Half-Life (1998)
The debut of gaming's greatest futuristic dystopian potboiler tickled our interest with Half-Life: Day One, a demo that contained a fifth of the entire game. A second demo, Half-Life: Uplink, was the holy grail. While some demos contain material not found in the finished product – the Age of Empires demo, for example, included two unreleased maps and a unique campaign – Uplink, set 48 hours into the story, consisted of cut material and revised levels.
Prey (2006)
Size matters when it comes to demos. Deus Ex released its first few levels for free, and Batman: Arkham Asylum had a director's cut of the first hour of the game. But when a demo is too long, sometimes you can't be bothered to buy the finished product. In its sampler for Prey, 3D Realms dished up a massive chunk of gameplay: from the first level to when the Native American protagonist, out to rescue his missus from alien bastards, gains immortality.
Stranglehold (2007)
Like a taste of caviar before a gallon of fish eggs, some demos are better than the game that follows. John Woo's Stranglehold made a bang with a demo that saw you slo-mo sniping, waving golden guns, and sliding around on carts like a drunk milkman. The full game, however, bored to tears with a melodramatic story and countless waves of enemies.
Just Cause 2 (2010)
Making a demo for an open world sandbox isn't easy, but thehard workersbehind Just Cause 2 took the task in hand. "We wanted to capture the total freedom offered by the main game while still providing enough structure and handholding so players wouldn't be totally lost or confused," says Chris Dillon, producer at Square Enix. "We tackled this by adding a special zone at the start that allowed players to get used to the controls and world logic before being thrown into the action."
As for the choice of locale: "Every part of the demo ended up being discussed in great depth. The decision to locate the demo within a region of the desert was made for several reasons. It was one of our newly introduced climate zones, so we wanted players to experience the advances we had made in the environments."
Darksiders (2010)
It's hard to beat a demo that lasts 90 freaking minutes. It didn't hurt that the game is good, also. It was probably a smart choice to have such a long demo, since the game takes a while to really get going, and becomes addictive somewhere after the first hour - just in time for the demo to end and for players to want more.
Jul 13, 2010
The Top 7... Best games of 2010 (so far)
With a first half this good, who needs the rest of the year?
Which console will win Fall 2010?
E3 is over. Battle plans are unveiled. Time to argue over who's going to come out on top!
