RalliSport Challenge has appeared as one of Microsoft’s famous trial versions, giving gamers the chance to sample four out of the game’s 29 machines on four tracks. As with some of the full game, you’ll be tackling three AI-controlled opponents as you duke it out on Safari, Pacific, icy and lakeside tracks, in the Ford Focus Cosworth, Mitsubishi Lancer Evo VI, Peugeot 206 and Subaru Impreza WRX.

The only downside to all this is a hefty download size: 221MB. However, we’d argue that RalliSport is sufficiently brilliant that it deserves your undivided attention, if you haven’t already bought it (it was out on Friday).

System requirements are also quite steep – you’ll be expected to have a 733MHz CPU under the bonnet with more than 128MB of RAM. Oh, and if your graphics card lacks the requisite 32MB of memory, you can also forget it. Other than that, all you need is DirectX 8.1 and a bit of patience to download the thing.

You can download the demo from Microsoft’s glamorous RalliSport website, here, but we weren’t kidding about that 221MB thing...