Dark Messiah

The Dark Messiah Might and Magic demo is out.

FileFront and 3dGamers has it, although all 3dGamers servers are too busy for me and FileFront gives me a horrible download speed.

I wish they'd release a torrent =/

Anyone else here looking forward to this game?

I played it a couple of weeks ago off a magazine cover disk. I wasn't that impressed. It seems to be like a combat orientated Olivion to me.

PC Zone did a massive preview of it in the last edition - they think it is really great though.

I saw some videos of it and it seemed to have some nice motion going on, so I'll give it a try :)

I'm not a big fan of dungeons, though. They seem like such a stupid trend considering how much room there is for fresh and unique ideas in the fantasy genre.
I don't think of killing hordes of monsters to level up in order to kill more hordes of monsters as a very fun thing anymore.

Dark Messiah looks like one of those RPG's without the role playing. Just a fantasy theme, a few orcs, lots of dark passages, a few villages and lots of slashing and hacking. Something I might pick up in the bargain bin for a tenner a few weeks after it's released.

Gothic 3 for me please. Plus I've barely started Heroes of Might and Magic 5 which is much more my thing.

Ill probably check it out, its emphisis on physics could make it interesting...it uses the Source engine right?

Nothing wrong with a good dungeon crawl..heh ;)

Combat was dissapointing in oblivion, so I hope theres more here. but I dont want just a action RPG.

Sam

I agree, as a whole, about oblivions combat.. there are much better systems out there.. HOWEVER.. it was a vast improvement over morrowind.. And it was enjoyable... I had fun fighting, it just wasn't mind blowing, like the rest of the game was.

It uses Source, might be heavily modified or just the standard version, don't know.

This is a big demo, 1415 MBs! I hope it has a good hour of play at least. Demos are getting way too big...

I don't bother with demos anymore.. I just wait for games to get cheap or get some great reviews from people I trust/have the same tastes as... (Luckily for me, the TV show 'Xplay' thinks about games EXACTLY like I do... and therefore are NEVER wrong.)

So I haven't bought a game I didn't enjoy that cost any more than about 10 bucks in the last... hmm.. 3 years?

Demos are useless to me.. haha..

http://gamedaily.newaol.com/pub/0078701466/Dark_Messiah_Demo.exe
found this link, they might not like it but its working with download acelerators..Ie flashget
I got it down in just over 20min @650k+ per sec on average.

Agreed, Oblivions combat was much better than Morrowinds, and the rubber like deaths were quite amusing for a time ;)
On the whole I enjoyed Oblivion until completion.


well im off to install.

Sam

This is great, almost when the 1415 MB install finishes installing, I get a catastrophic failure with no other information than that. Great.

Okay, downloaded... my experience thus far with the demo:

As always, fifty thousand logos at the start. One of the things I like about Nintendo's first-party software like Nintendogs is that they generally don't waste any time with those logos. They seem to be alone with that trait.

As I skip past logo after logo (I think I missed the actual introduction video for the game in the process, of course. I hate those things, though), I wonder how the menu looks, being that the game is running in Source.
Behold! It's an ungodly mess.
They used Valve's GUI for it, but they used their own skin. This skin has absolutely no contrast between focused and unfocused windows, and buttons are practically invisible. Popping up a dropdown menu to change my screen resolution (inexplicably set to 1024x768, which is neither the recomended value nor the value used in Windows) was a disgusting experience where the options were barely visible and appeared... distorted... by the effect that is supposed to highlight them when I drag the mouse over them.
All of the settings menus are identical to those seen in a MOD of Half-Life 2. Not even the note under the HDR option has been changed, so it still says "*Only works with HDR maps" or something to that extent. In the case of a game that attempts to be user-friendly and shouldn't really expose the idea of there being more than one map, that should not be there.
Did I mention that the 3d background looks like garbage? It's a character standing around doing nothing. What a waste.
Now, I don't know much about Source, so I will give them the benefit of the doubt and assume that the engine forces developers to use Valve's own menu system and the only customization the makers of M&M could do was to make everything the same tone of blue.

Oh well, at least the New Game button is visible.
Settings tweaked, so I press it.
OH, The Horror!
Loading screen looks nice at first. A nice loading bar at the bottom and a little blurb in the middle.
Looking closer (you know, reading the blurb?!) reveals that the writing on this blurb is white. Unfortunately, parts of the background are also rather white, making it difficult to read. I can't imagine what I would do if I had a CRT monitor. I guess I just wouldn't bother.
Thanks to slow load times, I could read to the end of this blurb where it inexplicably ended in the middle of a sentence. Looks like someone slacked off... and I guess the testers all had computers that loaded it too fast for them to be able to read the little blurb.
The blurb didn't sound much like an introduction... I suppose it could be if they did it right.

Game begins. Immediately it dawned on me: They didn't do it right.
Okay okay, it's a cutscene in which camera control is taken over by the game. I guess that's fine since everything does it, but considering how they can't make their menu any different from that of Half-life 2, I would like it if they stuck with that for things that people do make a point of appreciating.
Now, as we all know, Source has a brilliant animation system. This custscene, however - apparently the first cutscene in the game - does not harness it. Allright, it's not really something to complain about... the character's face doesn't show a lot of expression, and he folded his arms for no reason within a second of meeting me... but he does have a bit of extra movement in his face and the mouth movements are excellent. So, the problem is just that the artists had to do a lot of characters. They had to back off a bit.
Okay, that I can excuse. Mediocre game acting quality... oh, well. With Prey, Oblivion and Half-Life 2, I thought we'd gotten over that. Not really terrible acting, so I'll let it pass.

Oops, never mind!
This cutscene lasted about... 5 seconds.
Wait, it wasn't a cutscene, it was just this guy talking. Dialgue was as follows:
I say: "[Forgettable name 1]Where are you?"
He says: "I'm here. I need you to [blah blah blah]"
The end.

He seems to be giving me orders without introducing himself at all.
Hell, I don't even know how to move yet!
I don't know where I am, and it's not in the good way. For the first moment of this game I have ever played, and for the beginning of a Demo (remember how they are used to sell games?), I do not feel very welcome.
The game looks nice; the usual Source engine stuff with fancy spec maps and the like... an interesting swaying camera effect when I turn, but perhaps it is a bit excessive; my character is moving around like a drunk.

The game seems to have begun with me being assigned a mysterious quest; Get a key and unlock a door. I found the key on a table and I unlocked the door.
Now I have to kick a support and climb a chain. Well, that's kind of cool. Nice use of physics, and nice self-visibility.
Upon climbing this first chain, I am given an impossible task: I must jump off the chain and climb/do something to another object by holding Space and aiming. Aiming at what, I do not know. I swear, it didn't tell me, and there are a lot of possibilities here.
A 5 minute long struggle then led to my sad fate: I fell and became permanently lodged between a pile of dirt and the ground.
Unable to escape, I took the easy way out and quit the game.

Well, that was fun.


Edit:
Trying again, the little blurb in the loading screen is fully visible.
Some weird glitch associated with changing the screen resolution, I guess.
I noticed a screen telling me that this is not to be taken as a demonstration of the game's final quality, and that it is rather a release created to show everyone how many weird glitches and messy details they can clean up before release, and how these people can't test their own games anymore.
I figured out why the GUI skin is so weird looking, too: The menu highlight text colour is very similar to the menu highlight background colour, so the text nearly disappears when an option is highlighted. Also, the menus are very translucent, which means that they are unreadable if they unfold above another gadget.
It's weird how some of this (including the pointless introduction video) looks so ugly; the loading screens look really nice!

It's nicer this time round, so I will happily give it another chance. It appears to get better; I just hope there is some sort of story here.


Regular K:
Heh, that's nothing.
Have you ever tried configuring wireless networks with the MacBook setup program?
I was doing that just today. It kept telling me, simply, that it didn't work. That is all it told me. Every other wifi network setup I have ever used has been able to give me some hint at what is wrong by at least giving me a log of what it did! This one, however, saw it fit to simply say that Something Failed.
Of course, Mac OS is designed under the mean assumption that I am a moron who hates anything that dares to tell me technical information :P
Configuring wifi after setup led me to many irritating attempts by Apple to sell their bloody Airport routers until I finally found the config for everything else, at which point it turned out that I was connected to the Internet. (Though the setup program quite firmly disagreed and I quite explicitly and definietly told it: "Do Not Connect To A Network"). So first it gave me a stupid error message, then it tried to sell me Apple's routers with no clear alternative (turned out I had to click on the little network status icon in the status bar to access that particular utility), then it secretly connected to the Internet without my knowledge, and it broke an unwritten rule of politeness in the process, which is that it had actually connected to my neighbour's unprotected but clearly intended to be private wireless network.

I Hate Computer Software.
Beat that :P

Okay, Ive downloaded it 3 times now (differnt servers) with accelerator and without...it keeps being corrupt! :P

It should be done again on my other computer...so ill try once more and report back.

Sam

Wow, that was a true behemoth of a rambling excuse for a rant.
1408 words :S

Oh, well.
Good brain exercise.
Now I'm going to do something constructive.

@Zmatrix
If its corrupted, when the catastrophic error comes up, just ignore it but dont click ok. Go to the folder and run it. It will work fine, just no sounds except for voice overs.

@Mr. Picklesworth
They can change the menus layout very easily, you dont even need to quit the game! Theres a menu editor built into Source to change GUIs. And the menu being clipped off is because you changed the resolution and didn't restart the game, I wish Valve would fix that bug...

The actual game makes good use of the physics. It's just they screwed up on some aspects. The voice overs arn't impressive. I got stuck in a fence. The inventory freezing the game. And some other things I forgot.

<HiJack>

[a http://files.filefront.com/LEGO+Star+Wars+II+The+Original+Trilogy+Demo/;5366484;;/fileinfo.html]Lego Star Wars2[/a] demo just came out, fun (albeit bit easy) 2-player action adventure...cant wait for the finished thing to come out.
(now *that's* how a quality pre-game-release demo is done, with replay value incentive)

</HiJack>

That's a huge bitch!

Does Lego Star Wars 2 demo have Starforce, because Lego Star Wars 1 Demo certainly did. It's never affected me so I don't care, and I'm gonna download it right now, but I may be in the minority in these parts.

Okay, upon giving the game a 2nd chance, it's not bad as long as I ignore those ugly bits and pieces.

The battle animations are really well done, and the use of physics is well thought out.
...Although, it must be wondered: How can a single blow from a heavy barrel thrown over a massive distance by a guy already carrying a sword and without enough stamina to run anywhere kill someone so easily. Throwing stuff at guys is quite amusing, though, and so is kicking them.

The demo lasted about 20 minutes (heck, probably less if it wasn't for that loading) and what I saw of the game didn't interest me; it's more like a tech demo for stuff that I've already seen tech demos of.
There are two different parts in the demo.
One is with some weird guy who you later learn has been teaching you for your entire life. What he has been teaching, I am not told. There is absolutely nothing else there.
The 2nd part is 6 months later, and has a ridiculously vague bit of story that is so meaningless I can barely summarize it. It seems that they are trying to convey some sort of storyline with the text in these loading screens, and it does not work. From the sounds of it, something happened involving my trainer which the character I'm playing as knows but I don't (?!!!) which resulted in some something described vaguely as "blood stains and bad smells" (perhaps he was killed? I don't know, really... didn't sound like it). It seems that I was (for unknown reasons) bounced into a weird structure filled with a strange mixture of enemies and, with some extra supplies, I go and kill guys and encounter a teaser screen.
I still can't remember anyone's name.
For a 1.5 GB download, that felt like a waste of time.

I'm looking forward to the real game. I wonder how much space it will take up... 1.5 GBs (compressed) is appalling for something with so little content. Wasn't the much bigger Prey demo about half that size?

sounds like fun, but sheeeeez... 1400 MB!!!

sorry, i gotta pass on this demo...

something that big for a demo... now i know i'm a dinosaur... my whole sim won't even be that big...

anyway, too busy right now anyways for a new game...

--Mike

No clue here really since I already have StarForce on my system because a developer of a very specific game I like felt the need to kill their product with it. -.-
(I like my No-CD cracks, games that go out of their way to prevent that because we're being treated like criminals bugs the crap out of me)