Kane Enabled

Kane & Lynch: Dead Men didn't appear on many Best of 2007 round-ups, but it's nevertheless a game that no-one's going to forget in a hurry. We still don't know the full story behind the Jeff Gerstmann sacking saga, but whatever it was, it's hard not to think of Eidos' sweary shooter without a certain distate.

(Coincidental aside - rare brain disease Gerstmann's Syndrome has as one of its symptoms "a lack of understanding of the rules for calculation or arithmetic". In a crazy alternate world where Gerstmann suffered from Gerstmann's, at least he'd have a good reason for awarding 6/10 to a game he kicked the hell out of...)

Now it's time to make that distate objective. Maybe. It's your chance to decide whether Kane & Lynch deserves a lynching: a demo of the controversial (and, most critics say, a bit rubbish) third-person shooter has skulked onto teh interwebs today, almost a couple of months on from game itself. A sign of poor sales? Or just of someone not being bothered to port last year's Xbox 360 and PS3 demo to PC until now?

Whatever, in a relatively quiet month for games after November and December's frenzy of high-budget actioners, perhaps a few minutes of complimentary squad-based violence will feel a welcome treat. The demo is approximately 40 Peggles, 8.7 iPeggles, 5,900 Sumotoris, or pretty much one entire disc for any PC games magazine that still foolishly glues CDs rather than DVDs onto its cover.

Oh, and Jeff Gerstmann has his own blog these days, in case you, as I did, stopped following the story as soon as it became depressingly obvious that Gamespot were going to get away with firing him scot-free.