Game a Day-Ish:Demo-itis

Played a few demos in the last couple days, Left 4 Dead, Tomb Raider:Underworld, & Mirror's Edge. Demos for me are an important part of the gaming experience, because hopefully the demo is truly representative of the gaming experience. Like a trailer for a film, it should attract the consumer into parting with their money to have that experience, and like film, a good ad does not always denote a good game. However I have found that the percentage of "psych" in game demos are a lot smaller than in film trailers.

Some demos (though increasingly rare these days) are their own self contained experience that afford the gameplay, graphics and sense of story without actually being drawn directly from a level in the game. The legendary Half-Life demo remains one of the single best examples of this as it revealed the relationship the player would have with the NPC Barney, as well as the environments, enemies and gameplay in a rich intense but brief experience.

Left 4 Dead is from the same publisher as Half-Life, Valve (they bought the original developer and brought the game in-house). A stripped down multiplayer (either online or off,using bot's) the game is a series of encounters between four survivors of a zombie apocalypse and the aforementioned zombies. The sheer amount of bodies flung at the player is astounding as is the speed and intensity of the encounters. Graphically the game runs on the Source engine and while I was playing on the Xbox 360 I have to admit disappoint at the look of that version of the game. Like many PC 1st games (Fear, Half-Lief 2) the console ports just don't have the scalability or graphical fidelity of the the PC counterpart on a decently spec'd system. I am looking forward to trying the game on PC.

Tomb Raider:Underworld is a gorgeous looking game that shares the same developer Crystal Dynamics, as TR:Legend and TR:Anniversary, two games I like a lot. The gameplay and controls are tight and the level designs look to be as fiendishly platformy are the previous games. I am looking forward to playing the whole game.

The Mirror's Edge is an original IP from the maker's of the Battlefield series, DICE. Set in a dystopian future where information is controlled by corporations, "runners" like the player character "Faith" move documents and packages back and forth through the city by free-running across rooftops. Using a first-person view, the game provides vertiginous experiences as the player flings themselves on and around the tops of skyscrapers, precariously balanced on pipes and ledges. A fiercely original vision for a game, the gameplay is exhilarating, but if one is prone to motion sickness this game will kill you.