Games

[icycalm]

I played the Lost Planet demo recently on 360, and I ended up hating demos in general.

If it's a shitty game, I download for 5 hours only to delete it sraight away. If it's a good game, I play for 5 minutes and still end up deleting the demo, because what's the point of playing 5, 10 or 20 minutes of a good game? It's like foreplay without sex.

Playing demos of unreleased games sucks even more. From now on I will only download a demo if it is possible to walk 5 minutes to the store and pick the game up straight away. Demos are the devil I tell you.

On a side note, Inafune is on a roll. Lost Planet is a lot of fun, Dead Rising looks better with every trailer, and he seems to be a really cool guy judging by this IGN interview:

http://xbox360.ign.com/articles/707/707854p1.html

He makes some really interesting comments about the direction of the Japanese games market. Highly recommended reading.

[Molloy]

It depends on the demo. UK games magazines with demo disks are horribly, horribly overpriced so I haven't picked one up in about 10 years. But I remember getting the Tony Hawk 2 demo and playing the same level a 1000 times. When I ended up getting the full release I didn't enjoy it half as much. There was something appealing about playing the same level and thinking of new ways to milk more points out of the obstacles. When you had 15 levels to play you didn't get to know any of them properly. You were just rushing through each of them to unlock the next one.

[Pongism]

Considering they still have... 14 months to work on Lost Planet... I'm thinking they have plenty of time to perfet eveything. Take in all the feedback and see what's needed to fix or improve. Details like the story, voice acting and art design can be redone almost overnight, but serious engine adjustments take much longer to work out.

At least they are free to download while you're sleeping or something. Not $10 bundled with a biased magazine you don't really want to read. I was really praying they'd release a demo of the rockstar Table Tennis game, but didn't dammit.

If anything, icycalm, demos are a distraction, not foreplay. Better than waiting 2 years and then getting a crap game you wish you rented or regret renting. Demos rule. They show confidence in a product. Besides, like with the Battlefield 2 demo, I was able to get a better mastery of the controls before the game came out.

[icycalm]

Well, yeah, downloable demos are a really cool concept of course. It's just that I can't enjoy demos of good games. I loved Lost Planet, but I haven't completed the demo, and I never will. I only played 5 minutes and then switched off the console. I am already excited about the game, if I had played any more I would have felt pretty miserable in the end, knowing I'd have to wait for months to play the rest of the game. This is a personal "problem" though.

I react like that with many things in life. Chocolate, for example. If you offer me a tiny bit of chocolate I will not eat it. It's either a whole box or nothing.

But yeah the title of the thread was a bit of a joke--demos rule.

I hope that, in the long run, no one will have to rely on game reviews for a purchase decision. Just play the demo and decide for yourself.

My friend, who knows next to nothing about console games, downloaded the demos for Need for Speed and PGR3, and within a few minutes could see for himself that Need for Speed is a piece of trash. He came to that conclusion himself--I didn't say anything.

If he had just gone to the store, or read reviews, he might have well picked up Need for Speed.

[Molloy]

So he discovered NFS and Project Gotham 3 were shit? Good on him.

He made a fine selection in choosing Ridge Racer 6 then.

[icycalm]

No, Need for Speed only. PGR3 is crazy awesome. But only if you use the in-car view.

And that Stuart guy is a dick. He got banned from shmups.com a couple of days ago for insulting every single user posting in a thread he started, for no apparent reason.

He does know his stuff sometimes, though.

[Molloy]

Stuart rules. He only insults people who insulted him first. Then they ban him when they can't deal with it. The way he got banned off of ntsc-uk.com was absolutely priceless.

The guy who runs the site (Concept) wrote the most pretentious, up his arse, complete horseshit review of Outrun 2 you've ever read. And Stuart wrote this big review of the review in the Feedback forum. It was genius. The guy is a legend.

Plus, PGR3 is dull as dishwater.

Edit: Found the feedback he gave on the Outrun 2 review. How can you not love this guy?

[icycalm]

That's priceless. It really made my day.

It's exactly what I feel like doing when reading most reviews these days, only I never actually sit down to do it. I am glad someone else does.

See, I only heard about this guy a week ago, and I called him a dick judging by his behaviour in that one thread on shmups. I'll find it and link it here so you can see for yourself.

As for PGR3, I'll get back to you with a review in about 6 months, if you are willing to wait that long. For now I'll just say that I mostly agree with Stuart's take on it, but I am in love with an aspect of the game he didn't touch on.

[Chuplayer]

I remember an XBOX game demo for Amped a few years ago that gave you quite a bit of gameplay.