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Favourite demo(s)

Astral Rag

Arcane
Joined
Feb 1, 2012
Messages
7,771
Gta demo with time limit turned off

Heh, me and my brother were over the moon when we discovered how to disable that timer. Great times.

Maybe not strictly demos but I played a lot of Apogee and all id sharewares to death.

Like many others in this thread I also played that Fallout demo over and over.


Some others:

Die by the Sword
Half-Life: Uplink
Carmageddon 2
i76
Drakan
UT
unrealtournament2015-bsu8z.jpg
:love:
 
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Destroid

Arcane
Joined
May 9, 2007
Messages
16,628
Location
Australia
BF1942 and Tribes: Vengeance. Full multiplayer support with 1 level for BF and 3 levels for tribes, there wasn't really any pressing need to get the full game.
 

Melan

Arcane
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Civitas Quinque Ecclesiae, Hungary
PC RPG Website of the Year, 2015 Codex 2016 - The Age of Grimoire Make the Codex Great Again! Grab the Codex by the pussy Insert Title Here RPG Wokedex Strap Yourselves In Codex Year of the Donut Codex+ Now Streaming! I helped put crap in Monomyth
Unreal Tournament packed more content than some full games. Then you got the full UT and it was such a step up it still managed to blow your socks off. Maybe they don't make them like they used to because they were too good.

HL: Uplink, for being something different.

And of course...
Thief 2's demo which features an alpha version of Life of the Party called The Unwelcome Guest. The cityscape is bigger and a bit different, it is stylistically closer to Thief 1, there is another way to Angelwatch through a building near the greenhouse to the north that bypasses Lady Louisa's suite, Angelwatch has a creepier ambient soundtrack than in the final game, you can get to Angelwatch's rooftops, and while Angelwatch doesn't have any lower floors it has an access to the ballroom through an open window outside.
Unwelcome Guest is a fascinating evolutionary step, because Thief 2 seems to have changed so much between it and the final release, and not for the better. Particularly where Mechanists are concerned. The demo seemed to have a much clearer concept of them - "they are like the Hammers, but with technology from Metropolis" - and if I recall correctly, didn't yet feature Elmer Fudd Karras.
 

DwarvenFood

Arcane
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Atlantic Accelerator
Strap Yourselves In Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Wasteland 2 Codex USB, 2014 Divinity: Original Sin 2 BattleTech Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire
I have played unlimited amounts of Return to castle Wolfenstein beta/demo, which featured a single multiplayer map (beach). Was a blast, unfortunately the small community slowly died out when the full game got released.
 

Unkillable Cat

LEST WE FORGET
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27,088
Codex 2014 Make the Codex Great Again! Grab the Codex by the pussy
Reading about Half-Life: Uplink made me remember one of the most retarded online discussions I've had about HL ever. I was in an online voice chat related to an online game (sometime in 2011 IIRC) and some pompous ass was talking about how Half-Life 2: Ep 3 would never be released because Valve never released more than 2 expansion packs to their games, as exemplified by Half-Life 1 only having two expansion packs.

So I joined in.

Me: "Three. Half-Life 1 has three expansion packs."
Him: "Whut?"
Me. There's Opposing Force, Blue Shift and Decay."
Him: "No no, you're wrong...there were only two released."
Me: "One green, one blue, one red."
Him: Given that I am the absolute online authority on all things Half-Life, you simply can't be anything else but wrong."
Me: "Google "Half-Life Decay and see what you get."
Him: "I don't have to, I know I'm right."
Me: "Fine, anyone else wanna Google it?"
3rd Man: "I already have - it's real XXXX (pompous ass name withheld)."
Him: "...that can't be."
Me. "It has an emphasis on co-op play and features Dr. Mossman."
Him: "No! He's trolling! He's lying!"
Me: "Then how come [3rd Man] is claiming it's real?"
Him: "Because you're both in on it! You're just fucking trolling me!"

From there we started throwing links into the chat window so him (and everyone else) could see that it's real. He wouldn't give, he kept making the claim that this was all an elaborate hoax. I remember asking him if I was the kind of guy that would spend considerable time creating fake images (and a YouTube video) of a HL expansion, just to mess with one guy on the internet I barely know. Guess the response. :roll:
 

Carrion

Arcane
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Lost in Necropolis
The Operation Flashpoint demo is probably the one I've played the most. They really picked the perfect mission (Ambush) for it, as it's very atmospheric and has many memorable events but still has some wildly different outcomes and lots of replay value. Back then it was really cool how the game put you in the shoes of just one soldier who's part of a bigger group, and initially your first priority was pretty much just not getting shot ― spotting and especially killing an enemy was just a bonus. The mission itself, while being relatively heavily scripted and having a long build-up with a couple of cutscenes, driving sequences and so on, could still play out very differently every time. You might capture a town and finish the mission as intended, but you might also find yourself rushing to a helicopter and trying to escape from an oncoming enemy counter-attack (which resulted in a very memorable cliffhanger ending). I got really sold on the game when my entire squad got wiped out, and the only remaining course of action was just to get the hell out alive. I had no idea where the enemy was, so I just kept my head down and slowly crawled towards an empty enemy car, stole it and drove it all the way back to one of the starting areas, where I found most fortifications destroyed and many friendly soldiers turned into corpses.

It just makes you sad that Bohemia doesn't care about the single-player content anymore.
 

taxalot

I'm a spicy fellow.
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My favorite demo was when I got the Heroes of Might and Magic 2 demo in a game magazine, thinking "Damn, this is one long demo", and then realized the magazine had accidently burnt the full game on the demo CD. Whoops.
 

Black

Arcane
Joined
May 8, 2007
Messages
1,872,592
HoMM 3. One map with a time limit, offered more gameplay than many modern games. I remember you started with a single Castle town but the music was from Stronghold.
 

sser

Arcane
Developer
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Mar 10, 2011
Messages
1,866,661
GTAII and Postal II both had demos with timers. You could turn off the timers and do just about whatever. I bought neither game despite having a good time. Why buy the cow if I can get the milk for free sort of deal.
 

polo

Magister
Joined
Jul 8, 2014
Messages
1,737
I remember getting the transport tycoon demo from a magazine, oh boy i spent way too much of my youth playing that.
 

NJClaw

OoOoOoOoOoh
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HoMM 3. One map with a time limit, offered more gameplay than many modern games. I remember you started with a single Castle town but the music was from Stronghold.
HoMM 3 demo was incredible, a friend of mine had it when I was a kid and we used to play it non-stop every single day. I was 6 years old and the underground scared the shit out of me, good memories.

The only other demos I have fond memories of are those of GTA 1 and Heart of Darkness.
 

Falksi

Arcane
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Feb 14, 2017
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Nottingham
Curse of Monkey Island for defo. Perfect bitesized portion to wet the appetite. Had me chomping at the bit for more.

Carmageddon was another. Didn't bother buying the game as I got enough thrills flattening old dears out of that as I needed.
 
Joined
Dec 24, 2018
Messages
1,783
Dark Messiah's demo was great. There was a singleplayer part that was basically a short section of the game from around the halfway point (modified slightly to cut out a large detour and the worm) that showcased pretty much all playstyles and was basically a good all-around combat arena with lots of physics stuff to play around with, and if memory serves there was also a multiplayer component that was basically just one map from the full "tug of war" game mode, namely one into the undead side. Both modes were pretty fun, though, even the demo showcased how godawful the multiplayer loading times were, which I think was a big part of why DM never really took off in its day (that, plus Ubisoft abandoning it).
 

Filthy Sauce

Arbiter
Joined
Jan 26, 2016
Messages
613
I remember mostly shareware stuff. The original Exile from spiderweb, and Realmz from Fantasoft are ones I spent dozens of hours replaying.

I remember being excited about a Daggerfall demo cd... But my family only had a Macintosh. My neighbors went on vacation, and I crawled through an unlocked window to use their PC.
 

kangaxx

Arbiter
Joined
Jan 26, 2020
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1,385
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Atop a flaming horse
HL Uplink was good, as some others have pointed out.

I'll put in a vote for a semi-rare Tomb Raider Last Revelation demo that came on a cover disk from a newspaper, bizarrely. My parents must have had a subscription to it when I was a kid. From memory it was a cut level that never made it into the final game. I have a soft spot for TLR and think it was underrated.
 

catfood

AGAIN
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Nirvana for mice
I liked demos that offered different content than the main game. Examples that come to mind are Half Life (Uplink), Age of Empires Rise of Rome (which came with an incrdible third mission) and Starcraft (where they even went out of their way to voice everyting).
 

Comte

Guest
I have fond memories of the TIE Fighter pre release demo which was a very difficult mission. With a nice Dodge Neon ad at the end.

 
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visions

Arcane
Joined
Jun 10, 2007
Messages
1,801
Location
here
Unreal Tournament's demo must be my most played one.

When I was a kid and we didn't have a PC at home, me and my brother liked to hang out at my mother's workplace and play on her work PC when possible. Usually it was after school, when some colleague of hers was missing so she worked in the colleague's office and we would play games in her office. There was an older colleague there (I guess he was around 50 years old back then) who installed UT's demo for us on my mom's work PC one day. I remember that he learned that we were playing on her PC (probably Wolfenstein or Keen or something) and he thought he'd install a demo of a really cool new game for us. This was the first FPS with real mouse look that we played (I think the year could have been 1999), coming from Wolfenstein and Doom which we used to play with keyboard only, it seemed really hard to us at first. :lol:

A few years later my brother got some ISP's disc which again had UT's demo on it (pretty sure that was the only thing that disc was good for for us). From that point onwards I had UT's demo installed on any computer that could run it that I had access to until something like 2014, when I finally bought the full game on GOG. I didn't get internet at home until the second half of 00's, that was why I never bought the full version when it was still for sale in local stores (I figured there's no point in buying the full game if I can't play multiplayer). Anyway I would guess that I have spent 100+ hours on UT's demo over the years.

The shareware version of the first Geneforge was another favorite of ours. I think the year might have been 2001. This was one of our first rpg-s (if not the first). We were usually looking for demos and abandonware (we didn't know this term of course but local sites that hosted abandonware were easy to find) on her work computer on our own but we avoided the category of roleplaying games, because we didn't understand what it meant. I knew the word role but didn't understand it in this context. Autumn 2001 was also when I started to read the local PC mag (by this point we had a crappy 75 mhz computer at home). Not sure if I learned about role playing games from there or downloaded the Geneforge shareware demo some months before to learn what the fuck a "roleplaying game" is but we were impressed with how much content was in the demo and that the game wasn't like anything we had played before. I remember we thought that the author of the game must be a really cool guy for making the demo that big.

Later either the IT guys at my mother's workplace deleted the games we had installed or maybe they just upgraded her computer from Win 98 to XP but in either case the Geneforge demo was purged from her PC, our Geneforge characters were lost like tears in rain and we forgot the name of the game. I learned the name of the game again only years later thanks to the Codex.
 
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deem

Savant
Joined
Oct 3, 2019
Messages
421
I remember way back in the day I would go to my friends house. His father had a PC and he had one game installed. It was a demo version of a little known FPS called Project I.G.I. The demo contained only the first mission and we played it to death. The layout of that map is forever burned into my brain. Incidentally, having played the new Hitman games, their highly re-playable levels brought this memory right back.
 
Joined
Aug 10, 2012
Messages
5,869
Armies of Exigo demo. It was so feature complete (had all 3 races and 2 maps) that it was probably one of the main reasons why the full game bombed (that, and EA leaving it to die and releasing the vastly inferior BfME in the same month)

The game kicked ass, too.
 

Ash_Williams

Novice
Joined
Jan 9, 2022
Messages
3
Location
Canada



I remember playing this demo with my dad along with a bootleg copy of Half Life 1, i had played Fallout 2 and Tactics quite a lot at a friends house. I remember being very excited for Black Isle's Fallout 3 to come out, and was very heart broken when it was confirmed that it was cancelled.
 

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