When the Resident Evil 5 demo was released on Xbox Live and managed to get itself downloaded a staggering 1.8 million times in the first week, well everyone pretty much thought that was one Xbox record that was not going to be broken any time soon. But that was before someone went and decided to get a Halo Wars demo out there to excite all the Halo fans.

The 1.4GB demo appeared on the Xbox Live Marketplace during the day of February 5th, available as a free download for Xbox Live Gold members only for the first week. That did not deter some 2 million folk from doing just that in week one. None too shabby considering there are 'only' around 17 million people signed up to Xbox Live in total.

In fact, it has broken the Microsoft record for day-one downloads and that first week total clocked up in just five days rather than a full seven.

Now we just have to wait until March 3rd to see how many people buy the retail version.

Personally, I am on the edge of my seat waiting to see who will win the popularity battle between Halo Wars and the new downloadable Grand Theft Auto IV episode, The Lost and Damned, which will be available for download from February 17th.