Age of Empires Computer Gaming World Demo Downloadable!

[MrFlibble]

Dunno if you guys might be interested in this, but I've just got the news that the rare Computer Gaming World Magazine Demo of Age of Empires has finally become publicly downloadable thanks to Matt Pritchard, an ex-Ensemble Studios employee. Get it here.

 

The demo uses a late beta build of Age of Empires and contains a unique five-mission Egyptian campaign that is different from the Ascent of Egypt campaign in the full game.

[Tore]

Hmm, never heard of this. Anything different from the final release in there?

[MrFlibble]

Well, there's an entirely different Egyptian campaign, plus features from a late beta build (a "Release Beta" which was subject to a close beta test). You can take a look at screenshots here, and read about the various details concerning the demo campaign and other things here, here and also here.

 

 

[MrFlibble]

It is interesting that the regular trial version of AoE does not reject the CGW demo campaign, making it playable in a higher resolution (an presumably with less bugs) if the full version is unavailable (the demo campaign can be downloaded as a separate file here). Since one of the exiting splash screens in both CGW demo and the Trial version depict an Egyptian city, it would be reasonable to suppose that the demo campaign was initially intended to be Egyptian, but then it was changed to Hittites, probably for the reasons of variety (since the tutorial campaign in the full game is also Egyptian).