What Sucks in the 21st Century: Demos and Downloads

I'm really into the Monkey Island game series, and the first two Monkey Island games have been rebooted and available for download on Playstation Network and that XBox equivalent, which I don't care about because I think XBox sucks.

I downloaded a demo a while ago, and I was very impressed when I played it.  I was happy that the trademark Guybrush voice actor was there, and the switch from the original to the newer graphics brings back faded black and white memories. I felt like I had to buy this game.


I redeemed some codes for my wallet online, and the payment for the game was $9.99.  That's another thing I can't understand; why can't they just round it to ten dollars?  I think it would be easier. Anyway I bought it and a download prompts me to either download the game or the demo.

Well I just played the demo so I don't think I'll be getting that.  I'm just going to get the game.  I'd like to point out here that the wireless at my house is absolutely terrible.  To buffer a 5 minute YouTube video it takes about as much time to watch the faded red line get longer.  Not my favorite pre-loader.  It took about a day to get the demo so I'm scared as hell about how long the game would pick its ass up to get on my hard drive.  I just want to play this game.

I select to download the game and other useless information then it goes into a one second download and tells me the install is complete.  It was so fast the loading green bar didn't move; it warped to 100% within a second.  No...that can't be right.

I looked everywhere in the system for this thing, but not even an upload manager showed up.  There was a save utility icon for some reason, but I couldn't find this game.  Naturally I tried a dozen times but the same thing keeps happening.  I was starting to question my connection, but because I can update without any problems, I then started to worry about my system itself.

After a week of ignoring my problem, I got on the phone with someone at PSN.  I have no idea if any of you have called the help desk there, but navigating through the categories given on the phone when you have a very specific problem like mine can be confusing.  I had to repeat many of the menus over and over again just to find out if I had a connection problem or a hardware problem.

I was looking in the wrong direction, again, and I was connected to a guy, who I was very happy with because he was so patient with me, to help me out through this.  I go through a process where every step made me feel more and more that my hunch on my hardware was correct.  I was repeating what I was doing before and so forth, but I was also going through the system inside and out.  The suspense killed me until he decided to look into it himself.

He gets offline for a while and comes back telling me that I have to download the demo and finish it.  When it tells me if I want to buy the full version, then I can download the game.

Why do I have to do that?  I don't understand.  Now I have to wait longer just to play this game.  I really hate complaining about minor problems like this but, really, it doesn't make any sense.  How come the network has the option to buy the game in their store, but you can't do that until you download and play through the demo?  Why is it programmed like that?

And this isn't apparently the only game that does this.  Maybe the company wants more popularity in the demo downloads but it's really annoying.  Especially since I downloaded it in the first place and deleted it to save space.  Yeah I know I actually do that.

I love how the store is set up.  It's easy to get through and not confusing at all.  But what I don't like is when games I want to download flips me off like a pissed off highway tail gating hack and I have to back track.  I have no idea if I can just choose the download game option through the screen title or if I have to play through it.  Because the freakin demo didn't download yet from my shitty wireless!  If I have to go through the demo again, I'm going to waste more time by playing up to a point, downloading the game which will take a lot longer, and having to play the same thing again until I get to see something new for once.

 This reminds me of tons of weird programmed games like the Port 2 trick in Metal Gear Solid (ha ha now you know!).  But I'm really bothered why a download program works like this.  I'm not into XBox but I'm really curious to see if any downloads work like this in the Markplace as well.

I could bitch longer, but I'm going to just play around with Little Big Planet first.  At least it's a happy and sunny place.

"There is an update available."


Son of a bitch...