Gears of War faithful, you know who you are. As of last count, the earth teemed with roughly five million of you, so, along with running neck-and-neck with the population of Scotland, you're a fairly sure bet as far as video game audiences go. Thus, it makes sense that Epic associate producer Tanya Jessen wouldn't be too worried about failing to release a demo in order to promote the COG crew's next adventure.

"[There are] no plans for a demo," Jessen told Shacknews. "The reason being that it's been such a fast turnaround. A two year production cycle, for a game of this caliber, is really short."

Now, this isn't altogether unprecedented. Unless Epic's really out to spite me today, I'm fairly sure you could hop on Xbox Live right now, search for a Gears of War demo, and come up empty-handed. So, no surprises with GOW2, right?

Not quite. Note that Jessen emphasized Gears 2's truncated development cycle. Now repeat after me: "Uh-oh." If Epic's already feeling the crunch and their game is still about seven months from landing, things can't be going quite as well as they'd like. What does this mean? Probably a few missing features here and there, some glitches, and other things of the like. This may not sound like much, but hardcore Halo fans will stare you down and, with brows furrowed into a sort of grimace, tell you about a couple of obscure games in their franchise of choice that might've been rushed out the door. Put simply, that smidge of extra polish tends to be the dividing line between great games and merely decent games.

So here's hoping that Gears 2 revs a chainsaw gun right through our expectations -- demo or no. After all, Epic's dealing with a colossal fanbase here, and unlike some other sizeable groups, these guys don't wear kilts. Well, I hope they don't, anyway.