[General Discussion] More, MOOOOOOORE

What demos have caught you completely off-guard with their powers of awesome-o gameplay and made you want to rush out and play the full thing? Tasting just a sample of a video game is fun, because you don't need to lie to them like the people in Woolworths. "Here have this sample of bread, it's made from grease and seven different types of wood bark!" "Yes, yes, I will seriously purchase a full loaf later on!" Then you drop everything and rush out of the store, never to be seen again.

Hyperblade on PC was a huuuuge one for me. Never heard of it before, time for a mystery demo install! The game was another totally original 'death sport of the future!' type thing but it was SO MUCH FUN. Kinda like hockey, in a curved arena with all sorts of powerups and stuff. You could knock the heads off your opponents and use them to score goals. The demo was a short timed match, but it kept me going for about a million years. After that million years I went out and bought the full thing.


Man, look at those advanced 3D graphics, watch out Stunt Race FX.

Also SSX on PS2. Even though I got the machine at launch, my head had mostly been stuck in the sand leading up to it (because I lacked a metal detector and was looking for treasure at the beach), so I knew nothing of this games greatness. The demo was packed in, and again, a short timed thing. BLOWN AWAY I was. Me and a mate spent nearly a whole night just playing the demo because we're extremely sad. I later got the full game and threw many more nights at it! But now game demos are either attached to magazines that cost nearly as much as the full game itself or they're ten hundred zillion gigamegafloppabytes in size to download. Where are my free demo discs sitting on the counter of EB for me to take many of for the sole purpose of throwing them around? Nowhere, that's where!

Oh, oh. I remember when I was -39 years old, we had this angry beeping 286 computer featuring a stunning monitor that could display orange AND black. It had all sorts of shareware on it, one was Blockout!


Here's what it might have looked like with a real monitor.

I loved Blockout so much. But it'd kick you back out and play a bad version of the James Bond tune after a while, asking to send money to some hobo in America. COULDN'T DO THAT BLOCKOUT, COULDN'T DO THAT. What a depressing screen that was. To this day the thought of a full version of Blockout for a 286 compatible computer haunts me. Or maybe it's just the music.

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Well, as far as "being so impressed with it I just HAD to go out and buy it" goes, I remember the warez version of Imperium Galactica 2 having that affect on me. Sure, it had the cutscenes, voices, and music cut out, but even then I was just blown away (I had never really played a "4x" strategy game like that before, and Master of Orion never interested me for some reason), and ended up buying the game with a friend as soon as I had a chance to get to the store.

I also was really hyped on the Battlefield 2 demo for a long while. My coworkers at the time were all really getting excited for the game since it was first announced, so of course we all jumped on playing the demo as soon as it was released and played it to death. I also got a few GFFers interested in the game that way. After a while I got the full game, but I still ended up playing the demo fairly heavily since everyone else I had showed the demo to was still playing it (and they were too cheap to buy the full version).

Also, while I wasn't blown away by it, I ended up really liking Halo much better than I thought I would from the demo that was on some demo disc a year after the Xbox was released (which is about when I got mine), enough that I went out and got the game later...albiet I waited for a deal since I'm such a huge budget shopper.

There's nowhere I can't reach.

Trackmania Sunrise. I played the original Trackmania and remembered the great inovative aspect of creating your own tracks, and then racing on it. The controls just sucked and it didn't last long for me.

Then, I believe Parjay, created a thread about Trackmania Sunrise and I tried the demo. I became in love, but had to stick with the demo, since the game was protected by StarForce and back then it wasn't cracked yet. Eventually I decided to buy the game.

This thing is sticky, and I don't like it. I don't appreciate it.

MOTHERFUCKING AMPLITUDE.

The demo wasn't even playable. I hadn't played Frequency or anything like that, but the rolling demo of Amplitude was enough for me to purchase the game straight out. It was either Amplitude, or a combo of Splinter Cell, XIII and Prince of Persia.

All 3 games were pretty boring (XIII was garbage) so I ended up getting Amplitude instead. Turns out, the game was pretty fucking rad.

I remember getting it from Harvey Norman. Their last copy. It was scratched to hell which I noticed while walking back to the car with my mother, so we had it returned and ended up going to another store and getting it. Totally worth it.

I am a dolphin, do you want me on your body?

UT2k4. Not even funny. I would run out of battery power in my cordless mouse, hook it back up to the cradle, take a 30 second piss break, & then come back & try to finish a round on that 30 seconds worth of recharge.

I was speaking idiomatically.

DIABLO
-- Blizzard Entertainment --

I tried the 3 level or so demo, and damn, that game was HOT back in like what, 1997? I was sad to find that my save data couldn't be transfered to the full version when I was a wee little 12 year old boy back then. It still haunts me now! Yeah that game was addicting like porn sex.

What kind of toxic man-thing is happening now?

HOVER RACE

This game was fucking fantastic.

It was actually pretty damn simple and generic, but if you registered it you unlocked the ability to compile the tracks you made with the track creator, and I had lots of tracks waiting to be compiled. Holy hell, I must have spent months of my life just coming up with track designs and actually getting them to work in the game's simple track creator. I got docked points on a test in class once because I had all kinds of blueprints for tracks drawn all over it

I made some massive track that took place in a very barren city and the track was a massive 5MB, which was like 20 times bigger than the usual tracks people were putting out. I spent a whole summer on that track, and then when I released it to the public the creator of the game emailed me offering me a job to do programming junk, and I was like dude, I'm 14. Not that it would have mattered, the company shut down a few months later and I had no idea how to do anything but make awesome tracks.

It's also while playing this game when I came up with the name MrMonkeyMan, which was just before I released that huge track. I've been going by this name for a decade now...

Ahh, good times.

Originally Posted by Infernal Monkey

Hyperblade on PC was a huuuuge one for me. Never heard of it before, time for a mystery demo install! The game was another totally original 'death sport of the future!' type thing but it was SO MUCH FUN. Kinda like hockey, in a curved arena with all sorts of powerups and stuff. You could knock the heads off your opponents and use them to score goals. The demo was a short timed match, but it kept me going for about a million years. After that million years I went out and bought the full thing.


Man, look at those advanced 3D graphics, watch out Stunt Race FX.

Oh man, me a friend used to play this all the time, but we never actually got the full version.

FELIPE NO

Originally Posted by Grawl

Trackmania Sunrise. I played the original Trackmania and remembered the great inovative aspect of creating your own tracks, and then racing on it. The controls just sucked and it didn't last long for me.

Then, I believe Parjay, created a thread about Trackmania Sunrise and I tried the demo. I became in love, but had to stick with the demo, since the game was protected by StarForce and back then it wasn't cracked yet. Eventually I decided to buy the game.

Fucking ACE. I bought it because I tried the demo thanks that very same thread. Best idea EVER. Holy shit. That game is a great way to waste time in class.

Otherwise...the Metroid Prime Hunter's demo thing that came with the DS made me think that, Wow, you actually could do a decent shooter with the thing. When I first got it I thought they would all turn out horrible.

What, you don't want my bikini-clad body?

Originally Posted by Colonel Skills

Fucking ACE. I bought it because I tried the demo thanks that very same thread. Best idea EVER. Holy shit. That game is a great way to waste time in class.

Even better was when they released Trackmania Nations for free. Also the Xtreme update for Trackmania Sunrise, which was free as well, was just perfect.

I should buy Trackmania United, just to support the company.

Jam it back in, in the dark.

I can't tell you how many times my cousin and I played the Power Stone demo that was on that disc that came with the Dreamcast. Incidentally, I didn't get the actual game until a few months or so before the disappointing sequel came out.

The Dead Rising demo was a huge tease as well. I must've played that thing at least 400 times, looking for more weapons, trying to decipher the giant Servbot, killing as many zombies as I could before the time limit expired. Good times.

There's nowhere I can't reach.