Demos

The Ups and Downs of Downloads

In the age of DSL and Cable modems, demos of the big game titles are more within our grasp than ever before. These 100 megabyte plus downloads contain more graphics, more sound and more effects than any demos used to. But just because they are big does not mean they are better.

Frankly, some of the demos I have downloaded over the last few months have been pretty bad. AquaNox, the highly touted 'visual feast,' did not impress me in the least in its demo form. The same goes for DroneZ and a few other titles out there. If companies are going to spend all that time putting out a huge demo, the least they could do is make the game interesting to play. Remember Daikatana? The demo was so much weaker than the later levels in the game, that it may have done as much to doom the game as anything else did. If they had just put forth a demo based upon some of the later levels, this game may have actually had some respectable sales. Well, maybe not, but I admit I am in a giving mood these holidays.

This month, my curiosity was piqued with the release of two major demo releases: Return To Castle Wolfenstein, single player and Serious Sam The Second Encounter. I have been a Wolf fan from way back; a lot of us cut our FPS teeth on the title. All these years later, they finally have put forth an updated sequel, and I had been itching to play it because, in part, I thought it would offer more of the same with an updated engine. Serious Sam on the other hand, was a more recent phenomenon. A visually impressive throwback to the gameplay of the original Doom, where you have big guns, big explosions and hordes of strange creatures to plow through on your way to the next objective. The sequel promised more lush images and even more bizarre characters to interact with. I was disappointed when I found that only one of these new demos ended up paying off.

Castle Wolfenstein

Return To Castle Wolfenstein had some multiplayer demos out, but I had been wanting the single player version because, after all, the original was all about single player. I downloaded and installed the demo, and from the very start I felt that more time and effort had been put into the graphics than usability and gameplay. For instance, the opening interface stretched the various options across the screen so that you had to move the mouse a greater distance to get at them. On top of that, they did not default to useful selections for keyboard users. Why not default to Play, a level and a difficulty so that we could just hit Enter a few times and dive right in? Minor, yes, but there's more. There are these annoying intro screens that come up while the program loads files and such. They force you to sit there and wait while they load, and then when they are done, you have to click this glowing arrow in the lower-right corner of the screen to progress. I could not seem to find a way to get the Enter key to move me forward. I thought it would be over, but it took me to an annoying cut screen, that luckily allowed me to Escape out of it, but I had to sit and wait for this annoying "fade very slowly to black" effect. I could have done without this little nicety - I just wanted to shoot some Nazi scumbags. As if that was not enough, there was yet another intro screen that showed mission instructions while code loaded, and again I had to click on that smallish arrow in the lower-right corner. Then another annoying "fade very slowly to black" scenario and finally, finally I was able to get started.

I headed out of the cell and found these rather bland, flat wall textures facing me as I headed down the hall. I had started with a knife, but then a gun was on the floor, so I picked up. I reached a doorway, and instead of it opening automatically as I ran into it, I had to hit the Enter key. Argh. So then I proceeded forward and found that the gun worked great as I killed the scientist. The guard came, I killed him, then opened the door, ran up some stairs and somehow got a machine gun after killing another guard. I ran around, got ammo and health and started blasting, only to find that the darn thing reloaded at the worst possible moments! I don't want to sit there waiting for 2 seconds while the darn gun reloads! I just want it to keep shooting these Nazi scumbags!

I wandered up an oddly designed spiral staircase that just 'stopped' in mid air with no railing, and eventually made it to a room where people were shooting at huge holes in the thick castle floor. I expect castle floors to be very strong, so this entire idea seemed out of whack. Further, I was struck by the inconsistencies in the game. You could blow things apart, but not open chests and lockers? Why were the textures in some parts of the game, such as the castle stones, so detailed, while others such as the lockers, tables and meals so flat? Why had they spent so much time on fog and transparency effects, but so little on other elements of the game?

I was annoyed, and after playing three more times all the way through, I was still annoyed. Where were the cries of "mein leiben" and all the barking dogs? RTCW looked like a B-movie filled with stupid monsters and mad scientists instead of Nazi scumbags. There were no real elements tying it to the original, and frankly, I lost interest pretty darn fast. Is this the best they could do after all these years?