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Saxonia Issue 02 Part 033
Variform/Kewlers
Reviewed by Rumrunner/VOID
[l
I'm about to do something that I never though I would, namely review a
couple of pc-productions. I have no idea how old they are but, I think
that this one (Variform) is fairly new. Look at the next article for a
review of Fesk by Pulse.
Right, the background for writing this review is me sitting bored in
school, thinking that I should perhaps do something useful, so I ended
up downloading a few demos for the pc. This was one of those I found
that, if not good, at least kept my attention enough that I wathed the
whole thing.
Let's start with the music in the demo. It's the regular techno thing.
Not worth listening to a second time in my opinion. However, it plays
an important role in the demo, as almost every single effect throughout
the production is timed very hard to the music. And I have never seen
so many screen flashes in any production before. This surely have to be
the most overused effect looking through all of the scene's history.
Personally, I have only found one demo in which screen flashes is used
in a satisfying manner. Ofcourse it's the Andromeda demo Nexux 7,
released at The Party in 1994. The discoball effect there flashed the
screen every time one of the lightbeams hit the screen directly and
that looked good. I have never seen it used as good or even good at all
before or after that time.
As I have now started to comment the effects, let's look at some more of
them. Or perhaps that should be "let's look at the one effect there is".
I don't know, since most of them looks the same. It's basically pieces
of or whole objects flying around on screen, 3d ofcourse. Even some kind
of tunneleffect used objects as the "walls". There was at least one nice
thing to mention though, and that is a part where an object looses the
outer layer once in a while, almost like the glenzvector in the first
part of D.O.S by Andromeda (when still on the CLI screen). Except from
this, there's not much worth saying about each separate part of the demo.
But I will make a couple of remarks about all effects seen as a whole.
First is, where are the colours? PC-people complain about our AGA Amigas,
and how they are incapable of showing 24 bit pictures (if I ever hear
that phrase again, I will go maaad), and then they make a demo that
only uses greyscale! No wait, in one of the parts, I actually found some
blue colours. Also, plain white was overrepresented, I don't think that
it looks good keeping that large parts of the screen pure white. From
distance, it must have looked as if I was working in Word or some shit
like that.
The next remark regarding the effects is a positive one, I guess you all
got a bit shocked there, hehe. Strange enough, I have to say that the
effects ran smooth, there were no jerking and flicking. But then again,
it was all 3d and that's what pc's and graphiccards for that computer
is made for, so it's probably not so strange afterall.
Let's see, what can I say about the graphics? Not much, I'm afraid, as
I couldn't find much. There were a couple of pictures of people,
probably those who have made the demo, and they almost looked like the
pictures from the known and loved demos from Spaceballs, State Of The
Art and Nine Fingers. I got a bit curious when seeing this. Have
somebody got hold of Lone Starr's source for converting bitplanes into
vectors? As far as I know, I seem to remember that he sold the source
to a game company, can it have spread further?
All in all, this demo was certainly not bad, but at the same time, it
wasn't good either. The screen flashes destroyed much and the effects
are just the common ones. I prefer some effects that are simple to code
but still looks good. I also miss the colours, if you want monochrome
graphics, get a Commodore PET and work on that.
So, let's put down the credits at the end :
Curly Brace : Code, 3D, design
Mel Function : Music, design
Little Bitchard : Music
Actor Dolban : 2D graphics
