With the year drawing to a close and the Xbox 360 already two years old, we've seen a lot of high-profile titles hit the cutting room floor before ever seeing the light of day. And the original Xbox had a couple of big-name titles never make it out of the game development birth canal either. So we thought it'd be fun to spend the next seven days taking a look back at seven of the most memorable Xbox games that never were. We'll be going from worst to first, meaning the first few days you'll remember thinking "Thank God!" they were canceled, and the closer we get to the end, your reaction will be more like, "Why God?!" First you'll see our original, undoctored previews. Below that will follow our 2007 post-mortem. Enjoy!

DEMONIK -- ORIGINAL OXM PREVIEW (AUG. 2005 ISSUE):

It pays to be bad in Majesco's newly announced Demonik -- developed by BloodRayne studio Terminal Reality and penned by horror maestro Clive Barker. But the real news on Demonik is that fact that it looks incredibly promising.

You are the ultimate bad guy -- a demon summoned to wreak havoc on the world. But you can't just get the job done by showing up to the party as your horrifying self. You'll be much more sucessful if you body-jack human form -- and the more "good" the person is that you possess, the longer you're able to remain in their body (which in turn means you're able to do bad deeds and remain undetected for a longer time).

Inevitably, the human you're possessing grows more corrupt, and this will show physically -- they'll take on your demon attributes, making you a walking target for bystanders and other characters in the game. Granted, you'll be able to whoop people pretty good, no matter what form you're in -- but it's not the easiest path to take if you want to finish your objectives relatively unscathed.

THE 2007 OXM RETROSPECTIVE

Interestingly, developer Terminal reality's current project shares a couple of similarities with Demonik in that you're fighting supernatural foes and it's a third-person action game. That game is the recently unveiled Ghostbusters, and something tells us that one won't be getting canned. Anyway, it's hard to tell if Demonik would've ever been any good. We never got to play it, and the circumstances surrounding its death are not necessary indicative of poor quality, as Demonik was essentially Majesco's last effort as a big-deal publisher. When Demonik went down, they'd taken a pair of financial bullet wounds to the chest when two excellent games they published -- Psychonauts and Advent Rising -- combined to gross about sixty-two dollars (plus tax). So Demonik was axed before we ever got to find out if it was worth the hard drive space it occupied, and Majesco went back to smaller-scale, smaller-risk smaller-reward publishing of DS and PS2 projects. Regardless of game quality, though, we can't help but wonder if Demonik would've sold at all, given that its big marketing push was a starring role as the game being made in the DVD-dumpster-film Grandma's Boy starring...well, nobody.

DAY 1: THE ACRONYM SAYS IT ALL

DAY 2: A TRULY "AMERICAN" CLASSIC

DAY 4: GHOSTS (NOT) IN THE MACHINE