I managed to tear myself away from World of Warcraft yesterday to play the glut of demos I had been downloading the past few months but never actually played. Some of them were you standard one gig monstrosity that let me know in the first 30 seconds of actual game play that it would be a quick trip to uninstall city after an expletive or two. Others were just plain weird but entertaining enough to play through the whole demo. I mean, anytime you see a tank appear in Lord of the Rings world, you just gotta stick around to see what else may appear.

One of the better demos that actually has me thinking about whipping out ye olde plastic is Rise and Fall: Civilizations at War. Not a perfect game really, strategy is pretty simple, standard tech tree stuff and oh yeah… you get to run around in third person during the battles. Not constantly of course since you have stamina that acts as your health and energy but plenty enough to have lots of fun shooting people with bows or cutting wide swaths through enemy troops as if you were a minor god of war.

Low on stamina? No problem, jump back to RTS mode and let your hero rest up for when you need them the most. Luckily its not a race for resources and massive base building (which I loved in Total Annihilation) so you have plenty of time to size up your enemy and plan an attack.

Complaints? Well, Cleopatra in the demo is kinda the typical overly sexy female with one tweak… she has the chest size of a man. I mean, she could probably inflate a hippity-hop to explode with air handlers like that.

Other annoyances were paths that you just couldn’t walk through in third person mode. Felt like I was still an AI unit how couldn’t figure out how to go around a boulder or something. Oh and don’t ever attack a building with your melee weapon in hero mode. Once the building falls it triggers some logic to automatically kill anyone who was in it… and touching it, including you! Doh! Thanks for not including a save function, had to start that map over a few times.

Anyway, complaints aside, its a really fun demo and a possible by… if you don’t play WoW all day that is.

I’m a video game demo addict so I had to grab the latest Battlefield 2 demo and give it a spin. Some things are really great such as riding in vehicles with other people, the medic and engineer classes and the new commander feature which enables one person to airdrop supplies, call in artillery and scan the battle field with radar in order to give everyone a heads up. They’ve done a lot of things right vs. the earlier Battlefields but there are some issues which make it unplayable for me.

The first is the multiplayer browser. You have your standard features such as no empty servers, map size preference and sortable columns but the game frequently locks up as it tries to ping servers. Sometimes it will clear up in a few seconds and sometimes the game will just hang. When it hangs I was shocked to see that the game was eating up 500+ megs of memory and I was just in the menu systems, ridiculous!

Oh and once you do find a server with low ping that look interesting, prepare to wait. Loading, loading, loading. By the time the game is ready you are already having second thoughts about what you are doing with your life.

Once you are in it can be quite fun. All sorts of different classes are available to suit your individual playing style and its rather easy to complement other players instead of going lone wolf. The problems during normal game play are sadly the same that plagued the first game. Really bad vehicle controls, especially for the helicopters and planes which fall prey to bad networking code which causes short teleports when you least suspect it. This is really most evident in vehicles vs. running around on foot.

If this game was a home brew project I would have to laud it, unfortunately its a EA behemoth so I have to sadly shake my head and wonder were they put all the development money. A 500 meg menu system maybe?

Sorry folks, its time to uninstall this monstrosity as I won’t be wasting any more time on it. I learned that lesson the hard way with promises in the first game.

You probably should try out the Battlefield 2 Demo for yourself. I can be highly biased when hurt before.

I won’t even talk about the generic oil driven story line in the demo. Bleah!

I just finished the game and witnessed a truly great ending. Serious but with a slight touch of humor. Very well done.

The whole game was a good experience. I can’t rave enough about the control and how everything makes sense. It’s an inspiring story and makes me yearn to work in the video game industry.

I think I’ll just relax and savor the moment instead of jumping on to the next task.

Tomorrow is going to be a nice day because my group at work is going to a training session (week long) for our new content management system. I have a lot of good feeling about the software and the direction we are going in for the past year. Everything is set for success and even better things. It’s all about making people happy really. It’s something I think I’m pretty good at.