I have bought various games due to demos, two though come to mind:
- Rollercoaster Tycoon: probably the demo that I played the most. I never got tired of it and played extensively until the game was out
- Little Big Adventure 2: Twinsen's Odyssey: I didn't play it that much, it was pretty limited (as RCT, but this one is not a sim), but was awesome enough too!
with Steam and downloadable games I don't get them anymore, I have limited bandwidth and recent demos have been extremely disappointing. the last one I played was FEAR 2 and it was absurdly short. on the other hand, HAWX demo was surprisingly good, but didn't make me buy the game. there are a lot of other stuff that will affect my decision, mostly "replay value".
I used to buy a lot of mags with CDs full of demos, more than hundreds. most of them wouldn't even be released here, or were shareware. there was this cool Bomberman clone called Fracas, featuring mages. you could play locally with 8 people, all you needed was 6 keys (4 movement, normal attack and special attack IIRC) so it was easy to setup for 3 people on the same keyboard, plus a joystick. great fun!
right now I'm looking at one of these CDs, the demos include: Virtual Snooker, Quake, Descent 2, Micro Machines 2, Fatal Racing, Doom, Indycar Racing 2, Big Red Racing, Battle Arena Toshiden, Heretic, Duke Nuken (sic) 3D, Extreme Pinball, Warcraft 2, The Dig. good times :P
the words above were backed by NUCLEAR WEAPONS!
