MICROSOFT IS VEWWY SOWWY

Are you an Xbox Live subscriber? Have you been experiencing troubling outages, slow access to matchmaking and leaderboards, or general Live crappiness over the holidays? Well, Microsoft wants to apologize. Their gift to you? Undertow, the multiplayer undersea shooter we mentioned last time. Starting Wednesday at 2 PM PST through Sunday, Xbox Live users will be able to download the full version of Undertow for free. For all those folks wishing it could be Rez or Ikaruga, sorry. You gotta pay for your triple trance vibrators.

COMING TO PSN - DEFEND YOUR PIXELJUNK

Tower defense! These types of games task the player with building and upgrading a series of towers with different abilities to stop hordes of rampaging beasties, hence the tower defense. Those two words are enough to make some gamers instinctively begin to twitch their clicking finger. Next week, the tower defense genre comes to consoles with PixelJunk Monsters on the PS3 – now console gamers can feel the rush of obsessively blockading hordes of unrelenting beasts. PixelJunk Monsters hits PSN Thursday, so you should be defending your PixelJunk… or, defending yourself against PixelJunk, who knows… by next week.

DEVIL MAY CRY 4 DEMO ON THE WAY?

Capcom has always intended to release a demo of Devil May Cry 4 before the retail game hit shelves, and if the latest rumor swirling around the internet has anything to say about it, it will – a mere couple of days before the Japanese release, but before the game hits shelves nonetheless. The new Devil May Cry 4 website included a widget that would count down to a demo date of January 31st, but was quickly removed. Our guess? Either the demo is hitting that day and they wanted it to be a surprise, or the demo will be released after the game is launched. Either way, the game is set to be released in the states on February 5th, so you should be able to get your next gen devil trigger on some time that week on Xbox 360 or PS Triple.

ROCK BAND DLC GOES DOUBLE PLATINUM

EA let some impressive numbers slip recently – the Rock Band downloadable content numbers are in, and they are impressive. Over 2.5 million songs have been downloaded since the game’s release – that’s a lot of rock. EA also let the DLC lineup for the rest of the month slip; an Oasis track pack, followed by a selection of prog-rock hits. The oft-promised full album DLC? Harmonix insists it’s coming soon.

So, that about wraps it up for the big news in the world of d-loadable-c. Protect your PixelJunk!