Demo Redux

Serious Sam

I downloaded this demo and found the same, familiar interface from the earlier release. A few taps of the key was all that was needed to get into the game, though it did take some time to load components. I appreciated that each progress bar let me know what was going on - it seemed to make the time pass faster. It is still annoying that on a 1.2ghz AMD with 512meg of RAM and a modern DX8 accelerator, you still have to wait, but the wait for Sam was shorter than for Wolf.

I entered the game with only a few keystrokes, and am dumped into a pool of water. I headed to the surface and onto the shore and got a gander at the bold, colorful world around me. Wow, not bad at all. I saw a phone booth in the corner, headed over into it and pressed the USE key (Enter) and got a big kick out of what came next. I won't spoil it for you, but you should check it out.

Dove back into the water, grabbed the chainsaw off the dock and headed through the cheesy plants and trees towards the temple. Enemies came at me, I found ammo and guns and just went nuts blasting away at anything that moved. The plant graphics did look kind of cheesy, as they appeared to be bitmaps rendered on a transparent cube or slab instead of being real 3D rendered plants, such as you would find in Bryce or Lightwave. They are effective enough I guess, but still, I was a bit disappointed. One cool thing I saw was how they are not rendered at all until you reach a certain distance, then they slowly fade in. Pretty cool.

As I headed forward, I had to wait through a few cut scenes, at least, until I hit the Escape key and the scene instantly switched back to real-time gaming. Much better than the dreaded "slow fade". I found the sniper rifle, and was using it in seconds. It worked much like the one in Unreal Tournament. I kept going through the demo, blasting and running and jumping and before I knew it, it was over. Yes, it was too short, but it was one heck of a fun ride. In just minutes, I was able to get a look at the new weapons, enemies and environments. It was a much more effective introduction than Return To Castle Wolfenstein had been.

I had expected Wolf to be a slam-bam first person shooter, like its predecessor had been, but instead was greeted with a mix of stealth and eye-candy that had an odd pace to it. If it had been a demo for a Thief sequel, it might have been more in line with expectations, but as it was, it did not pay off the way I had expected it to. Serious Sam, on the other hand, was exactly what I expected it to be.

If you look at demos as a promotional product, you may compare it to a commercial. It needs to get you interested fairly quickly and hold onto your attention. In most cases, the commercial needs to represent the product, though in some cases they can work without doing so. In terms of these two demos, Serious Sam did a good job of representing the product and getting the user involved quickly. However, I don't think the same can be said for Castle Wolfenstein. It was not what I expected as a 'sequel' and it was pretty darn inconsistent in its implementation. In this tale of two demos, I have to say, Wolf failed and Sam soared.

PC Screen Shots

Quick note on PC screen shots. Windows has a built in clipboard that captures screens when you press the Print Screen key. It works most of the time and I find it faster and easier than most third party remedies. Once the image is in the clipboard, it is a breeze to paste into your favorite image editing program.

I am a huge fan of JASC's Paint Shop Pro, currently at version 7. It has about 90% of PhotoShop's features for about $100, and after all the years and all the upgrades, I don't think I'd want to use any other program. It has some of its own screen capture tools as well, and has a very handy browse mode that lets you view and work with your images without having to seek them out individually. It also has a handy batch-conversion feature so you can change graphics from one format to another on the fly. For those who need even more automated image handling, JASC also offers Image Robot, which is a $90 program that I consider a "DeBabelizer Light". Very convenient and easy to use for anyone interested in managing and manipulating screen shots. www.jasc.com