Ninja Gaiden 2 'demo' hits Xbox Live, just a video

by Ross Miller on Feb 22nd 2008 3:00PM

Remember that blip on the Xbox Live this week that said a Ninja Gaiden 2 Demo was coming soon? The "demo" has now gone live, and we hate to break it to you, folks, but it turns out that demo really means "video of someone playing the demo." Yep, we're disappointed, too, and a bit angry at the misleading title -- by convention, demo in the gaming world tends to be interactive. (Unless, of course, the game really is just us watching someone else play the game.) Creator Tomonobu Itagaki did assure that a demo is coming "at some point." Ninja Gaiden 2 is out for blood June 3.

Gallery: GDC08: Ninja Gaiden II

Tags: Action, Adventure, gdc, gdc08, Microsoft, Microsoft-Game-Studios, Ninja-Gaiden, Ninja-Gaiden-2, Team-Ninja, Tecmo, Xbox-360

Reader Comments (16)

Disappointment of the year 2008 CONFIRMED

Saying confirmed to things officially lame CONFIRMED.

Well, "demo" IS an abbreviation for "demonstration"...

CURSES!

Back in the old 8-bit days and right through to early PC days we had a distinction between demo, and playable-demo.
While that is indeed a video, it could have legitimately been a non playable demo. Although for it to be that it would have had to have been the 360 playing the game by itself not a pre-recorded rendering.
Think of the screens in the arcade where the you get an AI-AI fight every 30 seconds. When a cover disk used to say demo, there was a good chance that's all it was.

You don't know how good you've got it nowadays when people will routinely give away playable content of any kind. grumble, grumble...

Lame

What a lame bit of bait & switch. Sure, you got hundreds (thousands?) of people to download the video and "try" it, but how many came away pissed off about seeing a video of a game they expected to play?

I have yet to see the "demo" though... will probably download to try it out, as everyone seems to think the world of this game.

They were like, "j/k lololololol"

HA! A friend of mine just called me about this. Man was positively livid. While the naming concatenation is unfortunately misleading, ThornedVenom is right, they probably just meant "demonstration".

Alas, I was hoping to try out the very berserker barrage-esqe claw weapons in a demo.

I just found this out 5 minutes ago and came here to complain to anybody who would listen.

Bastards!!! Don't call it a Demo unless it's playable. If it's a video.... label it Video, damnit.

Well, now that I got that out of my system...I can't wait for this game!

The naming convention is a pretty weak excuse the the video above the "demo" is also a video of someone playing a demo level. Why not call them both videos???