They don’t make them like they used to

May 10, 2008

I’ve been downloading a lot of demo games on the XBox 360 and deleting a lot of them, too. It’s amazing how bad some of these demos are; it’s like the game companies don’t have a single lick of marketing sense.

the point of a demo is to let you know whether or not the game is fun. So when I start up The Darkness demo and get several spinning-logo splash screens, a loading screen, another loading screen disguised as a game control guide (complete with blood-spattered controller, thanks guys), I’m already a little impatient to start with the blowing crap up. So I’m not happy to be faced with a several minute non-interactive cut scene in which I’m riding in car listing to some bozo yammer about plot.

Incidentally, the driver of this car keeps nudging other cars out of the way — making risky lane changes, clipping bumpers, sideswiping people. Then they act surprised that the police are following them. If you want to involve me in the story with your cut scene, it better not be stupid. Or long.

Then I downloaded the demo for Conan: yet another logo-fest. Nihilistic Software? What message am I supposed to get from that brand name. “We don’t test our code, so what does it matter?” Conan kills some random guy while some random chick kills some other random guy. The dialog then goes like this, more or less:

Random chick: Who do you serve?
Conan: I serve no man.
Random chick: Maybe you will serve … a woman.

The camera begins a slow pan up Random Chick’s body, starting with her butt-cleavage and working its way up.

Conan: Maybe I will … service … a woman.
Random chick: You dare to speak to me in that manner!

Yet another demo that doesn’t survive the cut scene. I waited for both of these to download because they are presumably worth playing, but the developers felt the need to show off their cinematic and script-writing skills first.

No, you idiot. I want to play the Game. Maybe later I’ll experience the game, but for now let me blow stuff up.

On the other extreme is Operation: Darkness (a game about vampire Nazis, apparently) which didn’t plot at me or show me cutscenes, but instead dropped me — without explanation — into the character leveling-and-building screen. WTF? This is like demoing the Photoshop preferences panel.

The only demo I’ve downloaded recently that really nailed it was Kung Fu Panda, which spends about fifteen seconds setting the mood before turning control over to me and letting me blow things up. In this case that meant kicking the crap out of boxes, but none of the other games I played let me do anything nearly that cool because they were too busy showing off how cool they were to let me at the dang controls.

When you get your game-demo ass handed to you by a freaking video game based on an animated cartoon movie, maybe it’s time to reevaluate what a “demo” means.

Posted in Entertainment