Spend two hours with a Dead Man's Hand, and then pay for the rest of him
Hurrah for online distribution of first-person shooters in a sensible and timely manner.
At first glance, 483MB might strike you as a rather unpalatable file size for a game demo. "You could get an entire game in there!" your modem can be heard whimpering in the corner. And, whether the squealing plastic bastard realises it or not, he's absolutely right. The Dead Man's Hand "demo" is actually a full-blown trial version, which lets you play the final version of Human Head Studios' Wild West-themed FPS for two whole hours before it spits you out and asks for some money. You can purchase a license key online to continue playing.
Of course, back in the day every FPS was like this. Doom, Duke 3D, Quake, all that lot. And for exciting our senses with a pang of shareware nostalgia, we'll continue to talk about Dead Man's Hand for a couple more paragraphs. You might be interested to hear, for example, that it requires an 800MHz processor, 256MB RAM and a 32MB video card. Or that it looks like this when hauled out from under a towering heap of megabytes. Or that it's picked up fairly favourable reviews in the States.
Oh, and according to current estimates Atari will be publishing it in Europe this Friday. Granted, that's not very interesting for those of you picking through the rest of this item while you wait for 483MB to shoot up your pipe, but what is interesting is that the full thing seems to cost about 15 quid on the PC, and there's a matching Xbox version that's only about a tenner more. Can you say fairer than that? Of horse you can't.