Shadowcat on 1/11/2012 at 06:47

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"Max Payne" 1 & 2 spring to mind.

I did actually enjoy the demo for the original game, but after playing that I simply couldn't imagine that the full game had anything else to offer, so I never considered buying it. A few years later a friend convinced me to give it a try, so I borrowed his copy and found the game had more to offer than I imagined (and that even when you were just doing the same things in different environments, it was still good fun).

A slightly different thing happened with the demo for the sequel, which was that for some reason I got really bothered by the physics in the game (it being one of the earliest adopters of a third-party physics engine). Because it was basically impossible to navigate next to things without effectively connecting with them at your running speed (and the physics engine then processing that collision accordingly), Max would send items flying wherever he went. This made him look like he was either mind-bogglingly clumsy, or incredibly drunk. Either way, it bothered me so much that I once again ignored the game. As with the original, when I did get around to playing it, I thoroughly enjoyed it.

Edit: Actually, I did a similar thing with "Oasis" too -- I enjoyed the demo, but felt I'd seen everything there was to see. When I did finally buy the game, I couldn't believe how incredibly wrong I'd been in that assumption.

Harvester on 1/11/2012 at 09:34

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Deus Ex is finally clicking with me just now.

When I was younger and first tried to play the demo, I gave up very soon because the player is pretty weak and you can't just shoot everyone as easily as in the games I was used to, and sneaking is not my thing. Then later on the open-endedness put me off, I thought "if I go left here, won't I miss important items and plot elements by not going right?".

I picked it up on Steam in a sale, and gave it another shot. I've applied the New Vision mod, so now it no longer just looks ugly, it now looks ugly in hi-def, but I'm finally connecting with the game this time. Sneaking is still not my thing, but this time I found that brute force is a workable tactic if I just apply my brains a little to how I approach the gunfights. I'm really digging the storyline and I like having to make moral choices, who I let live and who I kill and such. Looking forward to continuing.

DDL on 1/11/2012 at 10:38

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Well, they're american cars: mostly automatics.

:)

Thirith on 1/11/2012 at 14:29

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Are you playing on PC, faetal? I remember there being a major issue with some controls (including the flight ones, I think) if vsync isn't enabled in the game's options (and probably the video driver). Activating it might help at least a bit.

SDF121 on 1/11/2012 at 15:48

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My first experience with Deus Ex was sometime around 2002 when I watched a friend play through an early section of Deus Ex: The Conspiracy (PS2). Despite how great my friend found the game to be, it never really grabbed my attention. However, I remember being distracted while he played as I was preoccupied with something else that night but with what I don't remember. I also think that I was somewhat put off with how weird the combat looked and I remember thinking that the games box cover looked lame. I was more interested in mil-sim games at the time like Operation Flashpoint and Ghost Recon. Although I had enjoyed various stealth games like Metal Gear and Splinter Cell, I had no idea that Deus Ex was a stealth game based on how my friend was playing through it. To me, Deus Ex just looked like a crappy fps in a cyber punk world.

Unfortunately, I also made a similar mistake by ignoring the Thief games at this time. I knew of several friends in the past who had praised the game but I was never really interested in part because I never fully understood the premise of the game. I remember a particularly obnoxious and annoying neighbor of mine who would talk about how great the game was because "you were a thief and got to steal!" which pretty much turned me off from the idea. Because of him, I was also under the impression that Thief was a game about being a criminal and I had no interest in playing a game where I was just a 'crooked thief'. Oh how misinformed I was!

Anyways, to make an already long story shorter, I have always been a fan of survival horror games and eventually learned about System Shock after playing through Dead Space and finding out that it was originally going to be System Shock 3. After doing some research, I figured out how to get System Shock to run on a modern computer and finally got around to playing both titles in the spring of 2011. Afterwards, I began to look into Deus Ex and Thief knowing that they were similar in their mechanics. I also remember a fellow peer of mine from a few of my philosophy courses who had mentioned playing Deus Ex the year before so I decided to give it another chance. Needless to say, these games have become instant classics and have since ruined my ability to appreciate other games from this generation!