If you had something you were trying to sell, wouldn't you try to make it look it's best? If it was a car; wouldn't you give it a wash and a shine, maybe even hoover out all those old parking vouchers and the piles of sand from that one trip to the beach 3 years ago?
So why would anyone release something quite so unpolished as the Stranglehold PC demo?
Here we have a (supposed) AAA title with a well know action director behind it and using a moddified Unreal 3.0 engine with Havok physics... all the ingredients for a winning title. And then they push out a demo on the PC that looks like they couldn't be bothered: It looks and feels like a XBox port(that's the original, not the 360) due to a fixed relatively low resolution; there is no facility to change any options so you're stuck with the keys that they chose (not everyone uses WASD) and can't do anything about improving the graphics or sound. After a little digging around it would seem that by adding some command line options when running the game you can improve the resolution... I may have a go at altering the ini file as well to see what else is possible. All in all though, Midway have hardly done the title any favours by throwing out such a lackluster effort. It may be that they don't really care... after all, there are a number of companies that seem to be abandoning the PC market these days claiming piracy is hurting their revenue.
Personally I think it has less to do with piracy (though I'm not saying that isn't a problem) and more to do with the extra money they can make from the console market. After all, the PC gaming market, although constisting of possibly the largest number of gamers on the planet, struggles to charge more than £25 per title these days while the XBox 360 and PS3 titles all float around the £45+ marker. There are, of course, licensing issues involved in most console games, but there is also the knowledge that unless there is something spectacularly wrong with your title, there is very little support you need to give for the title (of course, if they gave their testing departments a bit more time and finance, you might find that the PC versions would require less support as well... Boiling Point, I'm looking at you!)
There is also the problem of PC gamers being that bit more demanding... higher resolutions, more options etc... and to top it all off, as the longest ever running games system the PC has quite a substational back catalogue of games containing some of the most pivotal points in gaming history. It makes producing a 'Max Payne' clone (which is essentially what Stranglehold is) that much harder as you've got something truely spectacular to be compared to!
That said this is just a demo and the released game may prove to be a stunning example of what can happen when Hollywood and gaming collide. However, rather than making me feel like I need Stranglehold in my collection, I'm left feeling that it still has a lot to prove... not exactly a shining example of good PR. Midway, if you're after a good example of how it can be done you need only look at someone like EA (Hellgate and especially Crysis) or maybe Rockstar (pick any game you like).
To be fair, the demo was still midly fun... not quite Max Payne 2 though ;)
