Mass Effect 3 Punches Worldwide Love

Somewhere in a meeting room in EA, a place where heartbeats have been replaced with the papery flap of money being riffled, a meeting took place.

“February 12th?”
“Dear God, no. That's the day the creator of Peanuts died!”
“Okay, how about the 13th, then?”
“Excuse me, but did you really just suggest we launch the demo on first day of the The Festival of Parentalia? There'll be outrage! I won't sit here and allow you to disgrace EA by -”
“Alright! Enough! February 14th? Does anything significant happen on that day? Anything at all?”
“Well, it's the anniversary of Australian currency being decimalised, but other than that...”
“Fine. Right. Gentlemen: from this day forth, February the 14th shall forever be known as 'The Day EA released the Mass Effect 3 demo'. Call Clintons: I have an idea for a commemorative card”

It's a Valentine's Day Mass(Effect)acre. The final episode in Bioware's trilogical tale of Commander Shepard's has a demo looming over the most romantic day of the year. If you care about such notions, you'll have to decide between a romantic dinner, or fighting off a Reaper attack on Earth. Multiplayer access to the two co-op maps will go live on the 17th, although you can get in on the 14th if you own Battlefield 3 and you've unlocked that game's online pass. Because that's a thing you have to do now.

You'll need Origin to download it, and space for 15GB of story-based RPG action. Bioware's announcement also tells us the demo's specs, which we presume will match the full game's.
Are you ready with your screwdriver?

CPU - 1.8 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo (equivalent AMD CPU)
RAM - 1GB for XP / 2GB RAM for Vista/Win 7
Disc Drive - 1x speed
Hard Drive - 15 GB of free space
Video - 256 MB* (with Pixel Shader 3.0 support)
Sound - DirectX 9.0c compatible
DirectX - DirectX 9.0c August 2009 (included)

Recommended Spec:

OS - Windows XP SP3/Vista SP1, Win 7
CPU - 2.4 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo (equivalent AMD CPU)
RAM - 2GB for XP / 4GB RAM for Vista/Win 7
Disc Drive - 1x speed
Hard Drive - 15 GB of free space
Video - AMD/ATI Radeon HD 4850 512 MB or greater, NVidia GeForce 9800 GT 512 MB or greater
Sound - DirectX 9.0c compatible

I fear that 1x speed requirement for the disc drive. Who has access to such fearful tech? It might be their way of telling us there's an alien invasion on the way.