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[Frumple]

There was an old demo disc CD back in the day that had on it... some game. You were a tank (could move one direction, shoot another, even! Bigger deal than it sounds back when DOS was still meaningfully a thing, ha), starting in a partially forested area, with skyscrapers and stuff you could blow up. Very destructible environments for its time. Had an air strip on the left-ish side of the map, iirc, that I think was a major objective for the demo. Solid pixel graphics, very pleasing explosions and whatnot.

I don't remember what it was called, and it's been well over a decade since I played it, but I played the hell out that thing and it was pretty damn awesome to little frumple.

... just wish I hadn't forgotten what the hell it was called, ha.

[GalacticMonkey]

Frumple, was it Return Fire?

[Robsoie]

That sounds indeed like Return Fire, i remember that game mostly because of its 3DO version, there was a guy owning a VHS renting shop in my town and was also selling some consoles, he had a 3DO in display with Return Fire running that you could play for a certain amount of money by 20/30mn. What a fun game it was.

[Flying Carcass]

Yeah, one could have plenty of fun with the Unreal Tournament/UT2k4 demos. They basically had the core gameplay and a few maps to whet one's appetite for the full game.

I remember there was a battlefield-like game called Joint Ops that had a demo featuring a big jungle island map that used to have folks playing on it.

I remember when consoles, like the Playstation 1 and Dreamcast, used to come with demo disks. In particular, I remember the Dreamcast disk had a demo for Dead or Alive 2 that had two playable characters and provided a truncated arcade playthrough. Introduced me to the fighting game genre.

Oh yeah, and happened across the Ace Combat 6 demo on xbox live one day many years ago, tried it out on a whim, and was instantly hooked. The demo was just the first level, but that was fun enough to replay multiple times.

[Sharp]

Likewise, Mount and Blade Warband has a demo that is just the entire game but ends after you level up a few times. No better way to tell you what the game is like.

The Kenshi demo is like this as well, although I'm pretty sure I loved the game so bought it full before reaching any demo limitations.

[Frumple]

Frumple, was it Return Fire?

It wasn't! Tank was a different color (black, mostly) and shape (more square-ish), demo didn't have multiple pilotable things (though I want to say it might have teased or had different tanks, specifically, like different sorts of characters in a beat-em-up?), different art style (bigger/chunkier buildings, mostly). Tank had multiple ammo types, I think, powerups were littered around in places. Different gameplay, too, iirc... single player focused, almost like a more open top-down doom or somethin' than anything multiplayer-y. Wasn't return fire (or its predecessor or successors, for that matter).

E: The older Seek and Destroy is closer, but still pretty sure not it, unless the demo was just a lot different than the full game.

E2: After digging through about 15 pages of mobygames tank themed games list, I think I found it: Mass Destruction. There's apparently even a shitty port of the PS1 version on steam, for some reason...

[JimboM12]

speaking of demos: i remember playstation magazine? or some gaming zine used to have demo disks with their mags and i strongly remember the parappa the rapper demo that only had the onion dojo level but i also remember that song being an actual jam and playing through it dozens of times.

kick punch its all in the mind, if you want to test me you're sure to find the things ill teach ya are sure to beat ya

dammit now i have to look up the ost

[Stench Guzman]

Waaaaaaaaay back in the 1990s I had a CD that had a demo for Warcraft 1.  It had the first three levels for each campaign.

It also had all the cheat codes, and you could use the level skip cheat to access most of the rest of the levels.  A few research options were disabled, and you couldn't play custom games, but you could play most of the campaign because of Blizzard's oversight.

[sambojin]

While looking into demos from yesteryear, it turns out Tie-Fighter had an early build of its engine, somewhere between X-Wing and that, available on a promo-CD for a car (the Dodge Neon) of all things. How? Why? Don't know.

Maybe someone had shares, or was a mate of someone, or owed a favour, or got a free car. Who knows? Makes the "insert anime/ fighting game character here" cross promotions of today seem pretty reasonable by comparison.

[Journier]

Decades ago, i remember i played the Unreal Tournament demo for so many hours in botmatches (and they were damned good), even played a few over the internet with my horrible modem.
Enjoyed it so much i finally bought the retail game.
Oh and the Doom shareware, my long lost youth ... and i still play that game sometime

i never did buy Doom, i literally only played the Shareware randomely for years.

[martinuzz]

idkfa and iddqd will never leave my muscle memory

[Mephansteras]

Best use I ever got out of a Demo was a disk that came with some magazine that had Trade Empires on it. You could only play the first level, but you could play the entire first level, and I think I did at least a half dozen or more playthroughs of that demo. You know a demo is good when you're playing it instead of all the full games you own.

And it did its job well, since I definitely bought that game as soon as I came across it in a store. Back when you, you know, actually bought physical copies in stores.

It's still high up on my list of games that I wish Gog would make a nice smooth-running version of for modern PCs. Windows 10 can run it, but it's got lousy performance and weird graphical issues.

[ZebioLizard2]

My favorite demo in the past was Netstorm, which came with actual online multi capability. I couldn't remember what was the limiter but it worked surprisingly well.

[Frumple]

... yeah, I don't remember details, but I can second sky island murder tetris being one of the good ones, back in the day.

[ZebioLizard2]

Ah I finally remembered. When you ranked up by beating enough enemies, you weren't allowed to change what type of units you were allowed to take. So you were forced to remain purely a sunpriest rather then being able to branch out into thunder, rain, or air.