Play Kingdoms of Amalur demo and get free Mass Effect 3 items, and vice versa

Interesting cross promotion at play here - I haven't heard of Kingdoms of Amalur but there's some impressive names involved in this game:
bestselling D&D author RA Salvatore, Spawn creator Todd McFarlane, and Ken Rolston, lead designer on Morrwind and Oblivion.
If that wasn't enough to entice people to check out their game, there's this:

Source

This isn't the first time you've been able to unlock little perks and items in a full game by completing a demo, but this could be the first time you unlock said perks by playing a demo of a different game.

Additional details about these unlocks from IGN.com:

Overall it's a smart business move. I'd never even heard of this game until now and suddenly I've all but marked the date of it's demo release on my calendar.

I dunno, Bioware are kinda lameducks when it comes to bonus material for doing things before the game launches. The preorder Terminus armor in ME2 and the DA armor, and everything else, etc. were all big poops.

Even with SWTOR, a lot of nothing (Pre-order crystal lasts until like lvl 10, and everything else just takes up space and does nothing). Hologram stripper is cool, flaregun does nothing, and making a robot harmlessly float around someone. . .Yeah, that speaks for itself.

I don't know what this game is, but a bunch of crap items for ME3 isn't gonna get me to play it. Take a page out of the Microsoft book. Take a game no one cares about, like Crackdown, and give early access to a game EVERYONE cares about (Halo 3). And in the end, Crackdown was actually a pretty sweet game in itself.

So let me get this straight - you're not even going to play through a free demo for some ME3 items, no matter how trivial they may seem? Cause I can definitely waste 30 mins for some easy goods.

Mass Effect bonuses have always revolved around bonus armor and weapons. It's mostly all vanity type stuff but still, I do like a bonus here and there. Plus I remember some bonus weapons from ME2 to be unique and fun/overpowered (Arc Projector, Black Hole Gun).

No kidding, for a new EA IP to be coming out and it not being shilled to kingdom come yet is a strange thing indeed.

Good point.

Not really. Swtor was/is a huge risk ($200-300 million)for EA and they've barely done any advertising at all for it. I've seen like 2 commercials all month (And it was during Launch on Spike, which was having a Star Wars marathon). Not coincidentally Fox aired the Family Guy Star Wars and CN did a Clone Wars thing, but nothing explicitly saying "EA is pushing SWTOR".

And they're trying to compete with WoW. When they put BF3 up against CoD they advertised the hell out of it. I still see the "99 problems" commercial like 3 times a day.

So I've played a bit of the Kingdoms of Amalur demo - in fact I'd still be playing it if the damn thing didn't freeze up and I had to restart my 360. And supposedly this isn't a one off glitch, as many reports and bloggings have noted freezings, chunks of dialogue/audio cut and other things.

Anywho, right off of the bat you're prompted to select a race and go through a character creator. The races on hand here however aren't that varied. You get two very human races whose only differences seem to be specific aptitudes, and two elven races who have the same deal, but have the added distincion that one race is fair skinned and the other dark. I was expecting a little but more in terms of fantasy races but there may be more in the full game.
The creator itself isn't that varied either. There's about 6 presets you can select, and then toggle things like eye colour, hair colour, hair style, markings and such; but no option to change things that really help give your character distinction in addition, like nose, eye or chin shape. Maybe something more in depth will be in the full game, you can only hope for their sake. Something that also sticks out is that everybody basically has Lego hair - hair styles are basically a skullcap, dense as a rock and doesn't move whatsoever.

The graphics are on the decent side of average. Not quite encroaching on World of Warcraft territory or anything but visually we're in that same slightly exaggerated, half-toonish kind of look much like Fable meets Torchlight - but not quite on par. To Amular's credit though, the locales you get to run through are quite bright and colourful, but I think we've been spoiled with games in 2011 who really took the ball when it came to game worlds and ran with it.

Gameplay wise, it's an action RPG, reminding me a bit of Darksiders and the aforementioned Fable. On the positive side of things, the melee combat is fun, if not a bit mashy. Blast the button to combo up strikes, or hold it down for a charged attack. There's a stealth button where you can sneak around and pull off instant kills from behind on any enemy that hasn't noticed you, evident by a little eye marker that appears when a foe is in your sights. The eye gradually fills up red as you make yourself more known, which is quite handy to let you know when to go in for the kill and when to slink back into the shadows. The weapons you can get are really nice too, some with elemental and magical properties which pay off well. I grew attached to a mage rod even though I was decked out in a full suit of plate armor, just because it would pull off some great flame attacks.
On the negative side though, when it comes to ranged combat, things falter. You can equip various kinds of bows to pick off enemies at long range, but you immediately auto target them. As far as I had discovered, there was no way to move my sights around or even zoom in to more of a over the shoulder/first person look for it. Same deal with magic - holding down a trigger lets you access magical or weapon attacks you've got mapped to your face buttons but apart from deciding what to use, not much else thought goes into the use of them. The camera can be a bit annoying also when attacking at range, having to view it around periodically to see what I was auto-aiming at. This is all a let down compared to the flexibility you had with ranged attacks in Skyrim the last few months.
Running around the game world itself, to my surprise you can actually swim in water... on the surface. You can't submerge yourself to explore at all, you can only "dive" at certain little whirlpools where you then pick up some random objects. Pretty lame.
Some mini games it does get right though is a pretty cool lock-picking mechanism, sort like the one in Skyrim but a bit more involved, and a dispelling mini-game for when you want to grab a hexed chest or whatever.

The voice acting that I've heard so far has been pretty decent, all very English sounding - and all of it coming from NPCs. Despite that though, not many of the characters so far have been too memorable, least of all my own. Your character says absolutely nothing, and just stands stone faced during conversations. All of them. Nothing like sporadic eye movement, realistic blinking or even general signs of life of which we've been spoiled with in games like the Mass Effect series.
When conversing, you do get some small choices in replies thanks to Ye Olde Faithful dialogue wheel™ but there's only been one occasion where a decision played different outcomes, and a very small one at that (to my knowledge).

All in all, based on what I've played of the demo so far, it's purely the definition of an average game.

No, I have to start from the beginning of the demo all over again.
I'd really prefer not to.

And then after all of the growing pains it finds out it was merely adopted. The quintessential red-headed step child.

I managed to actually make it through the demo to the end the other day finally, after two different occasions where it bugged on me and I had to restart.
I think my initial thoughts may have been a bit harsh on the game - by the time the 45 minute timer ran out I was actually having fun and was somewhat invested in the smaller events of the story.

I'm still not impressed with the ranged combat in the game but the melee mechanics actually prove to have a bit of depth to them, and the way you can combo in magic and ranged attacks with that is interesting from what I've seen in some videos. Nothing that you could actually do here though.

Also a big pro for the game is the writing. Even for NPCs, everything is really well written. And coupled with the servicable voice acting, running around town to find out information becomes quite engaging.

Speaking of, the first town hub you come across looks really nice, and the interiors of the buildings are really homely and fit well, showing there's been a some attention to detail here.

On the downside, travelling through the forest and land does seem somewhat linear - what you experience in the demo feels quite A to B with a few diversions. I hope there's more wide open spaces further on as you travel through the lands.

Something which was really interesting was the levelling system and the fate cards. Though there's no cut and dry system that slots you into a specific class and narrows how you play, you are given a choice of what bonuses you recieve as you level, and these bonuses do lend to different class styles - the use of magic, the use of shields, heavy weapons and armour, and the use of lighter armor, poisons and daggers/felswords. As you level though, you gain access to more fate cards that in turn become more flexible - cards which will give rewards for a player who likes to use both heavy weapons and daggers, stealth tactics and magic, and any other combo of the three (or even all three at once eventually), so there's nothing that forces you into a specific playstyle thankfully.

So yeah, not as bad as I first thought. Far from a must-buy though, but there's hope for it yet.

Did you get around to it? I'm curious because it's clear we both didn't like much of it at all from the start, but I was turned around a little. It'll be interesting to see if it even negated your vast reserves of hate.

It somehow got a 9.0 from IGN

http://ps3.ign.com/articles/121/1216517p1.html