Asking about the gunplay of Mirror's Edge is pretty irrelevant, indeed. The core gameplay is not the shooting, and the game could have shipped without it. It's like saying "I'll wait to see the gunplay" before Portal was released.
One thing is that even though Cliff Bleszinski isn't probably as smart as he thinks he is, and by far, I dont think he could be in the position he's now if he was completly stupid. What he said about Mirror's Edge could be just motivated by marketing. Just making a statement, that will undermine the game for the potential average Gears of War players (the people who aren't going to notice that his statement is irrelevant) in order to prevent sales of Gears of War 2 to be slighly affected by Mirror's Edge. It could be just a part of a marketing strategy, after all.
But it's still a stupid statement.
About the demos, although I disagree with him, I think he makes some sense.
Besides the fact that it can sometimes ruin the hype for a game, it can hurt it as well, even if the game is good, for certain people.
A demo allows you to experience the specific gameplay of a game, before actually playing it. That's what makes them annoying for people like the guys at EPIC. With a demo, you can pretty much play it, experience the Gears of War cover system and gunplay style, and get over with it. A better exemple would be Brother in Arms : Hell's Highway. This game has a very specific gameplay. And with a demo, you can experience it without buying the game.
Try to think as a developper. Cliff Bleszinski probably plays a lot of games to experience their gameplay, even though he probably doesn't finish them all. For people like him, a demo is great, because you can experience with it the gameplay, without actually buying the game.
He probably thinks in those terms, forgetting that most people play games to enjoy them from start to finish, get the story, and often replay them.
But, a demo that doesn't make you want to buy the full game fails at what it does. So, even, if he's got his reasons for saying this, he shouldn't be talking about demos like that.
which is true but to my memory doesnt that mean he is talking bad about the Unreal series which Epic makes.
He worked on it himself, from Unreal in 1998 to Unreal Tournament 2004. So no, he was not talking bad, he was just saying that with Gears, they were going for realism in gameplay schemes. (Whereas in the Unreal Series, they make fun games without much concern for realism)
They should make "Mirrors edge 2: Run from the fuzz" or a European version "le edge du mirror: échapper de le flic"
lol
It would be "Le bord du miroir : échapper aux flics"
By the way, Video Games usually don't get their names translated when they're released in France, although there are some exceptions (like the Red Alert series translated into "Alerte Rouge").
