I spent like 3 hours downloading the Mega Man X PC demo onto a 1.22 MB 5.25" floppy disk at the Provo City Library and it was a prized possession. It was the entire opening stage! On my DOS computer!
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This isnât a particular demo but I have rly fond memories of this demo disc (remember those)
according to the innernette this was the first one in this series for the ps2, which tracks cause i probably played it around early 2002
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just cause 2 was a pretty good demo. iirc it just put you in the regular game but you only had 30 minutes with it. because itâs an open world game replaying it was kind of like a groundhog day type thing, just head off in a different direction and see what you can blow up before time runs out.
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christmas nights duh
others (THPS, MGS2, FFVII/VIII) already mentioned
someone said something about wanting long JRPG demos. the switch DQXI demo is like 15 hours. there was a lunar eternal blue ps1 edition demo that was about that long too
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When I was in middle school, someone had managed to install the GTA 2 demo on a bunch of the classroom computers, and we used to take turns playing it. It gave you something like a 5-10 minute time limit and no missions, but you could run riot and see how high of an alert rating you could get. It was peak donât-let-the-teacher-see gaming.
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one of my childhood favorite games is Little Big Adventure 2: Twinsenâs Odyssey and i first played it on a PC Gamer demo disc (the holy grail of magazine purchases to beg your parents for). It was a 3-part vertical slice of the game where if you transitioned from one area it would kick you to the next part of the demo. The first part lets you roam around the starting island during a rainstorm (the first act of the game) and i found it so lovely and atmospheric, thanks in large part to the very good music
if you enter any houses you get booted to the second part, which is weirdly enough a completely optional cave area that you enter to get protection magic in the full game. If you leave the cave you get sent to the final part, which is wayyy later when youâre in the molten core of an alien gas planet. I remember being really intrigued by the scope of the game as implied by the demo.
The other memorable demo from my youth was the one for the Neverhood, which is only notable because it has a unique music track not in the full game
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i played the shogo demo to death on my compaq presario. if you morphed into the tank/car mode of your mech and exited the level you got to play a second level.
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My favorite part of demos was prodding at the edges of them until something weird happened. Rocket Jockey was great for that. The demo was just a single, fairly bland stadium, but if you got the right trajectory you could slingshot yourself straight through the walls into the infinite beyond.
Which is cool! But then, sometimes, when you made your way back onto the playing field your hooks and cables worked differently. They would catch on the ground (and walls, maybe?) and you could make huge crazy webs until youâd saturated all 32MB of RAM and Windows 95 crashed.
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This is the first I heard of the alternative soundtrack! Thatâs amazing.
i remember it bugged me when i played the full game and that track wasnât in it. i also couldnât find it online for a long time, it made me feel weirdly like i dreamt it
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This track was in the retail version I had, and when I bought the GOG version I was kinda confused by how the music was all rearranged. I was a bit disappointed to find the desert Island music had been replaced with the creepy cave music
doom, duke3d
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Yâall reminding me of how the shareware version of Blood had several levels using different songs than the full release. Fortunately you could edit an .ini file to set what music was used in what level so I could get it back to the shareware tracks I preferred.
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Came with a free Zone of the Enders if I recall correctly
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Wasnât the Shadow Warrior demo the better of the gameâs two episodes?
Yes, but most of the best Shadow Warrior levels were fan-made ones which you needed the full game to play.
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Am I remembering right that a lot of Doom and Quake maps only required the demo?
has been a while but with quake iâm pretty sure if you have the assets you want in a .pak file and the executable anything will work
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ZZTâs demo came with the full level editor, and one of the big reasons for its initial success and enduring popularity was that anyone could grab the demo for free and create and release an entire game with it.
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I worked at a technical college in 2008 and one of my jobs was to supervise classes when teachers were absent.
The Young Adults i supervised would visit one particular room in the library, shut all the blinds, install the Halo demo and play LAN deathmatches on the worst looking software renderer i have ever seen. Perhaps it was just an optiplex AGP card glitching out.
When they were finished, they would open the mice and throw the mouse balls at each other and leave them on the floor.
One day IT found out about this, so they glued shut all the mice. The Young Adults therefore unplugged all the mice and bent all the PS2 pins.
I think about those kids and thier shenanigans a lot.
Best demo is Terra Incognita/Net Yaroze because at some point I distinctly remember that these were ârealâ games, and i was instantly radicalised.
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