I’ve been spending some time checking out some of the games I missed out on the past few years. I missed out because I was always working on my own game, and my laptop didn’t have much graphics power. But, now I’ve got a little more free time and a good laptop.

One thing that astounded me was that Fallout 3 didn’t have a demo. I was talking to a friend of mine recently about having played the original Fallout 1 and 2, and was curious about the newer games and whether they did a good job with them. He said Fallout New Vegas was really good, but there were some problems with the game at release. Specifically, he mentioned this video, which is actually a pretty odd glitch in the game:

Anyway, Fallout New Vegas doesn’t have a demo, either. At this point, I won’t even bother buying a game without a demo. I want to see if the game is done well, whether I’m into it, whether there are a lot of bugs, whether it runs okay on my machine before I buy it. It’s shocking to me that they wouldn’t release a demo. Anyway, my friend said he’s loan me his copy of the game so I could check it out. I tried to install it tonight and got this error:

Duplicate Product Code

The product code you’ve entered has already been activated by an existing Steam account, and is therefore invalid. Your activation of Fallout New Vegas Retail has not been completed.

Sigh. Why do companies make this so difficult?