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This playable demo for Wolfenstein includes the first first levels from the full game. System requirements are shown after the jump.

"Wolfenstein takes players deep into the heart of the Reich, where experiments with a dark force known as the Black Sun threaten to embolden the Nazis with unimaginable powers. There's only one man for a job of this magnitude: special agent B.J. Blazkowicz! But first he must harness the power of the Veil and hope to use the Nazi's nefarious technology against them!"

Download Wolfenstein Demo (685 MB)
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Last August, Raven Software, id Software and Activision released Wolfenstein, the latest game in the first person shooter series that started the genre. The game got some mixed reviews (good single player but poor in multiplayer) but sales were bad enough that Raven was forced to let got of a number of its team members.

However, we were scratching our heads at the time that Wolfenstein wasn't made available for a download purchase. Might the game have gotten some extra revenue via a downloadable version if it had been released at the same time the retail version shipped to stores? Well in any case Activision is now finally offering Wolfenstein via download from Steam and Direct2Drive for $49.95, nearly two months after the retail version shipped to stores.

Oh, and that PC single player Wolfenstein demo? The one that was FULLY PLAYABLE over two months ago at QuakeCon? The same one that was released for the Xbox 360? Well there's still no word on when, or even if, that demo will ever be released to the public.

Update: Just a few hours after this post went live, Activision finally released the Wolfenstein PC demo.

It's a known fact that games released in the US with any kind of Nazi symbols have to be edited out if they are to be released in Germany. Now it appears that some of those symbols may have slipped into the German version of Wolfenstein and now that game is being pulled from store shelves in that country.

Fan site Planet Wolfenstein, reporting the news from German language web sites, says that it's unknown at this time if publisher Activision Blizzard will try to re-edit and return the game to store shelves. Since the game hasn't been a sales success on this side of the Atlantic it's possible the company may cut its losses and not fool with returning the game to German stores.

[Via Blue's News]

Last month a developer from Raven Software pledged to pay for every copy of Wolfenstein sold if the first person shooter outsold Madden NFL 10. We figured that wasn't going to happen but we had no idea how badly the first person shooter would sell out of the gate.

Gamespot reports that according to the August 2009 sales figures from the NPD Group Wolfenstein managed to sell just over 17,000 copies of the PC version that month (it was released to stores on August 18). Combining the PC sales with the console versions and the game sold just 106,000 copies for the month. This was despite a solid marketing campaign by publisher Activision which included a tie-in to the release of the movie Inglourious Basterds. Activision laid off a number of Raven's team members shortly after Wolfenstein was released. The game is also the last in a long line of games that Activision published with id Software's input. id's next game Rage will be published by EA and their next Doom game will be published under its new owners at Zenimax Media.

We were promised some kind of LucasArts related announcement on GameTrailersTV's latest episode and we got it. Revealed almost as a throwaway, it was announced that their Star Wars themed Jedi Knight FPS series would be making their debut on Steam beginning next week.

It's currently unknown if all four Jedi Knight games (Dark Forces, Jedi Knight, Jedi Outcast and Jedi Academy) will be making the move to Steam and what price point each game will have. The first two games in the series were developed internally by LucasArts while the final two were made by Raven Software using the Quake III engine. All four games are considered some of the best Star Wars PC games ever made.

Activision Blizzard may have had solid financial news to report recently but it seems even they are not immune to cutting back on expenses Shacknews first reported the news that Activision's in-house developer Raven Software has let of a number of its employees Today. Big Download contacted Raven Software for confirmaton and its studio head and co-founder Brian Raffel emailed us back stating, "Raven Software is slightly reducing its workforce to better reflect the studios upcoming slate." Shacknews reports that the number could be between 30 and 40 team members that are affected.

Raven has shipped two games for Activision this year; the April released movie based game X-Men Origins Wolverine and the just released FPS Wolfenstein. They are slated to release the original FPS Singularity sometime in the first quarter of 2010. Shacknews claims that today's layoffs affected the developer as a whole and that it did not affect just one team or department.

Formed just over a year ago, the 17 man team at UK-based Endrant Studios worked to create the multiplayer portion of Wolfenstein, the Activision published first person shooter that ships to stores today for the PC and other platforms. However, Gamesindustry.biz is now reporting that Endrant Studios has let go of a number of its team members on the same day the game is released.

A spokesperson for the developer would not confirm how many team members were let go, saying only that, "We have recently completed a development cycle and have regrettably been forced to make adjustments to staff and headcounts."

Two classic PC game franchises get new entries along with an all new RTS-FPS hybrid game:

Wolfenstein: id Software collaborates with their long time partner Raven Software for perhaps the final time in this latest entry in the game series that first launched the first person shooter genre. B.J. Blazkowicz is once again making things hard for the Nazi as they search for supernatural weapons to win World War II. The game's multiplayer features were handled by Endrant Studios.

On the show floor at QuakeCon 2009 various hardware exhibitors like Alienware, Intel and AMD were showing off Wolfenstein, the Raven Software developed next game in the long running shooter series begun by id Software. The full game comes out for the PC next week; however the version that was playable at QuakeCon wasn't the full game; it was a previously unannounced demo.

The demo, which gives gamers about 10 minutes of gameplay, allowed folks to play a small portion of the single player game as B.J. Blazkowicz and some AI controlled WWII resistance buddies take on the Nazis in a train station. You will get to sample the game's extra-dimensional "Veil" powers in the demo, especially when you have to face off against one of the more super powered Nazis with a particle cannon. Unfortunately we didn't get any info on when the Wolfenstein demo will be released publicly.