Demos...
Altered Beast: I just think that this is fundamentally not a good game. The jumping is rigid, the punching and kicking are both pretty ineffective. The short, auto-scrolling-ish levels, the emphasis on killing the wolves to power-up... it's just not good. I do think the visual design is very interesting and inspired and obviously the little voices are cute for how old they are.
Band of Bugs: This is about my tenth time playing through this demo, and I never enjoy it enough to want to buy it. I actually own a DRM-free PC copy already so maybe I'm stupid for playing the demo here but... it's a low-fi fairly simple bug-themed strategy RPG. The closest comparison I can think of is maybe Vandal Hearts, in that it's simple. The animations are okay, the graphics are kind of ho-hum, and there are some real early-gen UI and presentation issues. It seems to work well enough mechanically, but never really grabs me. The music reminds me of other NinjaBee games, nice and hummable but simple. One weird thing is that the game now has avatar support so your team now consists of your avatar and a bunch of bugs and there's no text addressing the fact that the other bugs treat you like a bug but there I am, You Don't Know Jack shirt and all. I do like some of the environmental skills (pushing enemies back, drowning in water, freezing water into ice, melting ice to have the enemies drop. One thing that makes it simple is that since you don't pick your own party and there's no perma-death, and character leveling is in-between missions only and I think pre-ordained, it feels more like a puzzle game than a strategy game. Levels are clearly meant to be solved in a certain way. I'd maybe buy this for $2.50, but like I said as-is I think I'll just eventually play through my PC copy.
Burnout Crash: Welcome to Autolog powered by autolog, where you can autolog your progress so you can autolog with your autolog friends! But seriously, I played the game at a friend's house and it seemed like there was a decent amount of variety and content, but it's a very strange game. There's nothing quite like it. It's more of a sort of puzzle game, what with the very contained method of motion and the score attack kind of quality to it. Even the presentation, the music, and the voiceover is kind of weird. I could see myself playing this, but not paying much for it.
Darkstalkers Resurrection: It's a 2-pack of Darkstalkers Revenge (which I played a bunch of as a kid) and Darkstalkers 3 (which I have never played before). GGPO, Vault system--and like previous Vault games, you can earn tons of Vault points in the demo but you can't see what kind of content is actually in the Vault so it's hard to say if it's any good. The controls and How to Play pages are good. The visuals haven't aged all that well but I still think the character designs are top notch. I enjoyed my time with Darkstalkers Revenge more than DS3. Ultimately I think having played all the Capcom fighting game demos, they've gotten better at figuring out what to include to try to sell you a classic fighting game as time has gone on.
Deathspank: So I've finally come full circle to trying the original Deathspank and I liked it more this time. The jokes connected more, I appreciated the level design and colours a little better than in the other two games, it seemed like there was a good amount of content. It did ask me to buy the game an awful lot though, and $15 is crazy. I'll try to pick it up for $2.50 or less on PC. This is a much more positive impression than I had the first time around.
Eets: Chowdown: It's a Lemmingsalike where you place static objects around the screen and fire them off as a mindless idiot wanders around. You have to safely carry it through the level to the end. It was okay. I have an Eets game on PC. Meh. There was also an alternate mode which was basically a single screen twin-stick shooter meets typing of the dead on the controller. A constant stream of enemies attacked and you used visible on-screen key prompts to kill them. It only let me play for 4 minutes during the demo and hadn't gotten tough at that point, wonder if it gets harder?
One aside, as well--next week is the week that Games on Demand has more games than XBLA.
