Ultima 7 Demo

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There seems to be a distinct shortage of Ultima demos around. I suppose most of the later games were rushed and not exactly finished on release, so a demo may have been an unnecessary distraction in the circumstances. There was a non-playable Ultima 7 pre-release demo which is hosted here. A video of this was already on Youtube which I’ve embedded below:-

It consists of the intro and an ultimately optimistic claim that the game will be coming in Xmas 1991. It only has adlib music which is a bit of a letdown, and it’s not implemented as well it would be in the actual game. I imagine there would originally have been an installation program which has gone missing. The demo comes with all the music as MIDI files which can be played directly through an MT-32 to much better effect, but if there is a way to set up the demo’s config file to do this I couldn’t find it. The intro is cut down substantially from the one I’m used to but other than that there isn’t a whole lot to say about this so I’ll move on to Ultima 9.

Wings Of Glory Demo

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This demo comes from the April 1995 Cover CD of PC Format and I’ve uploaded it to here for anyone who wants to give it a go. Wings Of Glory was a game I didn’t have high hopes for, but I enjoyed a lot when I finally played it. Before getting sidetracked by UO, there was a spell in the mid 90’s where Origin could do no wrong with games like this, Bioforge, WC3 & 4, Crusader & Cybermage all being released in a short space of time.

The demo consists of a quick briefing (with speech) and the mission itself. It’s a simple case of going out and destroying enemy weather balloons.

It’s been a while since I played WoG and I found tracking the enemy planes extremely tricky. I have a strong tendency to over-steer but slow and steady is the key in this as much as possible. My wingman made up for my poor showing and single handedly set about clearing the skies while I was floundering around. There were 3 planes at the first nav point – I did at least manage to kill off one of them myself.

There is a natty green plane which is gunning for me at the third nav point. It takes me a couple of attempts to get my skills up to the point where I can defeat him. After this the weather balloon is an easy target. If it had been up to me, I’d probably have put a zeppelin in the demo mission as the animation for them blowing up was just awesome. That’s the end of the mission though and when I fly back to home the demo restarts.

Within the limitations of VGA graphics, Wings Of Glory is still a great looking game and extremely playable. The odds are that I completely ignored this demo back at the time with it being a flight sim but it’s a game that should have some appeal to any Wing Commander fan willing to give it a go. The demo doesn’t last long but is worth playing in its own right.

System Shock Demo

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I got this demo from the November 1994 CD Gamer Cover CD. A quick google didn’t turn up anywhere to download it other than an abandonware site that expects you to register and presumably pay, so I’ve uploaded it to here.

This is the demo for the floppy version of the game and includes the entire first level, minus the intro sequence. There wasn’t room for a sound installation program (just how short on space were they?), so there are instructions in the readme for setting up the sound manually. The demo has the full choice of difficulty levels. I probably should have gone for easy, given that I’m not allowed to save at any point but I left everything on normal.

I’ve never actually played the floppy version of System Shock. It’s a game that made the transition to CD so flawlessly that it’s hard to believe it wasn’t designed for CD in the first place. I’m hard pushed to think of another game that managed the transition as well.

Going back and playing the floppy version now, the obvious differences are the lack of speech and no option for SVGA graphics. Both of these do take away from the game but I was soon hooked once again despite this. The controls are the same confusing mess but I got the hang of them far more quickly second time around, and it’s one of those cases where they are intimidating at first but actually work quite well when you have them learnt.

An entire level takes some playing through. I remember the layout vaguely but it’s not like Underworld where I know where every item is. I made my way slowly through and must have explored nearly all of it before I found myself being gunned down in seconds by an unseen opponent. I’d got all the access cards to get off the level and must have played for going on an hour to get that far. I should probably have headed straight for the exit to see what happened in hindsight.

I can’t say I spotted any differences to the final game on the way, although the readme mentions a reduced number of opposition and textures. This is a huge demo and should be enough to convince anyone to give the game a go even if they don’t make it all the way through. For some reason, it didn’t convince me at the time. Maybe the controls put me off, or more likely my PC simply wasn’t quick enough. I was definitely expecting another Underworld and didn’t get it which was also an issue. Whatever the reasons, I never actually played System Shock until a couple of years back at which point it became one of my favourite games. Having got this far in the demo, I’m strongly tempted to go back and play through the whole thing again. I would seriously enjoy having another run through, but I’ll leave it for now and have a look at the Wings Of Glory demo instead.

Privateer 2 Demo

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I got this demo off the April 1997 cover CD of PC Zone. I assume it’s the same as the one on WCNews, although it did insist on me having the CD in the drive when running it. To get this running in DOSBox, I had to turn off EMS, XMS and UMB and swap to a normal core rather than dynamic.

It starts with the entire Canerra crashing sequence before dumping me on Hermes without much idea of how I got there. I can go to the bar and talk to Joe who either comments about me smelling of success or being too good and it not helping his reputation. I don’t recall seeing these scenes in the game actually, so they may well be unique to the demo.

With nothing else to do I leave the bar. The booth is closed for business so I don’t get to buy my first ship and instead have to take off in the one supplied.

After takeoff, I’m immediately emailed my first mission which is to go and perform a rescue mission. The location of this varies but was invariably a long way away whenever I tried it.

I’m given a reasonable ship for the job kitted out with some decent guns and an afterburner. I immediately notice the countdown timer here which is rapidly ticking down to me being kicked out of the demo. The problem with this is that the time limit is so strict that I don’t actually get to the nav point. Mileage on this would vary depending on how much opposition you run into but I tried several times without managing it.

The nearest I got was a couple of nav points away. As soon as my time runs out I blow up and it’s game over. I’m sure it’s reachable with some luck but I can’t imagine it’s worth the effort.

Out of curiosity, I loaded up the game again and tried flying to another planet and landing to see what would happen. It turns out the communications system is disabled so I can’t ask for landing clearance.

I can just about remember playing this demo back when I bought the magazine. I was definitely impressed by the engine as you simply didn’t expect 3D graphics to move that smoothly back then and this probably sold me on it more than anything else. I’d also played WC4 at this point and as the next in the series this was already going to be an essential purchase. The quality of the movies was a slight letdown just on a technical basis as the video quality was a step down from Wing Commander 4. The movie segments in Privateer 2 were done first which is presumably the reason.

The space flight is quite a different experience to Wing Commander with slower, smoother movement and much faster firing rates. It’s less fun but I wouldn’t want every space combat game to play the same and I quite like the variety.

The demo does it’s job of offering a taste of the game but apart from the (possibly) original movie segments, there isn’t much new in this except from a mission that there isn’t time to complete.

Wing Commander 4 Demo

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Getting all these Wing Commander demo’s running in DOSBox is proving to be quite difficult. They are considerably more picky than the final games although ultimately I have been able to get them all running so far. Initially with this demo, it was crashing with an exception 14 error which looked just like the exception 0 error in WC3. I tried slowing DOSBox down which worked for WC3 but with no luck this time.

At this point I should have just kept fiddling around with DOSBox but I decided to fix my Win98 machine instead. I tried swapping the RAM to start with but that didn’t make any difference. The PSU that was in the case looked horrifically cheap so I swapped that out for a decent one next. That may have done the trick as it has actually been behaving itself for the most part since. The WC4 demo didn’t want to run in windows any more than the WC3 one did however and I didn’t much fancy playing it in DOS without sound. The problem I’ve got with this PC is a complete absence of ISA slots. I’ve got an AWE32, AWE64  + an one of the original Soundblasters I could slot in otherwise.

The card I have got in there is one of the original SB Live’s. I remembered that these used to have DOS drivers to emulate an SB16 and thanks to Loaf’s efforts with his PC, I didn’t have to look too far for one of the old driver CD’s. This sort of worked but I still have to manually run some files to set everything up when exiting to DOS. This emulation was temperamental at best from what I remember.

By now the WC4 demo would just about start up and run for a couple of seconds before crashing again. Further tinkering with this got me nowhere so I gave in and went back to DOSBox. About 2 minutes later I had it running simply by turning off EMS memory. I should have done this in the first place but at least I have my other PC running again so it wasn’t wasted effort. I’ll have to put a proper installation of DOS on there some time so that I can tweak the memory settings.

There are two versions of the WC4 demo which as far as I know are the same except one has a movie trailer. It’s a proper movie trailer complete with voiceover, and should have been enough to impress people running this in ’96. There isn’t any new footage though so it’s the game demo that I’m really interested in.

The demo is another 5 minute gauntlet. I have to autopilot out to a nav point in a Hellcat and take down as many confed/pirate ships in the time as possible. These are launched from a frigate in pairs. 

Most of these are reasonably easy to shoot down until you run up against Thunderbolts with rear turrets. These things finish me off in seconds if I try to tail them and not much slower if I approach them head on. I could try to take them down slowly from a distance but that wouldn’t work out too well with a 5 minute time trial so I end up shooting them from the side at close range as they are steering around me. This has mixed results and I never did manage to come up with a good technique.

Because of this, I found simply surviving the 5 minutes is tough. The best I managed was something like 13 kills without missiles. The target in the readme was 21 so I was nowhere near. The odd thing about these targets in the readme is that they give another set of kill scores using the stormfire, which as far as I can tell isn’t available in the demo. Were these testers even flying the same ship?

I can’t see myself getting 20+ anyway so I gave in on trying to beat it. Other than being a little on the hard side, this is a decent enough demo but the WCP 3dfx one was more fun.