MORE DEMO REVIEWS ~SECOND.FIL~ ---------------------- EVEN MORE DEMO REVIEWS ---------------------- Reviewed by Slimer --------------------------- ARE YOU EXPERIENCED? BY EKO --------------------------- I couldn't help noticing that the entire Falcon scene seemed to dominated by the German democrews. This somewhat worried me a bit, are there only active Falcon users in Germany? So, I was quite relieved to receive a dentro done by the French. Lets take a closer look, INTRODUCTION The dentro comes on one HD disk and runs of the harddrive where it takes a couple of megabytes of memory. After 'installing' it is time to become part of the exciting world of tricks and effects. Shortly after booting a well drawn FLI animation shows up. We slowly zoom in on an animated logo as it moves over the screen. Then the word 'present' in a solid 3D outfit glides from the top, down below. The introduction part gets rapped up with a nice picture showing the title of this dentro. This is made more spectacular with some nice sound effects, like cream on the cake. The impression so far is, eeerrhh, impressing ? PART 1 A few seconds later I find myself in the middle of a battle in space between EKO ships and spaceships of competing democrews. Somehow I already knew the result of this battle before it even ended. As the little 3D spaceships of the competition try to escape, they are fiercely hunted down by the EKO ships. 3D rockets find their way to their designated targets and take them out. I guess nobody should doubt the supremacy of EKO, now should they !? A decent module contributes to this well done space part of this dentro. We get treated again with a nice picture, presenting the next batch of effects. Some effects which I've seen earlier in an EKO demo make their entree. Big solid 3D objects flow smooth through each-other which makes it quite interesting to look at. After some more of these examples the 'normal' 3D objects step in. Some of these objects are quite big (i.e. many polygons)but still move smooth and swift over the tube. PART 2 The next part of the dentro makes it's appearance with another nice drawing by the excellent graphics people of EKO. Some nice colorcycling tricks create the effect of fire on the screen. A cube zooms in with texture mapped pics on all sides. It's probably one of the best ones that I've seen so far on the Falcon. They added a shadow effect to it, to make even more spectacular. The module underneath this part is of lesser (sound) quality as the previous one. As the dentro runs high on 3D effects it also contains a landscape generator. A green mountain terrain in different shades of green gets formed on screen. Looks nice and is fast.... All good things must come to an end, and that goes also for this production. Textscreens with the usual credits and greetings come by, with some sort of bubble routine added to it. The module with the classic piano piece sounds nice and gives the endpart a touch of style. CONCLUSION I think it's time for the comments (positive or negative)and the figures to form the final conclusion. I'm a bit disappointed that today's democrews still come up with same old effects. But because this dentro is so perfect executed I will take it easy with my comments on the effects. However I do have a remark to make about the 'supremacy' thing of EKO, don't over do it ! You're good but remember there are always people who can do better (still I think D.B.A. has the best text-displayer(grin)). ~DISKSTAK.BLK~ CODE : 8 1/2 GRAPHICS : 9 it's got style SOUND : 7 1/2 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---------------------------- 124 BEERS LATER DEMO BY TRIO ---------------------------- Yes, Life of an reviewer is hard, you have to search through piles of disks in other to find a suitable demo to review. Then you actually have to watch it, take notes, and write something about it. This can be either great fun or total depressing, depending on the quality of the goods. Watching the previous demo was great fun, making the review also a pleasant one to do. But life as I know it also has it's dark sides, and one of them is writing a review about the following production ... The '124 Beers Later' demo is done by a French democrew calling themselves 'Trio'. It must be a rather new crew as the name didn't ring any bells. It's seems that this production was released at the 'Place 2 Be' party in august 1994. It comes on 2 HD disks and takes a couple precious megabytes on your harddrive. HERE WE GO, A module starts playing (a familiar tune)and the title of the demo in picture format comes up. Then another one showing a couple of bottles, followed by yet another one showing the crew's logo. After the slideshow the first effect drops in on the party, a zooming picture. An almost common effect in most demo's, a Terminal rip-off clone. I wonder when these democrews stop doing them, as it gets very very boring after seeing 2 thousand different examples of the same idea. If you feel the uncontrollable urge to do it anyway, at least make it worth watching ! The next stage of this demo is a home-video. Some dude with a videocamera runs through his/someone's house or garage, or whatever ! Next thing in line is a lightsourced spinning cube, a pretty standard procedure in todays demo's. Yep another pic shows up with 'Place 2 Be' all over it, and on we go. Yep another tunnel effect, a pretty standard procedure in today's demo's. This one is not even original as it made it's first appearance in an 'Avena demo' ... The tunnel takes the exit and an (poor)attempt at a texture mapped cube comes in. Four pics underneath the cube showing through on all sides ! The next effect doesn't work properly on my machine or is it supposed to be this way? Anyway it has something to do with 3 planes or something along that line. Finally the endpic appears, the credits and greetings get projected on it with transparent characters. An annoying sample of the French version of '20 Bottles of Beer on The Wall' accompanies the end part. CONCLUSION Boring effects, average coding and average graphics. It's not really worth the harddrive space. That's all I want to say about this really, the figures will tell, ~DISKSTAK.BLK~ CODE : 6- GRAPHICS : 7 SOUND : 6- Boredom struck !! --------------------------------------------------------------------- -------------------------------- HIGHWAY STAR DEMO V.1.07 BY PLPL -------------------------------- Here we have another demo released at the 'Place 2 Be' held in France. This whole review-section contains only French demos, eehh see like a special or something. Just like the previous demo I'm also not familiar with the coder of this production. It's always positive to see some new names entering the scene. This particular demo is smaller then the two previous ones, it's about 1000 Kilobytes. HERE COMES THE CAVALRY Before the actual show starts there is an info screen first. You have to press any key to go on, it took me 30 minutes to decide which one. I'm the sort of guy who needs clear guidelines of what to do, like press spacebar ! Well, the first thing that appears is a 256 color pic of a mountain landscape. Then from the center of the screen spirals of shaded dots erupt in many different shapes and colors. The same pic as before appears several times and the demo goes in a loop. There is music in the shape of a module. This thing doesn't work a VGA which I personally would have liked. Is this demo that time consuming that it can be done on VGA ? However it works very well with my 32 Mhz. accelerator, almost doubling the speed of the spirals building up. CONCLUSION To be honest with you all, I think that this effect is boring and done millions of times before. Shadebobs, shadedots, shadeblocks, shadecircles, shade... This is the kind of demo you watch once, and then you either delete it or it gets packed and winds up on a disk, never to be seen again. ~DISKSTAK.BLK~ CODE : 6 GRAPHICS : 6 SOUND : 7 ~MINT.PAL~