Another problem with game demos is that they can make the final game too easy. I’ve discussed before how games each have their own skill that’s obtained via practice, and can usually be applied to any level in the game. Since demos are often composed of a sampling of levels, of varying difficulty, if you can beat the entire demo, you’ve acquired enough skill at the game to beat the hardest level in the demo—without having had to beat all the intermediate levels. This causes two problems: Not only are the demo’s harder levels incredibly difficult for the demo-player (since you don’t have the benefit of approaching them gradually), but once you have gotten them down, when you go back and play the real game, it’s too easy.

Case in point: I just purchased Marble Blast Gold after having beaten the demo levels. I managed to make it through all twenty-four of the game’s “beginner” levels in under an hour, beating the “gold time” on many of them.

Right now, TiVo Suggestions has six episodes, in a row, of Barney & Friends.

Myst IV: Revelation is due out September 28th. It’s coming out simultaneously for Mac as well as PC, which is good news after the disappointment with Uru last year. There’s a demo on the site. Since we know how much I like game demos, I downloaded it. It does not bode well for the Mac version of Revelation, unfortunately:

• I downloaded the zipfile, expanded it, and found a Mac OS X app package that wouldn’t launch. Not a good first impression. I poked at it a bit and discovered that if I set the executable bit on the binary inside the package, it launched. I imagine that the program they used to zip up the files (the demo is for both Windows and Mac OS X) didn’t set it up correctly, or maybe if I’d used a different expansion utility, it would have worked, but the fact that I’m using the default browser, with its built-in zipfile-expander, on the latest release of Mac OS X, and it didn’t work—I downloaded the file twice, just to be sure—isn’t good.
• After I launched the demo, I found that the interface didn’t seem to work right. The cursor is far too slow at the main screen, and once I got into the game, I couldn’t seem to figure out how to do very basic things. If I use the magnifying glass to get a close-up of an object, I can’t figure out how to zoom back out. I can’t seem to figure out how to use the objects at the bottom of the screen, either. I seem to remember that in Exile, there was a key I could hold down for those, but I couldn’t find it here.
• When I click the camera button (at least, I think it’s a camera) the game freezes. I have to force quit, and then there’s a dialog on my screen indicating some sort of internal file access error. Not good.

I tried a few times to get more than a minute or two into the demo, and finally gave up. Not a good overall experience. It feels like nobody bothered to even do a cursory test of the Mac version of the demo before putting it up, and that’s not a good sign. If the same lack of basic testing shows in the released version, it will be completely unplayable. I’m keeping my fingers crossed, though; I’ve been looking forward to Myst IV otherwise. I had mixed feelings about Exile, and I suspect this will be more of the same, but I’m betting it’ll still be fun.

For many years, I’ve been wanting to find a copy of the LEGO Trains Idea Book (#7777). When I was a kid, I remember having it, and must have looked through it for hours on end, my imagination running wild with the plastic trains. But I haven’t seen my copy for years, despite repeated searches through my parents’ house, and the book, published in 1981, has been out of print for years. What copies are available for sale online are $125 and up. There’s a pretty active LEGO train community online, and a number of tantalizing links claiming to be scans of the book, but I never managed to find any, so I couldn’t even revisit it through images on the computer screen.

This weekend I was at my parents’, and I actually happened across it, hidden under a pile of papers at the bottom of a bookshelf. It’s pretty beat up, taped together and a few pages missing, but I wasn’t expecting to find it, so that was pretty exciting. Ironically, I did this evening actually manage to find a complete set of scans of the book. Which I no longer need, now that I have the book. Or vice versa.