XNA trials deadline extended News

Good news, Internet! Those XNA community game trials that no one can figure out how to download will be available until midnight PST on Tuesday, 26th February.

Microsoft had originally planned to yank the downloads 48 hours earlier (so, right about now), but due to "an amazing response" and GDC attendees complaining that some of them wouldn't actually be home in time to try them out, the world's been granted an extension.

However, even if you download them during the extension period, the time-limited demos will still "expire" on 9th March.

The XNA trials, in case you missed GDC's excitements, are seven downloadable demos of games made by amateur developers using Microsoft's cross-platform homebrew dev solution, XNA.

The company plans to allow XNA-created games to be released on Xbox Live Marketplace, starting this autumn, and is about to enter beta and establish a proper business plan, according to Microsoft VP John Schappert.

In order to test them out yourselves, log onto Xbox Live, go to the Game Store page that lists all games and scroll all the way down the 352-game list to "XNA Creators Club". What you want is the Launcher application - the top one of the two entries that say "Launcher" on them (helpful).

With that installed, go to your Game Library and you should be able to scroll right to an XNA Creators Club list, hit Y to download games, and get a list of all seven. And they say 360 is too complicated for grans and toddlers.

For more on how the XNA games stack up, check out our XNA Trials Roundup.