system. A great 1st person stealth game I had forgotten how unforgiving it was and died quite a few times while fooling around with the demo.

If you like carefully stalking your opponents and tearing them a new one and don't mind Vin Diesel grumbling at you during the cut scenes then you should probably pick this up when it's finally released. It has an added campaign for those who played the hell out of it already so there's a good incentive to relive a great, great game.