Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Those folks participating in the AWOMO stress test beta can get hold of Tomb Raider: Legend for nowt. (That’s the game before last?) To get it you need to register with the new digi downloads service and then just get, er, downloading. The game will be free with an AWOMO account for a month from today. AWOMO is all about getting games super fast, and they claim of Legend that “we can demonstrate that players on an 8 Megabit line can be playing the game within 11 minutes.” Woo.

The future is, it seems, digital downloading of games. So what is the future of digital downloading? Well, perhaps it’s this: AWOMO, or “A World Of My Own”, is coming to the end of its public beta this week. You’ve got two days left to sign up and get Rome: Total War for free, if you’re interested in testing the service. It’s a rather neat idea: a download service that downloads content as you play. It delivers the essential files to get you started with just a short period of buffering, and then fetches the rest of the game once you’re busy playing. After the jump: more info, and a call for questions.

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We haven’t talked about Awomo before, oddly. I suspect that while it’s conceptually interesting, that we couldn’t download something to try it out meant it was filled firmly in the “We’ll write when we can get a game sharpish, thanks” category. And lo! Now we can have a whole copy of the genuine classic Rome: Total War for free. In ten minutes! Less, if you’ve got a better class of broadband. You can get it here, but a little more on my experience with their streaming-thingy-tech-stuff beneath the cut…
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