Microsoft Outwars

Fury and Hellbender are must-try and their demos are freely available even now. Basically, any title with DirectDraw/Direct3D is something you want to throw on your PC. Some demos are too buggy to play though, as they were based on early code and never patched to go along with the final product patches.

I am having trouble finding Fury. I found Hellbender but not Fury.

Did you mean Fury3?

RE II 🤣

I'd probably suggest on technical curiosity. Jedi Knight demo does all sorts of resolutions and covers Direct3D 5 and supports 1st gen 3d cards. Quake3's a classic benchmark and the first major judge of GL ICD compliance, Crime Cities is like a swiss army knife of MiniGLs for old 3d cards, and 4x4 Evo's one of the last in the line of TRI's classic heightmap engine lineage that was started in Terminal Velocity, Turok's flashy, benchmarky and supports all the APIs and represents N64 games' technical art well, Unreal Tournament does D3D7/Glide, MDK2 supports Hor+ HD resolutions, DDR for input latency, etc.

"Must try" is super subjective though. Some parts of the internet in this era would absolutely order you to play Burning Money Solitaire, Spherejongg, Demonstar or something

I can't seem to find Crime Cities. At least not a clean download. Fileplanet's download get flagged by Microsoft Defender. Fileplanet seems to be using some kind of proprietary installer and I don't trust it 🤣

leileilol wrote on 2021-11-08, 07:30:

I'd probably suggest on technical curiosity. Jedi Knight demo does all sorts of resolutions and covers Direct3D 5 and supports 1st gen 3d cards.

Add the demo of Shadows of the Empire in the mix, running it without a supported 3d card produces interesting results.

ZombieKohhi wrote on 2021-11-08, 13:10:

I can't seem to find Crime Cities. At least not a clean download. Fileplanet's download get flagged by Microsoft Defender. Fileplanet seems to be using some kind of proprietary installer and I don't trust it 🤣

Try this: http://ftp.retroarchive.se/gamesdomain/demos/ … Cities_Demo.zip

Chrome seems to be blocking that link. Closes itself after clicking the link 😒

Yeah, this behaviour is super annoying. Right-click and choose Save-as. If nothing happens after choosing where to save it check the downloaded files list.

Chrome says no to FTP now, as well as unsecure downloads. You can still download it, by clicking on the little arrow and selecting "Keep".

davidrg wrote on 2021-11-09, 00:38:

Yeah, this behaviour is super annoying. Right-click and choose Save-as. If nothing happens after choosing where to save it check the downloaded files list.

This worked, thank you 😀

Need for Speed has got to be a must have? 3, 4 , 5 are my favourites
https://www.nfshome.com/demos.php

Other racing games I played alot of even though I only had the demo

Powerslide
https://archive.org/details/PowerslideDemo

Road Rash
https://archive.org/details/rashdemo

RTS's
C&C95, Red Alert, Tiberium Sun are all freeware now if you want the full versions. I know the first 2 had demo's if your not allowed to go full versions.
KKND
https://planet.kknd2.com/demos/

Not strictly a RTS but Return Fire is best played with 2 people keyboard sharing. I played the demo version tons of times against my brother
https://archive.org/details/Rfire

3D shooters
Not really my thing but Unreal, UT. Quake's and even Doom 95 I guess need to be included on any "must have" list

I guess the 95/98 era was getting away from DOS shareware stuff. I remember being really let down that FPS demos went from being 1/3 of the game to 2, maybe 3 levels. I played so many demos off the Computer Gaming World demo discs. When you had dialup, you played everything that was playable on those disc from month to month. Among the most memorable were:

• Slave Zero
• Shogo
• Blood 2
• Kingpin
• Sin
• Warlords Battlecry
• Battlezone
• MDK
• Zork: Grand Inquisitor
• Outpost 2
• Fallout
• Dark Colony
• Carmageddon

I can't speak to the historical significance of all these games. Dark Colony for example was probably an objectively bad game, but it had larger sprites than other RTS, and it was far bloodier. That was enough to at least hold my attention through a demo when I was a young teen boy. I also remember an atrocious demo for BattleCruiser 3000. That might be fun to try as a goof.

The demos discussed in this thread may also be of interest: Demos /w "Extra Stuff"

WARNING: Given the age of the posts, some of this stuff may be difficult to find these days.

So many great suggestions. Thanks everyone 😀