Sega has just released an Aliens vs. Predator demo for the PC. You can get it on Steam here. Sweet!

But then I tried to actually play it on a LAN with some friends. Oops, no such luck. It's public servers only. And it's only deathmatch, which results in some utterly silly alien-on-alien, predator-on-predator, and marine-on-marine violence. So unrealistic. And for a fairly complex shooter, it's completely undocumented. If I hadn't spent many an hour playing the last game, I would have been lost. Well, even more lost. For instance, I eventually figured out how to toggle the predator's vision mode, which led to being jumped by aliens or gutted by predators several times because I was scanning for marines. This is a game heavy on making sure you get killed in elaborately animated ways. I look forward to being able to inflict them on other players in appropriate gameplay modes.

But straight-up deathmatch is the absolute worst way to show off Aliens vs. Predator. What a terrible introduction for prospective players. On the plus side, it sure does look nice.

EDIT: Ah, I see it's available to flummox Xbox Live users as well.