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Saxonia Issue 02 Part 034
Fesk/Pulse^Movement^Phenomena
Reviewed by Rumrunner/VOID
[l
After the previous review, you might think that I'm in a bad mood today,
however that's not the case. And this production even managed to cheer
me up a little. It's a musicdisk, and every Amigascener should at least
recognize one of the names above. Yes, that's right, Phenomena was one
of the leading groups back in the start of the nineties. People should
remember Mr Gurk blitting lot's of bobs to the screen, beeing one of the
leading men behind the "bobwars". Mantronix and Tip should be wellknown
for their music used in several productions, and especially for the
music in Crystal Symphonies 1 and 2. Other names strongly connected to
the group is ofcourse such as Azatoth and Celebrandil.
When loading this musicdisk I wondered a little in the start. I didn't
know what happened to Mantronix and Tip after they disappeared from
the Amiga, and then I find the names here. Even the name Crystal
Symphonies were present. I first thought that this was a joke, made by
somebody who thought they were so clever, using the names of old legends.
Luckily, this wasn't the case. There's a text telling that Tip and
Mantronix wanted to release all their unused music at one time, but
this never happened, until this musicdisk that is. I cannot remember if
anybody else from Phenomena was involved in this production, but I don't
think so. But that's not important here.
What is important is that such a thing as a musicdisk is quite uncommon
today, no matter what platform you are looking at. There has been some
good chippacks out lately (perhaps you can discuss if lately is the right
phrase), examples of such are Her Numbness from Industry and the
longrunning Digital Chips series from Apathy. Digital Chips is not only
a chippack anymore though, as it has a decent magpart also. However, I
hope that Apathy will work on the musicpart as well and not make the
production a pure diskmag. Having said that, I would also like to say
that there were some good articles present in Digital Chips 31, and the
new code from Strife looks good. I liked the idea of copying articles
and cliparts to ram before running the musicpack/diskmag, I guess that
most of you who have read my other articles in this issue and also in
the previous issue have noticed that I like to make things that works
on Amiga 500, and I also like the possibility of running things from
floppydisk. And the speedup you get from loading articles from ram:
instead of disk is quite big. I haven't tried loading Digital Chips from
floppy though, but a quick look at the filesizes tells me that it should
work well.
Seems I got onto another offtrack there, perhaps I should try to stick
to the subject of this article this time. I said that musicdisks are
rare nowadays and looking at a production like Fesk was enjoyable. There
was not much effects and things running while playing the music, but
anyway there was good music, and that's what's important in a musicdisk.
The code worked well, even when run from Windoze 98, and everything was
nice. That must be a first time regarding scene productions on the pc.
I think that the main reason for me liking Fesk is that I enjoy old
productions. I remember all those who were famous in past times, and I
still vote for them in the charts, simply because I haven't yet found
any other that is equally good, I would like to point out however that
this doesn't mean that I dislike present scener's work, I just think that
it needs more work to reach the level on old productions. So, hearing
Tip and Mantronix modules made the experience for me, although they have
never been among my top favourites, they were unquestionable good at what
they did.
Another thing I like about the musicdisk is that there is no boring
3d routines in it. Not many 2d routines either by the way, the only
thing present is a musicselector and some pages of text that fades in
and out in a rather decent way.
I think that this production doesn't need any more comments. I have made
my point. The music is good, and the code does the job. It's the modules
that are important in a musicdisk, just like articles are the most
important in a diskmag, pictures in a slideshow and effects and ideas
in a demo.
If I was to recommend one production for the pc to download, this would
be the one. It may be some years old now (I seem to remember that I saw
the year 1999, but I'm not sure), but it's still worth looking at, just
like Mirror/Andromeda is worth getting if you are looking for an Amiga
musicdisk.
