You know, the good old days when companies would provide us a whole chapter for free for all those great shooters from the 90s, most of which would last well over 3-4 hours on the first playthrough. Nowadays, we should count ourselves lucky if we get a demo that lasts over half an hour. The absolute worst example of stingy demos in recent times would probably be the demo for The Orange Box on the 360, which provides us with a whopping 5-10 minutes of the beginning of episode 2, and zero content on portal and team fortress 2. What's worse is these demos are often around 1.5-2 GB in size, most of which is occupied by half a dozen unskippable ultra high-res splash screens for the company's fancy logos (damn you EA, I hope you rot in hell for making me watch your logo every single time I want to play every single one of your games...which nowadays is pretty much every single game out there seeing as how EA pretty much owns every single company). Companies should really take inspiration from Blizzard in this regard. Show an intro cinematic the very first time you start the game and never play it again, and let the user see it manually if they want to. Such a simple thing really, yet so hard to find nowadays. It seems most companies nowadays are intent on being as sadistic and evil as possible by trying to reduce our enjoyment any way they can.

But let's get back to the issue at hand: game demos. Short demos are bad, but you know what's even worse? No demo at all. I'm looking at you Bethesda and Bioware. Neither of those two developers have released demos for their last few games, and it doesn't look like they're willing to change this trend. Usually, the cop out argument is that it's difficult to have demos for open ended games like Oblivion and Mass Effect. What a load of nonsense. Daggerfall (released by Bethesda back when they were awesome) is one of the most expansive and open-ended games ever released, yet it had a fantastic, perfectly functioning demo. Companies that refuse to release demos don't come off as being trustworthy, and it usually feels like they're afraid to show their games and would rather rely on all the carefully filtered hype that we get courtesy of modern video game "journalists". And in the case of Oblivion and Mass Effect, my suspicions were indeed justified as both games manage to be severely underwhelming and fall way short of what was promised by the developers.

Tsk tsk, sneaky and shameless business tactics are everywhere nowadays. Can't help but feel game companies were a lot more honest and well...less evil than they are now. Anyways, I'll end my rant for now. Lemme know what you think.