MORE DEMO REVIEWS
~SECOND.FIL~
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EVEN MORE DEMO REVIEWS
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 Reviewed by Slimer


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ARE YOU EXPERIENCED? BY EKO
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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 

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124 BEERS LATER DEMO BY TRIO
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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 !!

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HIGHWAY STAR DEMO V.1.07 BY PLPL
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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~
