My friend Richard, bless his heart, lives alone in Japan. We talk a lot via Skype, typically while watching sumo or insane Japanese variety programs, but Richard is more of a gamer than he is a television fan. He has been encouraging me to find time to play games with him online and I've kind of been avoiding him, mostly because our Resistance 2 sessions earlier this year put my wife into a rather sour mood. However, since she has gone to her parents' house to prepare for the imminent delivery, Richard argued that this was my last chance to enjoy any kind of online gaming for a long time. After all, when she returns there will be a new human being living here who demands constant attention.

I knew Richard was right. It was time to return to the world of survival horror.

You may recall my excitement over Resident Evil 5 late last year when I used the Jedi mind trick to convince a retail clerk to give me a demo version of the game at a time when only new PS3 owners could play it. As much fun as it was to get my hands on something rare (at the time), when I actually sat down and played it I was sorely disappointed. The awkward control scheme, the confusing lack of objectives (fight or flight? stay or go?) and the weakness of the weapons really soured me on the game as a whole. It looked great, yes, but it was neither fun nor scary; it was just annoying. Once the game actually went on sale, I heard many people echo my own complaints, reassuring me that I had made the right call.

However, there were also a substantial number of people who proclaimed that Resident Evil 5 was much better than the demo had led on. While every game, no matter how bad, is bound to have its defenders, I found that my friends were among these voices of support. There developed an odd kind of peer pressure where different friends encouraged me to buy on the game on PS3 or Xbox so I could play with them. Normally I am my own worst enemy when it comes to impulse purchases, but now I was receiving near-demands from others to join the party. Still I held out, partly because I had other games to play but mostly because I felt I had already given the game its fair shake and rejected it.

With this new-found gaming time (because Mako has gone to her parents' house) and another generous loan from Alex (thanks again, sir), I finally played Resident Evil 5 for real on Sunday. Even though Richard had completed the game already, he was happy to play it again with me, both to seek out more hidden objects and for the sheer fun of it. He tried to share some of his upgraded weapons with me but the game, rather smartly, wouldn't allow it. Having a friend with both advanced items and knowledge of the game was advantage enough; anything more than that and our survival horror would become a survival cakewalk.

I don't know whether it was having more context to the bizarre situations or simply a matter of having played the demo a couple of times, but everything about Resident Evil 5 was better than I remembered. Playing alongside Richard and knowing where to go certainly helped cut down on frustration, but more than that, the entire game just seemed more accessible and entertaining than I had previously thought. The controls no longer felt like an obstacle, probably because the demo had already made them familiar to me. Most importantly, the combat was fun rather than being a chore.

The bigger issue here is not how fun Resident Evil 5 turned out to be but how wrong I was to have judged it as I did after playing an arbitrary piece of it as a demo. One could argue that my failed experience with the demo was in fact valuable preparation time for the real thing; that is, had I never played the demo and simply sat down with the game cold, I would have encountered all of the same problems, quirks and irritants as I did before. While that might be true, there's no way to know if I would have reacted to those things in the way that I did. Also, it doesn't hold up when contrasted with my other recent video game demo playthroughs.

I was rather down on the demo of Resistance 2 that I played at Tokyo Game Show but I ended up receiving that game as a gift and playing through the entire story mode. The demo was an accurate taste of the first stage, albeit a rushed one that followed a very long wait in line which presumably put me in a bad mood. I credit my eventual seduction by that game to the excellent online co-op mode which then led me to try the single-player mode once I had no time to play online anymore.

Conversely, I absolutely adored the demo of Mirror's Edge and bought it based solely on that initial positive experience, but the real game turned out to be much more frustrating than I had previously thought. Lowering the difficulty somewhat recaptured the fun I had remembered, but I have yet to fully return to the game and play anything beyond the prologue. Then again, I haven't gotten around to playing BioShock yet either and I can't blame that on anything besides my own state of mind. The demo I played in October was phenomenal and the real game wasn't any different. I just haven't convinced myself to explore that glorious underwater world.

Looking at these conflicting examples, there's no clear connection between a good demo or a bad demo and enjoying or not enjoying the full game. Of course, the entertainment value of a video game (or any media for that matter) is not a simple Boolean matter. I can't draw a line and sort out games which are Fun versus those which are Not Fun. Taste is subjective and constantly in flux. At first I liked PixelJunk Eden, then I grew bored of it, then I suddenly rediscovered it and felt compelled to finish it. There's still time for me to enjoy Mirror's Edge or BioShock just as there's still time for me to reject Resident Evil 5.

I still feel like playing demo versions of video games is the best way to determine whether I should buy the full version or not. No amount of screenshots or gameplay footage can equal the hands-on test that a demo offers. However, it is vital that I keep in mind that a lot can change between the release of a demo and the release of the finished product. More than the graphics or the controls or the difficulty or any other technological tweaks, I can change and that's something nobody can predict - least of all me.

Daniel Feit was born in New York but now lives in Japan. Follow him on Twitter @feitclub or visit his blog, feitclub.com