I just bought and installed Outcast as per the forums recommendation and I am absolutly loving it. A few years ago I picked up the demo and found it to be rancid, so when everyone in here told me to get the game I thought, 'Great. I'll buy it. It will suck as per the demo. I will get mad. I will have a temper tantrum.' Alas the demo is crap and the game is a real gem. Some demos really do help to push and sell a game (Commandos BEL) but I'm finding more and more that do such a poor job they will keep you from getting an otherwise great game and missing out on whole lotta fun. I also found this the case with Slipstream.

Anyone have any thoughts on this or do I need to get a life and stop thinking about stupid shit like this? :P

It's not a stupid thing to say. We all care about stuff like this. It doesn't make us lame.

Telltale is still doing that. The good one.

Well, yes. But that requires the game to be long enough to allow for a shareware episode that's an hour or a few long. Many current AAA titles are no longer in total than shareware episodes used to be. So it's just not possible anymore to split them in a shareware part and a full part.

But yes, I agree that some demos can vary greatly in quality. There are good ones and there are incredibly annoying ones that really make you stay away from the game. Just like in the movie business. A well made trailer can do wonders to promote a movie. A bad made one can spoil it on several levels.

But nice to hear that you like Outcast after all, tinyE! :-)

I remember playing Fallout and XCOM demo versions. Fallout was pretty bad, slow, unpolished, and XCOM was unstable and kept crashing all the time. I hate when demos are based on an unfinished game, as opposed to being a cut down version of the full game.

Oh man I forgot about Fallout. Identicle story to Outcast, and not to keep sucking up to the forum, but I once again owe everyone a big THANK YOU for that one. The demo is shit but when I first joined up here in December everyone told me to ignore the demo and get the game, and man I am so loving it.

And then there are the demo's that are so short, that you get no idea about what the game is like.

^Yeah this for sure.^ Once nice thing, is that the current Defenders Quest promo, pretty much follows your old shareware method...plus you can carry it right over into the game you buy :D

That's not true at all. Most of the shareware games back then were maybe 10 hours at most with all episodes. That's not really different from today's games. I sitll wonder where the "games today are way shorter" mentality comes from. In the days of the SNES and before everything that wasn't an RPG or (Action) Adventure often wasn't much longer than 2 hours, maybe 5.

I need new glasses. I read "demons can kill games" and thought the thread is about a game where demon monsters ruined the gameplay ;-)

About the topic: Good ol' shareware time, but I always had the feeling the free episodes were the best part of the games. Thanks to youtube I don't play any demos, except maybe some indie games I had the feeling controls can be tricky.

Actually, that's what I meant to make the thread title. You see I'm currently possesed and I need some help with it. By the time I realized I had accidentally posted "demos" everyone had already started commenting on actual demos and it was too late to change it.

Might be true. But most of the games had very few or no save points and so often it took 100 hours before you were able to complete them (even if there was content for just 5 hours). So the games felt much longer than they really were.

This is exactly why I pirate almost every game before buying it. And even then, I still make mistakes. The Defender's quest was a killer. I tried it, and after 3 hours pondering to buy the game or wait for christmas, I was so hooked I bought it full price.

There actually was an extra credit episode about the topic where they basically said, that there are way more situations where a demo will scare potential buyers away than the other way around and I would agree. There are way more games I didn't want to buy first because the demo was "meh" at best and enjoyed greatly after buying them for cheap than there where games I bought because of the demo.