Microsoft and Ensemble Studios have finally released the demo of the upcoming sequel to the Age of Empires series. You'll need a decent graphics card if you want to turn the settings up and if you've got an 'Ol Shitty PC (as the developers so eloquently put it), then either get a new GPU or don't worry about not seeing individual bricks flying over your head when you blow up the last house in a village.
According to this site you'll need at least a 2GHz P4/2500+ Athlon with a 128MB VRAM graphics chip and a 512MB stick of RAM to run it with things turned up. Oh and if you're still running Windows 2000 or earlier, you won't be able to run the installer. Microsoft requires you to upgrade to Windows XP if you want to play a demo of the game.
So, for me this game requires a 2GB+ chunk of hard disk and at least £80 from my poor student wallet. Worth it? Not by a long shot. On the surface it looks like a Microsoft tactic to get gamers to upgrade. Of course, other companies like EA are starting to require XP on their games, Battlefield 2 for instance, but they don't lock you out from playing the game. If anyone manages to extract the demo and play it on a pre-XP machine, report back to us and we'll publish your experience.
Download Here (366MB .exe)
[Thanks to everyone who sent this in]
[Update: Check the comments for multiple links for how-tos on installing the game under Windows 2000.]
