Nintendo 3DS users will now be able to download free demos of some games for the system through the Nintendo eShop. The first demos, available tomorrow (January 18th) , will be for Resident Evil Revelations and Cooking Mama 4. Other games with planned demos include Konami’s Metal Gear Solid: Snake Eater 3D, something called Rhythm Thief & the Emperor’s Treasure from Sega, and Mario & Sonic at the London 2012 Olympic Games.
You know, even a decade after Sega left the console business, the idea of Sonic the Hedgehog on a Nintendo console- to say nothing of Sonic and Mario actually sharing top billing in a game together- still feels profoundly wrong to me. I feel like I’m in an M. Night Shyamalan movie, and all of the references to Nintendo Sonic games are actually subtle foreshadowing of the surprise twist at the end where it’s revealed that the main character is insane, and the movie’s previous scenes have actually been shifting between back and forth between reality and his fevered hallucinations.
The possibility that I’m unwittingly trapped in some nightmarish hallucinatory mindscape aside, this is very good news, since one of my favorite changes that has come with the current generation of consoles has been the existence of downloadable game demos. Such demos for PC games have a long history, of course, but on consoles demos of any sort were an economic impossibility prior to the replacement of cartridge-based games with optical disks, due to the high cost of manufacturing cartridges. We started to see some demos in the PlayStation/Sega Saturn era, but they were still quite rare and acquiring a copy of one often required renting or buying a completely different game.
I can still recall renting Tobal No. 1 for the original PlayStation- though I recall almost nothing about the game itself aside from the fact that it was some sort of fighting game, which should give you an idea of how interested in it I was- simply because it had a demo of Final Fantasy VII, and I’ve known people who actually bought Zone of the Enders on PlayStation 2 simply because it had a demo of Metal Gear Solid 2 included.
The original PlayStation also came with a disc that included Battle Arena Tohshinden, Jumping Flash, and a few others, and there were later sample discs with short playable demos that were either included with later batches of the system or could be bought for a few dollars. Most of them weren’t that good, frankly, though I did discover the terribly underrated first-person shooter Disruptor on one of them. The pickings were pretty slim, all in all, and of course the fact that they were on physical media meant that you couldn’t simply try a game that had a demo available on a whim and had no guarantee that you’d be able to find it at all.
The large numbers of downloadable demo on modern consoles has been a great boon, especially since the collapse of the home video rental market means that I can’t swing by my local Hollywood Video and rent a game for a few dollars any more. I’ve bought quite a few PlayStation 3 games I’ve greatly enjoyed as a result of playing their demos- Infamous, Just Cause 2, Red Faction: Guerrilla, and several others. So I hope to see Nintendo continue with this.
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