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"It's a little bit hard to work out without knowing the altitude of that dragon..."

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Prince of Persia demo

Wind back time and actually buy it.

Prince of Persia may be one of the finest games of 2003, but sales figures for Ubisoft's crown jewel have been distinctly disappointing, only perking up after heavy discounting was employed to help shift stock.

Fortunately though that means that any doubting Thomases (not me guv) are left with only one barrier - and thanks to a playable demo released today, they now have no excuse to screw up their eyes and whinge about being unconvinced.

The demo released this week weighs in at just over 240MB, and has the same recommended specs as the full PC game - in other words you'll need a GeForce 3 or higher graphics card that supports DirectX 9.0b, and that does seem to rule out the GeForce 4 MX series of cards as a friend learned to his unfortunate cost. And while the game can be run on systems with less than 256MB of RAM, slowdown is likely.

As for its contents, nobody seems to know (save those who've played it) but it reportedly features an early section of the game - hopefully more than enough to convince any doubters as to the unparalleled quality of The Sands of Time, an adventure that raises so many bars for technical excellence that you'll be pining after it at least a couple of times in the next 10 third person games you play.

You can download the demo here, and read our review of the PC version here.