Any Valve Steam customer who does not live in North America got a rather enticing offer for a pre-load in Steam news today. As of today, everyone outside of North America can purchase and download (but not play) Quake Wars: Enemy Territory for $49.95USD or equivalent via Valve's revolutionary Steam. North American Quake Wars fans will have to wait until October 9th (this coming Tuesday) for their turn.

I have good news for the crowd of people who can't realistically afford to play Crysis for the next year. We finally have the hardware requirements for Quake Wars, one of the most anticipated shooters of the year (next to BioShock, Unreal Tournament 3, and Crysis). Despite Quake Wars being done off a heavily modified and upgraded Doom 3 engine, which includes John Carmack's famed megatexturing algorithms, all you need to play is a GeForce FX 5700, or an ATI Radeon 9700. As far as CPU and RAM requirements go, those required to play Quake Wars are almost predictable. For XP, you need a 2.8GHz Pentium 4 or AMD equivalent, and 512MB of RAM. If you are running Vista, you need a 3GHz Pentium 4 or AMD equivalent, and 768MB of RAM.