alanschu

They can also provide a fun little aside. I remember playing the demo of some game on Steam that used the Half-Life engine. Shadowgrounds or something, I can't remember. It was a fun little game. Ultimately not worth buying, but the demo took up an hour or so of my time

This doesn't surprise me at all. It was possible to get Windows 98 SE for a long time after XP came out (which is funny, because they continued support for 98 SE, rather than ME).

I laughed when Ion Storm released the second demo of Deus Ex. It was just such a foreign concept. Far Cry's demo made me realise that I needed a new video card, as the Radeon 9500 I had was probably literally running at 0.3 FPS, with hideous graphical artifacting. It was quite clear that the card was not supported ^_^ As for demos affecting purchasing decisions, I'd say I have probably played demos of well over half of the games that I have bought. And there certainly have been some games that I wouldn't have bought had it not been for the demo. I routinely download demos, just to try out new games that may have slipped under the radar as well.

Where did you dig up those numbers Llyranor?

I'm just saying that my EB Games, which has been sufficiently consolized, still stocks it. So does the local Future Shop (which I think is just Canadian). It's really not that hard to find if you just go out and look for it. I can't imagine it just being stocked in Edmonton Canada.

If Troika had to start laying people off due to financial reasons, it's entirely possible that the game essentially had a skeleton staff on it, at which point they aren't doing anything more than just sitting on the game. Given they were able to conveniently release the game the second Half-Life 2 was released (literally the same day), I wouldn't be surprised if there was some sitting around.

Then you're unlucky. Both the EB Games I have visited in the past month have had the Starcraft battlechest. Try here by punching in your zip code to see if any local stores have it. As for Walmart being second rate, who gives a ****. If it has they game you're looking for, then go buy it.

It doesn't cut the game short at all. The amount of content you experience is still the same. It just doesn't get all consumed at the same time. I played the demo for NWN, and it brought me to the end of the tutorial with the Waterdavian creatures being kidnapped. Hardly a significant chunk of the game. Deus Ex's demo completely 100% sold me on the game. People were so clamouring for more that they released an expansion (the second mission) to the demo. I probably played that demo about 40 or 50 times. And in the end, it probably amounted to around 2% of the final game. But I still didn't experience anything less. And it also discounts the fact that games like Fallout have unique demos, that have nothing to do with the story of the game. Naturally they don't come with the whole game, because developers aren't really keen on giving all their hard work away for nothing.

So you can remember a time when teams didn't need many people? I don't think anyone disputes this. Is it the same situation for handheld games? This sounds like it was directed at Sawyer, which is odd, because I'm not really sure how talking about dev team sizes is really a justified opinion. If you don't know what the sizes are, then it's just a guess. And based on Sawyer's response, Kaftan's guess was a poor one. The only thing up for an opinion is the comment about how Bioware can keep working on "real games," which given that Kaftan's insistence on such comments is starting to reach Hades proportions, I can understand the eye roll. But as for the comment about dev team sizes, I don't think it was an opinion. Just a guess. EDIT: In hindsight, the thing I liked about the romances in BG2 was because it was something different. To be honest I find them rather artificial and that they evolve way too quickly. I didn't find the romances of KOTOR particularly interesting, but I actually appreciated the fact that it was relatively mild in its scope, rather than going around doing the horizontal mambo numerous times.

Yeah why have a demo? It would cut the game short. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> Why would it do that? Demos provide people an opportunity to get a 1st hand experience with how the game plays and runs on their system.

I'm still curious if it is important to know where Armenia is off the top of your head. Or heck, even Afghanistan. Considering people criticize Bush about it (which is sort of how this part of the discussion got started), I'm quite surprised. I doubt many political leaders in the world could accurately list the neighbouring countries of Afghanistan. I highly doubt George W. Bush was completely clueless as to where Afghanistan was.

I remember that. Takes you right to the end of the tutorial area.

When you're gods among men, I guess it's suspected

Not to take things too off topic, but handheld and cell phone games are perfect candidates for the more "traditional" CRPG style. You'll get your isometric views and whatnot more easily there.

To be honest, my day is going better now that I have been referred to as: Iron William Rackham

Wait...you're not Epiphany! ^_^

It still works. But I'm curious why they're not using the hype surrounding the game before the release to gain attention for the demo. After a game is released, I seldom bother to download demos. I just read reviews instead. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> Why not? It's effectively still the same thing, in terms of trying out the game and seeing how it runs. I don't typically play demos to build up the hype for a game for me, but rather to see what the game is like. I still feel it's a much better assessment of the game than a review. As for why they wouldn't do it to help build the hype with a prerelease demo, maybe they'd rather have their team working on the final product since they already had a minor delay recently, and are likely in a huge crunch. Taking people off the project to work on a demo is probably low priority.

I'm really hoping it's just a language barrier thing going on right now...

More just the natural, obvious progression of the thread. As soon as I saw the title of it, I knew we'd be talking pirate names.

Iron William Rackham A pirate's life isn't easy; it takes a tough person. That's okay with you, though, since you a tough person. You have the good fortune of having a good name, since Rackham (pronounced RACKem, not rack-ham) is one of the coolest sounding surnames for a pirate. Arr!

I said basic geography, not exact. I knew it was an African country and not some town in South Dakota. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> Good for you. I hadn't even heard of the country prior to looking it up.

Regarding Oilers tickets...well, it's pretty much impossible to get the preseason tickets if I remember correctly. Regular season will likely be a gong show. I heard the minipaks sold like crazy.

Sure. I'm curious why this doesn't work if the demo was released after the intended release date though?

Unfortunately game enthusiasts likely make up a rather insignificant part of the market. If they made up a larger share, then we'd have more games that didn't have gee-whiz bang graphics. Even then, I'd still wager there is a fair share of game enthusiasts that have found it hard to get into a game with heavily outdated graphics. Heck, I'm one of them. I'm a giant fan of the 2nd trilogy of the Ultima games (as well as the Ultima 7 games), but I find it hard to pick up and try playing the original Ultima games, despite their critical acclaim. And I disagree that games like NWN, WoW, and The Sims had horrible graphics. As you say, it's all about relative to the times. Especially considering graphics can be mitigated by art style (which is a huge bonus to a game like WoW). Furthermore, you're not really arguing anything significant. Not surprisingly, games that are fun are the big sellers. But those games were being sold compared to other games. How well would a NWN looking game do today, especially when going up against NWN2? If graphics are as unimportant as you seem to be making them out to be, why did Obsidian completely rewrite the graphics engine for NWN2? Why were there engine changes for KOTOR and KOTOR 2 from the original NWN engine? Furthermore, why were games like Fallout not even really that great of a seller in its own right? I agree that the game is phenomenal, but clearly there was something that stopped it from making significant sales. It couldn't all just be a lack of advertising or some other unfortunate circumstances. There are other posts by people I would probably consider game enthusiasts in this thread alone, as well as scattered throughout this forum, of people that upon playing Fallout for the first time recently aren't all that impressed by it.

I've still seen that Battlechest at almost every computer store. I think the game itself is still a decent seller, for a game that's like 8 years old.