Rock, Paper, Shotgun

I miss demos. I miss them so much. I wouldn’t be here, writing these words, if it weren’t for demos: how else could a sport-fearing, skinny young misery with only the slightest pittance for pocketmoney have found his way into playing video games? Once, my bedroom was littered with floppy discs, each and every one of which had at some point led to me standing outside a game shop, counting pennies with a quivering hand, praying I had enough.

Granted, magazines were the gateway drug back then, when there was no way to watch a trailer or scour Facebook for new screenshots, but later in life the web too seemed an infinite fount of sampled digital delights, and led to any number of purchases of those games that seemed the most absorbing – or simply because the demo ended, apparently expertly, at a point which left me urgently hungry for more. Those days are gone.
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Paradox Interactive’s latest strip of historical beef jerky, Commander: Conquest of the Americas, has a brand spanking new demo available for download at FilePlanet. CotA casts players as a European power scrabbling for colonies in the New World at the start of the 16th century, meaning it’s all turning a profit while remembering to fight your wars. Or the other way around, if you’re a jerk. I’ve had a quick look and it seems plenty engaging in a biscuity, Paradoxy, straight-laced sort of way, so why not give it a shot?

The demo stands alone. In all of entertainment, with the possible and fairly rare exception of novel samplers, there’s nothing quite like it – it may be based on the same principles as a movie trailer or a single, but the execution and the eventual effect is entirely different. A movie trailer is a mash-up of the film’s best moments – often to the point that the film itself simply can’t measure up to that ninety seconds of concentrated bombast. A single is, in theory at least, the most immediate track from an album, the song that demonstrates that artist at the height of their abilities.

A demo? It’s got to do so much more than simply look cool or sound catchy. Read the rest of this entry »

Yes, due to the cheery activity of clever internet bods, they’ve managed to drag the Bioshock demo from the hands of Fileplanet before release. This caused the preloading to be cancelled and… oh, all manner of stuff. In other words, yes, it’s a cheery clusterfuck.

But that’s not really our problem. What matters is it’s available. You can get it via a direct download via Softpedia (Which claims to be a torrent, but actually isn’t) or torrent via Mininova (Which claims to be a torrent and- strike a light! – actually is). Be sure to update your drivers and stuff – in fact, the reason for the delay in the release is meant to be there’s some new drivers for Bioshock coming out today, so it may actually be (er) a bit quirky.

Meer and Walker are currently excitedly downloading it, and expect some screens in the feature we’re lobbing up later today.