Has you seen the horde of demos to hit the scene recently? There seems to be a general output of a demo every 3 days for the past couple of weeks. It's definitely easy enough to just download all these demos and play them through, than buying a game right now, because of the amount of time you can easily pour into all of the types of game demos recently released.

Let's take a look at the list of demos out at the moment. There's demos for some of the bigger releases this year including Unreal Tournmanet 3, Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, and today's Hellgate: London. Let's not forget some of the other demos that aren't as hyped coming out soon and releasing their demos recently including Painkiller: Overdose, Clive Barker's Jericho, Strangehold, Enemy Territory: Quake Wars, and the Timeshift demo. And if you more inclined, you can check out the demo for Hard to be a God. yeah, it's in Russian, but if you mess with the ini file a little bit, you can play it in English, but if you're one of those people who are still pondering what a ini file is as you keep reading, no fear, the developer is releasing an English demo soon enough.

But what does it all mean? This barrage of demos from developers from all corners of the earth, and before I forget, lets not forget one of the most anticipated demos of the year, Crysis, by the German developers Crytek. Just the capabilities that this game can have in the way of graphics is quit astonishing. Regardless of gameplay, you have to give credit to Crytek for once again coming up with a superb engine, much like they did when they first released Far Cry, but back to the importance of demos and the industry that they're in. I've glorified the titan enough for now.

While demos can be a good thing for developers, it can also be one of the worst things for their companies and some have fallen victim to this n the past. Gamers don't really understand the concept of the demo, they believe if the 20 minutes of gameplay that they're subjected to isn't all that they've dreamed of and hyped about for the past 2 years, than it's crap and they'll run to their nearest forums and complain to their hearts content because 20 minutes of the possibly 20 hours of gameplay that the game actually is wasn't complete perfection. And because of this scare of random tennieboppers running to the forums **** and complaining, some developers have decided to pass the chance of letting gamers try out an early release of their titles. And while sometimes you can gage a game's mechanics from the demo, such as the interface, combat, and general ****of play, people must realize that it's only a fraction of the game. it's a demo. And what is the definition of a demo? Well, let's check....

noun
1. a visual presentation showing how something works

Oh yeah, showing how something works....Not the entire presentation, just a fraction. I've seen some pretty crappy demos where the actual game has actually turned out great, but first impressions are a big part of what the business is about and there's a large percentage of gamers who are turned off by the first offense to their gaming time. Time is everything yes, but don't judge a 20 hour endeavor by just 20 minutes of your time. But enough pleading for the time of developers, if you are the way you are, I can't change you by a simple blog post.

Let's take a look at some of these demos, but just a couple because of the time allowed by myself to type Anyway, to my surprise, my favorite demo at the moment has to be the demo for Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare. Infinity Ward simply did a superb job with optimization of their gaming engine with their fourth time around in the Call of Duty series. It just plays well on a host of computers and for people out there who don't have a top of the line computer right now, you can easily crank up a lot of graphic settings to make this creation look great with a decent enough framerate and what I mean with decent enough, is that it runs flawlessly on a lot of the maxed settings on medium computers. And being the first time away from normal everyday World War II setting that every other Call of Duty was in, Modern Warfare is to everyone's surprise a great turn of events in this series to revive it and have it compete with modern FPS's like the Battlefield series. If you get some time, check it out. After Call of Duty 3 only being released for consoles, I was a little leery about their latest release, but with this demo, I'm very much looking forward to their newest installment in the series.

How about that Unreal Tournament 3 demo. Yeah....I wasn't impressed for some reason. No, I'm not being hypocritical by bashing it here on the site. I'm sure the final version is going to be just as good as the previous games, but I guess the graphics didn't immediately catch my eye, like I thought they would, but I'm thinking it's because you can't max out the graphics options that much in the demo because the developers didn't include that option. The more I play, the more I come to enjoy the graphical design that the developer was trying to portray. It's definitely a different ****of graphics, but it seems to fit the setting and the multiplayer in the game is as fun as it ever was as in previous releases, but I think that's it, it seems like the previous releases with more maps and better graphics. Don't get me wrong, Epic really gets the fun of multiplayer right, but the mechanics of the game seem a little stale after this many times with the same gameplay. I am looking forward to the full game though because in multiplayer there's not a whole lot that can compete with the intense carnage that the Unreal Tournament series gives their players. Check it out this season, I just wish they would have made it possible to go cross console with pc players playing console gamers, but that's cool, most people will probably be playing in on their pc.

I do want to bring up one more demo though before I talk your ear off, the demo for Clive Barker's Jericho. This seems like it could be the diamond in the rough for fps gamers alike. The ****of gameplay with the squad based tactics and the storyline done by Clive Barker himself seems to be a great combination. Just from the demo, which has some pretty impressive graphics, you can tell that the setting is gonna be a big part of the game and this is fine with me for sure. The entire setting, background, team-based strategy, squad members, and gameplay seems to be a winner in this years barrage of games coming out this fall. Check it out...

- SadExchange