The demo for HAWX (I mean, Tom Clancy's H.A.W.X.) will be posted today for Xbox Live. It'll appear tomorrow on the Playstation Network and two weeks from tomorrow for PCs.

The first thing you're probably wondering is "But what does H.A.W.X. stand for?" I looked it up. High Altitude Warfare Experimental Squadron. It's pretty fortuitous that the name of the program works out to be an acronym that kinds of sounds like "hawks". It couldn't have worked out better if they'd planned it.

I actually don't mean to ridicule the game, at least not until I've played it. There's definitely a place for this sort of glib, graphics-heavy, action-oriented fighter jet arcade game. For a longest time, that place was Namco's weirdly Japanese take on the genre with the Air Combat series. So I'm glad to see another option that might not have giant robots and UFOs. HAWX is by the Ubisoft development studio that did the serviceable Blazing Squadrons games, which were similar, but set during World War II. And before that, they did the super hardcore Silent Hunter submarine sims. How times have changed...