Turok

I thought it was cool. A bit hard to aim when things got hectic, though. I might be a bit to used to CoD4 aim assist…

Edit–
But the knife seems a bit overpowered. Instakill if you get close.

And the checkpoints are a bit far apart…

The bullshit magazine exclusive demo has guaranteed I will never buy this game even in the future when the demo is available on Live in the US.

It is extremely easy to take a principled stand when it comes to such a marginal release.

I believe it will end up on Live for you as well soon enough. It’s available here in Europe

Yeah but see, even when it is on Live, I’m just going to skip the demo completely out of protest for the magazine timed exclusive bullshit.

My will would not strong enough to live by such a statement if we were talking about a Big Game I really wanted to try out, but it sure as fuck is for Turok.

In Major Nelson’s podcast this week, the studio head behind Turok says it’ll be on LIVE next week.

Forgive the ignorant question, please, but what issue do you take with the time exclusive for the demo?

Magazines are obsolete. Just put the demo on Live as soon as it is ready, like they did everywhere other than North America. In the bigger picture of things I generally dislike any artificial barrier to entry for demos, whether it is being on a magazine disc or you have to subscribe to FilePlanet for the demo or whatever other stupid thing. Demos are advertisements, treat them as such and make them as widely available as possible. Or face my impotent boycott!

I dunno, I had fun with the knife. I didn’t fire a single round until I got to the miniboss dinosaur. Everything else got killed with the knife.

Played the demo today. Just very standard-feeling. It’s also suffering by comparison with Crysis, which I’m playing at the moment on a new high end machine. By comparison with that, it looks extremely mediocre and the environment feels very static.

Crysis rocks.

That really annoyed me with GH3…I should have taken it as a warning of how I would feel about the finished product. Packaging your game demo with another game exclusively is obsolete bundlefuckery as well. I dismissed Crackdown for a long time because the premise did not appeal to me on the surface and the Halo 3 thing actually hurt it from where I was sitting (talk about impotent boycotts).

Also, why are we still at a point where a console demo can massively undersell the main game? DMC4’s demo is an exercise in frustration and not selling the product on its strengths (timed? make me reload?). GH3’s you get to play 3 songs (or whatever it was) then you have to reload the demo. Burnout Paradise’s generally buggy “beta” demo. I know the third wasn’t necessarily intentional, but they all seem to embrace the “annoy the player into buying the real deal” scenario. This isn’t shareware, and if your game is any good you don’t need to piss me off. That goes double if your game isn’t that great.

Seriously? I thought DMC4’s demo was awesome. I was really digging the tighter controls, and the boss fight was awesome. Grabbing his horns with the devil bringer’s grappling hook in particular.

I finally got to try the Turok demo. What a disappointment. Completely underwhelming. I don’t know if the frame rate is low, or if the animations are somewhat off, or if its the weapon sound effects, but it all combines to make a pretty unsatisfying shooter. It might be worth playing as a bargain title, or a rental maybe.

I’ll say one thing though, they did pretty much capture the generic shooter atmosphere and the mediocre nature of Turok for the N64. So congratulations on that. The only thing they’re missing is the fog.

Yeah, I didn’t get that complaint either. It is timed, but there is well enough time to run through the whole demo level.

And what was bugged in the Burnout Paradise demo?

Well, I didn’t. I thought the timer was enough of a significant break from the series’ standard gameplay that I didn’t bother restarting once it ran out. I like demos that let me freely play whatever level they’ve given up, without any artificial constraints beyond the fact that you can’t save and you can’t get past point A in the plot.

It crashed numerous times, while trying to make connections to EA’s server. After which I had to go through the multiple loadscreens and the totally sweet DJ talking me through my learners permit, only to have it crash again. I’m sure somebody’s going to claim it was either a) my connection or b) xbox live’s fault, but I tested some of my multiplayer games at the same time and had no problem playing them. Perhaps I need to update my drivers on my xbox?

The game plays like an Unreal 1 game only uglier.

I think that’s a bit of an exaggeration, at least for the 360 version. Though starting the demo in the cave was a really dumb decision on their part, they should start you in the forest. Framerate feels clunky, also the vertical aiming feels really messed up, I have a lot harder time aiming in this game than in most console FPS games.

Yeah, same here. I think the poor aiming is related to the clunky framerate. At least, that’s my guess.

The thing that stuck out for me was the sound design – the enemies were suffering from wolfenstein syndrome, saying the same things over and over, which was really annoying.

If the dinosaurs cry out “mein lieben!” when you shank them, my interest will climb sharply.

Especially if they drift. Dinos can’t move straight.

Yes, I think that is about the only way I am interested in this.