Plasma Fun

Batman Forever

2011-03-22T08:54:00.013Z

I decided to express my feelings for this demo. I know I have to. Because this is going to have impact. The scene will remember this. This demo owns in many different ways. It doesn't just own the CPC. It totally owns!

Amazing feats this demo has achieved. First of all this demo teases both the CPC and the C64 scene at the same time! I don't remember any demo doing such clever and hilarious teasing of two scenes simultaneously! This is a first.

Secondly, the presentation reminds me of Amiga. It's such a fast paced and impressive presentation that I can hardly think of any better in other 8bits. Maybe I exagerate with this because what is a succesful presentation is subjective and people might mention Edge of Disgrace but I think Batman Forever shows more energy.

How about the effects? I don't think I exagerate here and actually some of the records and effects would impress even if they were running in an Amiga demo. Maybe to this add the beautiful graphics and vivid colours of the CPC. Honestly, that texture twister with it's big size, smoothness and neat CPC graphics would be praised even if it was running on a 16bit machine. Or the dot records! This doesn't look like 8bit. The last good C64 record I remember must be 512 dots tunnel in Soiled Legacy except if this was beaten but surely it hasn't reached the record of this CPC demo. The dot tunnels even in Desert Dreams on Amiga (oh, or the amazing C64 conversion) or other demos on this machine aren't so much populated in dots. The vector city (compared to the one in Soiled Legacy again) is more high res and with much more buildings (even if it must be animation) than similar I have seen on C64 or even AtariST. I think I have seen a record of 6000 sine dots in an AtariSt demo.

Do you understand what that means? Some of the effects surely beat any 8bit records out there by far and maybe even 16bit records!!! I haven't seen such a feat in any demo before. Oh, maybe except in a single effect in Numen, the bump mapping somewhere in the middle which is smoother and has higher resolution and size than anything I have seen for example in AtariST and I don't remember a really good big bump mapper in a 16bit Amiga either.

Another thing I enjoy in this demo is the great use of zooming, probably by X-stretching with a fast software rendering routine and using the CRTC for Y-stretching the X-stretched bitmap. This is my guess and what else could it be when the size is enormous and the speed 50hz! I did a fast enough X-stretcher used in my demo X-kore and for a long time I wanted to learn the CRTC so that I can combine it with this routine and make the similar zoomers as seen on C64. But guess what, I never bothered to learn the CRTC. I know it was possible though and finally I have seen it now! The only thing where C64 is still better in this domain now is that their zoomers show much bigger bitmaps. One reason for this is they store their bitmap in char mode with different chars of preshifted graphics of the bitmap, that they combine for the X-stretch (in some manner I have to figure), so the time it takes for CPC to stretch one line they would probably stretch 8 lines, well not precisely because of different CPU but you get the point.

Last but not least, what rules in a demo is the initiative. It is the will to make impact, to push things, to motivate, to be a milestone for others to follow. This is what this demo has managed to achieve. This has created serious noise in our minds. This was a mental bomb that totally shuttered our vision of what is possible and how things could be improved. I tell you what. After this demo, two things have changed in my way I see CPC demos. When I remember all the past CPC demos released, when I try to watch them, I know I will be laughing now. When I think of my released and unreleased pieces of code, I cry.

I was scared for a while that the effect of this would be to not want to code anything anymore because it will take time to top this but no. What the effect of this has to me is to be willing to take more time to improve what I already have (there are many ugly elements in the ASB2 demo we are working on that makes me laugh now :). And another change is that I am willing to learn the CRTC. It must not be that hard really! I just have to focus. My X-stretcher (even if Rhino's might be even faster judging by some code I have stared at with the Winape debugger) and your average CRTC line splitting code would be enough to do the zoomer effects Rhino did and even more cool stuff!

All the pun in this demo is truly well said. Amstrad Begins. Now!

Borderlands

2011-01-25T09:47:00.010Z

I wasn't playing modern PC games for a long time. It's too much of a hassle, installing some GBs in your hard drive, getting into the game, calibrating tons of controls and then not playing it. So, I used to play old stuff and emulators because it's easier to set up and the controls are simple and you might finish a game in half an hour. So, if I review a modern PC game I have been playing it means something. Because I rarely have the motivation to install and play one. The last good FPS I loved on the PC is Return To Castle Wolfenstein to give you an idea how away I am from hardcore (not casual or indie or emu) PC gaming. Also, there were two recent PC games I played too much the year that passed (and I still play). One is Test Drive Unlimited and the other is Borderlands. Nuff said!

I see that Borderlands has created a fan base on the internet. And I see lot's of people hating it. This happens a lot with succesful games that miss that something and you think they are overrated. Many people find Borderlands boring. It's exactly the opposite with my case, cause I find it extremely addictive. Needless to say that I play the single player mode only, while most people say the game is worth for it's multiplayer. I can't imagine how that will be!

Ok, I will start for the bad points and I agree with some of the haters that something is missing. And then I will go on with what makes Borderlands so unique. They say there is no scenario, just pointless missions. There is some kind of scenario unravelled here even though it's not very strong. This is not important though to enjoy such kind of game. You are a treasure hunter on planet pandora, being lured by some kind of guardian angel to go into the search of a legendary vault that is supposed to hide some alien technology. There is some progression on the story, you find a young scientist called Patricia Tanis, there is Atlas corporation who wants the alien technology for itself, etc. And some side missions that sometimes have some relation to the story, like collecting audio tapes that people left that tell the story (like the Patricia Tanis audio tapes) and some other stupid missions like collecting bottles of beer and such stuff. The ending is not that good, maybe leaves you with expectations for another sequel, maybe not. But the scenario is there to fill the gap and it's not supposed to be important, there are also humorous elements in it and funny character presentations. But it's there, it doesn't suck entirely as people say.

Ok, the annoying stuff that I agree with. Lot's of side missions where you have to go somewhere and find some stuff scattered around, like "Oh, those bandits have stolen my cigarretes, go find them" and such. But if you just love moving around and mowing people done and getting loot then the punny missions are just the motive to go at some place and do that and then finish and go back to collect your reward. Such side stories existed in Fallout 3 and Oblivion too. Then, having to run around from one far side of the map to the other far side to collect something for a mission can be boring, although you have some vehicle you can use for faster travel too. Oh, and those signposts where you can teleport at different location. One sidenote, in the DLCs (aka expansions) that were released for this game, there are no teleport posts to move around, I don't know why they did that and it's very annoying for example in General Knoxx's Secret Armory DLC where the distances are vast (but you always move with the vehicles) - a very good DLC anyway.

What makes Borderlands good is how it combines the FPS and RPG elements together. It's more focused on the hilarious FPS action (with some sense of humour and funny cartoonish style graphics) rather than RPG itself, but borrows some of the most addictive elements of RPG games. You won't find any serious role playing in here, all you will find is what made the Diablo series addictive. Constant leveling up and ability increasing and (drumroll :) LOOTING!!! This is the single thing that makes it addicting for me. You can either kill enemies and they randomly drop loot, which can be money, ammo or weapons, shields and special items. Or you can find these stuff by opening chests. We are interested of course in chests that contain special weapons and stuff, not those ammo chests because you always have plenty of them.

There are any random combination of weapons (some say 1000000... number I don't remember) in the sense of being a pistol/revolver/SMG/Rifle/Sniper/Bazooka/Alien but each with random characteristics sharing, like different percent of accuracy, recoil, damage, reload speed, etc. So, you might find something totally funny, like a rifle with very strong damage but firing so slow like a fucking pistol or a powerful shotgun that spreads the shots so widely that you can't hit anything over one meter of distance or an SMG that fires X2 or X4 shots at once and there are also elemental powers attached to some of the weapons like fire, shock, acid or explosion damage and way much more funny stuff. What might come into your posession is so vast that it's such the excitement when you find new weapon chests scattered around. And there are also many different 3d models/styles of weapons and different weapon manufacturers that affect differently some of these elements. Well, most of the times there is some balance in what you find, so you end up with 95% of the weapons being already worse than what you have which you go and sell in vending machines (another place to find and buy weapons) till you reach higher levels and find more interesting gear around.

This is the main thing that makes this game addictive to me. But of course it's not the only one. The FPS/RPG mix is better to my liking than say Fallout 3 where you had to play with the turn based fighting mode (R.A.T.S.) instead of the real time because it was simply more effective and also you felt sort on ammo (this game is more focused on true role playing than action but it' still a good game but not as addictive as Borderlands for me). There is a scenario that I like as a concept even if it's not deep and just there to fill the gap, but the characters, the humour, the stylish presentation raise this up to a good level imho. If you like moving around in vast areas, enjoying good action and the leveling up/looting elements of RPGs like Diablo then this is for you. Don't listen to people who say this game totally sucks, it's not that bad, it's quite good in my opinion but that depends whether you will be bored with such kind of games or not (if there is a playable demo, try it first).

One last thing I forgot, you choose between four characters, each one of them have different special abilities. One is better with snipers and pistols and carries a sword while he sends a hawk down to enemies, another is the soldier who can set up a turret with a shield to mow down enemies, then there is the girl who can phase in another dimension and come back and likes elemental weapons and then Brick the monster who can punch people to death. So, if you finish the game with one character, you can play another one for an entirely different experience (there is a tree list of different abilities you can choose too). Till now I am playing with Mordecai, the guy with the sword and the hawk, because he had great style on the intro presentation and I also enjoy snipping :)

For me it's one of my most favorite games ever now! I hope more FPS will follow these RPG elements with such success.

p.s. Words about the DLCs. Dr.Ned's Zombie Island, small nice, with Zombies and purple colours and gothic atmosphere. Mad Moxxi's Underdome riot, this is a sequence of arena matches, too many of them, I stopped playing it at some time because it took me 6 hours to finish 3x25 rounds and there were 3x100 later(!!!), might catch up with it later, also it doesn't give you XP by killing enemies so it makes less sense. Then we have General Knoxx's secret armory which is one of the best DLCs, relies a lot on driving vehicles (3 of them) and have some nice ideas and a good finale. Killing the boss (which looks like the general inside a robot suit like in Avatar the movie :) you are into his armory where you set up a bomb to explode in less than 3:00 minutes and you are in a room with maybe a hundred of special weapon boxes with tons of loot, being extatic while your acomplish tells you "Hurry up, you have xxx minutes left" but you ignore and collect loot, LOL!!! And then Tartarus Station where you find Tanis again and she asks for robot parts and more robot parts and she has you complete a boring mission for several times (whyyyy???) before you reach a nice town with a railroad and take some more interesting missions. I wonder why these DLCs don't have teleport signs for their various locations as the original. Though they are generally smaller in size so except from the General Knoxx DLC, the others are ok. I am also hoping for a new Borderlands 2 instead of more DLCs. Maybe improving some of the stuff I don't like (I almost forgot, the Bazooka's sometimes pass through an enemy so you have to shoot for the floor and they still don't do much damage, ugh :P)

Luck in games

2011-01-22T12:16:00.003Z

I never understood Bejewled.

It's fun, you move jewels, jewels break and a lot of funny graphics, explosions, 3d tunnels, warps are happening in your screen per click.

But I don't get the concept. You can just click and make some random pairs and things break. What forces me to have a strategy to choose the right jewels to break? It seems random. Sometimes I loose because there are no jewel pairs to break. Are people thinking strategically which jewel to break in order to not be out of pairs after 20 plays? I don't get it! The only strategy I could think is to break the ones that are lower in order for more stuff to fall off and make compos. A puzzle game like tetris was based entirely on how you set up the 7 pieces that came randomly. You were building stuff, there was logic, there was skill. But what is there in bejeweled? Except if I am missing something..

There is an interesting article about luck in games that inspired me to write this post. It shows with pie charts how much skill, luck and other factors are there in different game genres. It also reviews the bejeweled case.

It also has as an example of luck, the funniest game video I have ever seen (if you exclude any video of big rigs of course :)

WTF?

Led Blur slit-scan representation

2010-12-20T10:10:00.003Z

This is an oldie. I found the image again. The next scanline of every frame of my demo Led Blur is displayed at each line. It's like a brief timeline representation of what's happening in the progression of my demo. I liked this very much so I decided to upload. It's reduced in size in blogspot so I split the very high image (5700 pixels) in three parts. It's still reduced a bit but not so much. Enjoy!

Recent demos from X

2010-10-20T12:30:00.006+01:00

I just always feel like I really want to write a lot about the recent demos from various demoparties. I am not talking only about the Mekka of the C64 but also the latest PC stuff in Main, Buenzli, Function, etc. But since time is not so much, I will focus on my favorite C64 demos at X and forget the rest. I wish there were more frequent updates here about every significant party out there but it's not possible atm. It would be fun though that this blog would turn out into a more frequent review blog of recent demo releases.

The most important demoparties dedicated to the C64 seems to be X and LCP. When there are months since I have last seen an impressive and massive demo on the C64, those are the two places to expect lot's of good stuff of this kind. And when I mean lot's, I mean the first three or four places being masterpieces, followed by several okayish demos. This is what happened to this X 2010 too. It's one of those times that I am motivated to come back to the C64 (I should keep on with this motivation this time).

The first demo I have seen from X was Mekanix from Booze Design and Instinct (they have recently merged together I've heard) and when I found out it was placed only 3rd I was thrilled by the thought of what masterpieces would follow at the 2nd and 1st place. However, after I have seen all the releases I still liked Mekanix more than the rest. But my high expectations didn't killed the good feeling I got from the rest. They are all very memorable demos.

Actually, there is a different distinctive style between the three releases. Mekanix is all about great code but still features some good graphics and transitions (although not as amazing as Edge of Disgrace). 2nd place, We Are New by Fairlight has very original transitions (although at some places it's slow paced), great artwork, good ideas and few parts with good code among the average ones. It's also different than the older Fairlight demos which were more abstract and conveyed a message, more demoish I would say (personally I love both styles). The winner is a comeback by Offence, an old Hungarian C64 and Amiga group mostly known for their 1992 demo Emotional Breakdown. The style is quite surprising because it brings back the old megademo style where you have to press the long key to load the next part, but each part is done with such graphical design and unique or funny ideas that really makes that old kind of style likeable. I could compare it to Dutch Breeze or the demos from Panoramic Designs. It surprised me at first that this one got the 1st place over Mekanix and We Are New but the great feeling and ideas won over the usual trackmo style. I love both three demos and each one has it's own unique style and distinctive way to show what is a demo.

Going back to Mekanix (and I am sorry about the ranting about both three places, I wanted to make this distinction of the different styles here,. oh the screenshot above is not from Mekanix but the 1st place, Another Beginning), each of the parts is a masterpieces of code and good effect ideas. I don't know where to start from. Should I speak about the amazing per pixel rotozoomers (the best I have ever seen on the C64, how do they do it at such resolution and speed? Don't tell me, with many different char sets? Gotta think this again :), the wonderful 3d dots and strange 3d wireframe cube (I said they look like gouraud edges, but it's just planes cutting the cube, ho I even had to do this detail for my master's project for volume slicing and I forgot it's this one ;), classic booze design zooming algorithms (code recycling?), but the amazing isometric rendering of what looks like a 16*16*16 volume of metaballs!

That's the shit for me!!! This looks absolutely fabulous. I wondered how did they do that and I thought it was impossible at such speed. Then I thought it too much and found out some theoritical ways I have to try and see how they look, that would make it pretty fucking possible. But some people said it's an animation and that could bring down all the magic (gotta try my idea first on CPC, well maybe in 2015 :). Still it's an amazing and unique idea, pretty much another paradigm shift of new effects on the 8bits and not only. They even use this engine as a writer for some isometric texts and then for a second effects which is a 3d torus with isometric feeling (both run at 2-3 frames (screen refreshes I mean)), which must be some smaller blobs in a ring, maybe 16 of them, rotating around the center of the torus. That's neat stuff!

For me, this is the effect of the year for the C64. And it's not the only impressive effect in the demo. The 3rd place is a true coder's delight. Some graphics artwork are also good. The music didn't left me a very good feeling though. I mean, it's doing it's work but it didn't stay in my mind. Overall a really hot demo and now with the merge of Booze Design and Instinct I am expecting to see hotter stuff from them.

Going on with the 2nd place from Fairlight, this is a really nice to watch big demo even if you might get bored if you are expecting coder porn in every screen. I really love the transitions and the artwork in this demo. The only cool effect one can enjoy are the 3d renditions of ninja panda and little monster in the change disk part and near the end too. Those are made by fat blocks that rotate around the Y axis and without a projection. They are pretty unique and original as effects. The bouncing sphere on a graphics picture with other drawn spheres is a nice idea too even if too small and not very good looking. But still a good part. Little mention about the great parallax part in the screenshot above, joking of course. Finally, now we can see the true distinction between a UFO and a balloon and that they are completely different. Those skeptics are truly nuts!

I am showing mostly artwork in the screenshots for this demo. Because one has to see the transitions in movement to appreciate so a screenshot wouldn't suffice. And also because I truly love the artwork. The artwork from the end upscroller in the background is so good and is actually a work from Louie500, famous for his Amiga artwork with TBL. In fact, he also worked on the PC demo Only One Wish and some of the thematic parts (the stamps) in this demo reminds me of the PC graphics. I just remember Fairlight also did the demo One Little Wish on the C64 which also featured his graphics. It's great to see people from newschool scenes coming to the true oldschool. (I should mention that the other graphics are Tempest and Pantaloon (who also did code for this demo, great to see musicians/graphics switching to coding too :) and one of them drew a really great panda upon a tree, absolute great graphics, you can see it here along with credits and other stuff). I should also say, coming back to transitions, that it's not "in your face" but more slow placed yet original (some startling animations at the beginning, diagonal stripes closing screens, etc). Maybe I am forgetting stuff.

Fairlight demo would be a demo to lay back and enjoy at your own pace. If you seek for easy to consume coder porn and slick fast paced trackmo style then run Mekanix. If you want style, design, great art still in a trackmo style go Fairlight. If you really feel the need for something more traditional, Another Beginning is your thing. But this is a demo you really need to have time, lay back and stare at scrollers while enjoying lovely tunes for more than your average short demo attention span. This is Another Beginning.

You gotta press the long key. And you gotta watch parts which consists of oldschool scrollers and good ideas. Clearly, the best part for coders is the beginning with the horizontal twister saying Offence (little shadows too, prerendered of course). Then it's the end for code porn consumers :). But the feeling is so unique, the ideas great, Joystick moving swiftly while the stick animates, man which screams out loud letters, split that shows coder brain (on screenshot), beautiful simple part with man in the rain and text that Optimus likes (you know, the sad kind of stuff :), scrolling screen with background that is a delusion (with the dots, think it's distorting, simple but funny as an idea :), 3d isometric scroller that changes height (that's the only other part that code-hungry people will like), C64 logo at nap. Ok, I still prefer 2nd and 3rd from this, but this is unique that a "press space" demo really catched the feeling and won. I love it!

And we end up with the rest which are still interesting coder-wise stuff from the rest and still good enough demos. I will start with the what is in the screenshot, which is Exotic Excitement by Camelot. I was happy to see another comeback from Camelot and Cruzer. They must be working for their true megademo since ages, which might be called "Meet the Camels". A parody of course of that Crest demo everyone is waiting since forever. But it's gonna be great and I am truly waiting for it. Because this single effect on this little demo is supposed to be a leftover from their big demo, but it's still awesome! This is the biggest, smoothest, greatest and more colorful plasma I have ever seen on the C64!!! And you know how I love plasma. I "smelled" color cycling among other things (yet some formations look like real plasma), but it's not only that. You need a FLI algorithm on the C64 to have that kind of colors so close together. This means changing the colors again and again at each different scanline (here it's per two lines) which needs a lot of synchronization and several cycles wasted. This is a great routine. C64 never stops impressing me and so do Camelot!

The remaining good stuff are Frighthof by Arsenic (5th place) and Portal by Lepsi Developments & Miracles. Honorable mention to the 4th place, Cubase64 by Mahoney which is not exactly a demo but a demonstration of impressive realtime digital sound processing on the C64. This is monumental! Even after so many years we see new paradigms of coding not only on graphics but on sound too on such an old machine. If the C64 scene where one thinks everything is being done already, sceners can still show quite new impossible stuff every year that makes the old records look like a child's play, imagine what is possible in underdeveloped scenes like the CPC and not only. Wow! Simple wow..

Let's go back to the two demos. The Arsenic demo is a good coder's demo with slow paced music and gothic style (as usual), while featuring some neat 3d effects. I love the big X-rotating dithered stuff (although we have seen this a lot of times before, but here it's BIG) and the use of black 3d vectors for the bat transition (reminds me of some funny old lame Greek PC demo, guess which :). There are some more stuff into this one and I let you watch it. Portal is also a demo with a lot of nice 3d and other 2d algorithm, pretty newschool chunky stuff, even features a nice 3d city and little more stuff. Some of the graphics are ugly though. This is a pure coder demo with not so good graphical design. Still a good release from these Polish groups. There were more demos at X, even if less significant, and you can see the full results and downloads here.

I gotta close this big review and now I see why I can't write more frequent demoparty reviews in this blog. Takes much more time than I plan too. I am just too enthusiastic and spend time taking new screenshot (which I love to) and writting lot's of text :)

My only hope after X and this review is that this will motivate me personally to come back to C64 coding and plan a new demo with more interesting effects than my Livetro this time. I am looking at an older thread at CSDb where I was asking for crossdev tools. Heh. I remember having downloading some of them but I never found the time between my other projects (CPC, Gamepark or PC) to start coding. Till then, I will be watching demos and writing (not frequently) more reviews here.

p.s. You can find youtube links in some of the Pouet links of these demos in case you don't know how to run an emulator.

Beautiful Astronomy Pictures

2010-09-25T18:57:00.006+01:00

Ok, I just realized that I have a long time since I last posted something in this blog (among my 7 other ones, OMG) and so I decided to throw a filler or something.

We start with this image which is one of those sky aurora phenomenons I very much would like to see from the ground and with my very own eyes oneday. For that reason and the fact that the shape and colour smoothing reminds me of some plasma effects in demos (but not too much, this could be classified more as a luminous ribbon effect :) this is one of my favorites here.

We continue next with an astonishing image that is just pure blackness with some stars and our own little planet together with it's only moon. Definitely not so beautiful as some of the other pictures in the link I will give you soon but perplexing as you see this in this distance and it gets too hard to grasp that this big beautiful world we currently occupy is such a tiny place lost in the vastness of the universe. Similar emotions arise if you think about time, human civilization being such a tiny time fragment compared to the age of the planets of the solar system, our galaxy or the universe itself. It simply scares me staring at this picture. In the very next moment we could be wiped out in a puff by major cosmic events and that would be a natural event without a special meaning.

One more beautiful image to separate this text and give you the links. They are probably no news, you might have already encountered these images somewhere before this blog post (spare me the ORLY's here, I am not planning to be an exclusive source here but just post something that fascinates me even if it's old news), this is Around the Solar System and then someone pointed out a very obvious website called Astronomy Picture of the Day which I am sure I have encountered several times before but I want to put the link here to bookmark it and maybe view some of it's contents in the near future. As a final bonus, check also this interactive Flash called The scale of the universe, from the tiniest size of matter to the size of the universe. It's definitely mind-boggling especially the fact that you have to travel from the tiniest scale so many factors of ten to reach the first known element. Anyway I leave you to explore yourself.

Chromatic

2010-06-12T12:40:00.004+01:00

Such an addictive timewaster. Fortunately, in such games, when I reach higher levels I get frustrated and stop playing. It gets so complicated that I am too lazy to play further :P

The concept is sooo cool and so are the controls (you've got to get used to them) and ideas. You are a ball that can change between three colors. You have to match the colors with the coin colors to collect them or the traps and obstacles of the same color. There are also different abilities for each color, the red can run faster and dash further, the blue can slide and climb on walls, the yellow can double jump. And you have to combine them together as you go through the levels. Then the complex levels start where an area behind you is colored differently and affects your own color so you have 6 colors or more and also some objects that change your primary colors. It's a very effective concept and if you want to be challenged by the advanced levels this is for you!

Breakpoint 2010 releases

2010-04-10T00:54:00.000+01:00

I watched part of the BP competitions from the stream. I wish I could be there this year but I was in Greece for the eastern holidays. The ambiance was great, the feeling rocked, there were music, people dancing :)

I totally loved several of the releases both from PC, Amiga and C64. I might want to write something about few of them. I really don't know where to start from. Maybe I should start from the demo whose music I am just listening right now repeatedly.

No time to grab a new screenshot and this one from Pouet (which is four pics), I don't like much. But I will stay with it. This is Rove by Farbrausch and it got the 2nd place in the PC demo compo.

I am not sure why I like this demo so much. It has the elements that can make you easily to get bored. It is actually a so called flybye, a long one, with the same scenes after a while. The visuals are so beautiful, it's like 'elevated' but in an alien world with totally strange creatures. One thing that makes it so nice is probably the music which I am listening for hours and I am totally in love with it. And so am I with the visuals and those strange worlds. No matter if it's a long boring flybye, I can totally watch this till the end without getting bored. Possibly not the demo you would watch with friends but a favorite one to me.

A demo that you can actually watch with friends and have fun is Wir Sind Einstein by United Force and Digital Dynamite and this came 4th in the same compo. It actually looks a lot like their previous masterpiece, The Golden Path but I like their new one three times more because it has a more consistent and funny theme and is not just going straight through a single path. Maybe it's the lyrics that are making this hilarious and when we watched the words "RESEARCH IS LUST" appearing we had a great laugh. The same fun we had discovering the rest of the lyrics. It's like a funny song about science being cool or something. It also follows the same happy colorful design as in their previous demo. No matter if some people might think it's recycling, I did liked this a lot. But mostly when watching with friends who adore it :)

Those might be my two favorites. Of course there is the winner of this compo, Agenda Circling Forth by Fairlight and CNCD which although I can't enjoy because it's unacceptably slow in my machine but I like the concept. This demo is build only by shitload of dots and some great fluid dynamics effects are applied upon them. In the meantime you can stare an animal or two runners build exclusively by dots on which various physical forces are applied. Personally I am not that fan of this demo even after I watched the video. But thumbs up for the originality. This will definitely get a nomination for best effects.

The 3rd place is a demo I could enjoy better because it definitely runs on my machine and this is one of the few moments I am happy I have Vista here. It is Partycle by Pandacube. In the last Breakpoint Pandacube also came 3rd with their first attempt at making a demo, even though I was surprised for this place. Here they do much better than their last time and there are actually some nice times in this demo. Apart from the Doom3-ish looks (shadows, bump mapping, etc) and the good music, I also liked the final scene with the particle and the 3d girl (probably some model from Poser, oh what a nice way to attract scener votes :).

Another demo that made me happy but only got the 14th place is Ibis by Cubicle. It needs some sort of thing called XNA which I don't know what it is about (some M$ thing) but I am going to download now to watch this again. I love this demo because of the crystal clear visuals (something usual in Cubicle demos) and it's lovely electronic sound.

I will only refer to the remaining PC demos that are maybe worth to watch but don't have so much to say. The 5th place is zkareplace mk 5 by Nuance which most of the time is not very interesting or good looking except from two scenes, a short scene with some water ripple effects in 3D and the surprising greeting part with the talking heads. Vokawordai by Satori (6th place) is a strange noizy software demo which I am not much fan of it but many people seemed to like it and you will do too if you like Satori demos. Lucifer by Brainstorm (7th place) has such a scary atmosphere and some nice visuals at times. Another interpretation for Lucifer is that of a dark planet or comet that produced floods or another destruction on earth tens of thousands of years ago according to some books by people into conspiracy theories or paranormal and maybe such stories have inspired the concept of this demo because there is a scene of such dark firey planetoid before the end. The artway invitation has a great 3D rendering of an Amiga computer both inside and outside (the best I have seen so far). And Byterapers are back with a demo that didn't seem to attract my attention the last time I have seen it on the streamer and now it just doesn't run here.

Concerning the intros on PC, there seems to be a trend. 64k is dying, 4k is growing. The only worth watching 64k I remember is Imagine by TGGC, Copycat and Blueflame. It starts with a grey city full of focal blur and then rainbow and plasma with rainbow colors appear everywhere. I liked it but I expected more from the 64k category. I haven't watched most of the other entries (some didn't simple ran in my PC and I have lost the 64k streaming).

The 4k were much better. My favorite must be Retrospection by Frequency and Trolls in the Shadows (5th place). It's another one of those 4k raytracing intros among with ergon by Frequency (3rd place), Fan_tastic by Rebels and Alcatraz and maybe others I am missing too. From all of them I love retrospection because of the music. And it's almost the only one that manages to run smooth enough here. The 2nd place is taken by Mistrace from TBC which I like because of putting those beautiful shapes (hexagon, pentagon?) in just 1k.

But the real winner of this compo is Darwinism by Archee. In a time when 4k raytracing intros are so common and expected, people seem to expect something different. And that different is Darwinism. When I first saw it, my first thought were that this was inspired by Karl Sims evolutionary creatures. Although I am not sure what is evolving in Archee's demo because not much is changing in the geometry. Maybe just the different ways the creature tries to jump in order to catch the butterfly? While it's a good surprise this 4k won the compo it's not my favorite. In my system it simply crashes. It was fun to watch it on the streamer and see sometimes the creature failing and sometimes succeeding. The concept is great. Good to see someone tried something different than what you expect in 4k. But it's not an intro I would watch many times. Retrospection is still my favorite.

Going back to Amiga concerning intros. There is a single one that I truly loved much more than any PC 4k. It is Ikadalawampu by Loonies which got the 1st place in the Amiga 4k compo of course. I am wondering what it's position would be if it took place in the PC compos. This intro just by using glowing lines and great music synchronization with the visuals it creates such an atmosphere and is so enjoyful to watch that it beats 4ks with better visuals easily. I totally love this! I only want to mention that a similar effect is achieved by the winner of the C64 4k compo, Dramatic Pixels by PwP which by just animating three(!) char blocks perfectly synced to the music and telling a story it manages to entertain so much that it makes you wonder. Three little chars are enough to say a story and keep your attention. Amazing!

Can't say the same about Amiga 64ks. The 64k scene is truly dying, just try to imagine if there was a really good 64k in the scene awards. There were some that I like but not the masterpiece we were used in the past. The 4k scene is ever evolving. It's logical. It's easier to make a small 4k that people might like than a full blown 64k. Less space but you can get away by having crappy sound and much fewer visuals. Size is your excuse. In 64ks you have to make a lot more content to make it worth. Btw, there must be quite more good stuff in the PC 4k that I didn't mention because there were so many entries that I forgot what most are about. Just check it for yourself.

Going back to the Amiga and C64 demo competitions. I am personally very satisfied by the quality of the entries. There are at least three demos I liked in each category.

What can I say about the 1st place of the C64 demo competition? Snapshot by Glance totally kicked my ass with it's originality of effects and great presentation. And when I am totally in awe and I hope this will not end yet, a great pic asking for the 2nd disk appears. And a lot more stuff to see here. What can I say? Should I speak about there being a concept in this demo? (films, cameras, etc) Should I write about several impressive effects (vertical wolfenstein (or so I call it), highres big full frame flat 3d (best of it's kind for sure), TBL tunnel effect and whatever I forget) or original use of effects (pseudo-focal blur with target on words, filming instanbul effect or the great mechanical greetings device build of polygons and sprites) or how about the spirit. The final message almost made me cry:

PARTIES MAY GO
DEMOS STAY
WE CHOOSE TO MAKE TOMORROW HAPPEN

It's one of those times that I feel that the scene is alive and kicking! Btw the first three places were above average. Also notice that none of them where from the famous elite groups of C64. I will mention the 2nd and 3rd places in short here. Black Spark by Black Sun (Some nice effects and few original too, like the flat shaded objects as vector balls, never seen and in such quality before on C64) and Agiel by Inversion for 3rd place, a demo from a new group and quite nice for start with good design and some effects that are not bad. One killer demo that might go for best oldschool 8bit demo and probably breakthrough performance (some people didn't know Glance before that, although they did a promising demo in the past) and the 2nd and 3rd positions that are above average and have some good effects to watch.

How about Amiga demos? I like at least the six first places. No killer demos from the usual suspects but quite good stuff from smaller groups. I was personally satisfied by this Amiga demo competition a lot. You don't have to always expect the same killer TBL demo. It's getting boring :)

The screenshots on Pouet are not good and so I will only show one from the 6th position somewhere later during my reviews.

My favorite demo was actually the 2nd place, Metropolice by RNO and Ghostown. It's a regular RNO demo with 2D or 3D stuff, but has such a beautiful theme and presentation among with music, that somehow manages to speak to my feelings. I can't be sure why I love this sooo much! It also seems to have some kind of a concept. The second time I watched it in an emulator I still fell in love with this. I might watch it once more tonight.

The 1st place is the demo We come in Peace by Elude. I was very happy that Elude finally got the 1st place they deserved. Last year they lost the place over Jesus Christ Motocross which is actually a good reason to not get 1st :). But their debut demo in Breakpoint 2008 missed the 1st place over a Drifters demo celebrating their 20th years which was definitely a bad surprise (what are those voters in Breakpoint drinking anyways ;). They deserve this place because what these people are doing in the Amiga is unbelievable. Crazy 3d engine with great post processing effects, glow, blur, ribbons and 3d metaballs and lot's of other stuff. Elude is for Amiga what Plastic is for PC. Both three releases of them in the last Breakpoints are amazing! Not just technically but also concerning the music and graphics. Although I still like Metropolice more :)

We also have the return of Haujobb on the Amiga with their demo Prototype 1 that got the 3rd place, which I remember to have liked on the stream and just downloaded the video to watch because I couldn't run this in WinUAE. I remember some pleasing stuff mostly and the usual Haujobb style. 4th place is Garden variety autobulk by Traktor and Nature which follows a similar pattern as their Jesus Christ Motocross but somehow it didn't managed to entertain me this time (neither on the stream nor when I tried to watch this again in WinUAE). But I still love their cartoonish rendering. Another one of the surprises is the return of the spanish group Ozone on the Amiga after 11(!) years of absence. Their demo Fetish 2 got the 5th place and the style kinda reminds me of their older stuff (although I didn't manage to watch Fetish 1 in WinUAE yet). I still prefer their Smokebomb masterpiece of the past though.

The screenshot is from the 6th place, The ventures of Prince Dakkar and his pilgrimage to the abyss by Tulou (what a strange name :). I really liked this one. Vivid colours, sea concept, some nice 3d (fish that seems to be made of voxels in a sphere, submarine with point sprites :) and great oldschool effects (wavy stuff at the beginning, particles completing the logo at the end, crosszooming). Quick mention of the 7th position, Ontoclasia by Software Failure another spanish group whose coder Ham did also some nice stuff on GP2X and is a great guy so I wanted to write something about his demo :). It follows the same style of Amiga Ham demos but with ever improved design, better colours and the same 3d :)

I will make a short mention on the wild/console competition which also had some nice stuff but I lost half of it on the stream unfortunately. The highlight was definitely BluREU by Crest which with the help of some REU hardware (for more additional memory, 16MB here) and some fast animation player it manages to show some great animations running on a stock C64 in a 320*200 with 16 colors and fullscreen. Going smooth! I couldn't believe this is a commodore doing this. The last animation video I have seen on the C64 doesn't reach this quality at all. We have seen classics from Amiga TBL demo, Popular demo or ASD's Lifeforce rendered as animations with such glorious colours and smoothly! Oh,. have you been Rick Rolled by a C64 before? You should try this, it's even possible to run this in WinVICE.

Honorable mentions are the attempts to make new demos with microcontrolers by the usual suspects or Z80 based computers build by sceners and running new demos with Amiga like gfx and sound. Fun to watch was also a 4x4 led demo, a Vectrex demo and a Calculator demo with funny message at the end. I was also happy to see a new Dreamcast demo, Wobble by CRTC. And a lot of others I might have missed on the streamer.

A nice thing for the CPC scene is that this year the demo From Scratch by Vanity was nominated for Public Choice Awards, something unexpected for me because the CPC scene is sooo small and the other nominees were PC and Amiga masterpieces. This has resulted in a group of French CPC sceners travelling to Breakpoint and even taking part in the graphics and music compo with CPC stuff. A report from Hicks/Vanity is written here.

Parties may go but Demos stay.
See you next year in a Breakpoint replacing demoparty :)

Oh noooo!!!

2010-03-19T20:31:00.000Z

I just found that in Dosbox (don't know from which version on) there is a magic button (or combination of buttons) for fast forward (aka unlimited speed, aka speed disaster, etc.). Which is great when you want to skip fast some parts of a game or demo or for any other reason. It actually works very nicely, depending on the machine cycles you have set, things might go quite fast and even the music is funny.

My dilemma is that it enforces some bad habit I have with demo watching and never told you. When I am in hurry yet I want to see some old demos I didn't knew before, searching maybe for an effect or a screen that could impress me, instead of watching the demo as a regular scener watches them, I press the fast forward after I have seen each effect. Ok a logo, fast forward, stop there, nice blobs, ok I saw them, fast forward, wow great voxel! Fast forward, etc, etc.

I used to do this with emulators in AtariST demos, Spectrum, AtariXL, C64 and everything that has an emulator enabling fast forward. I am wondering now if WinUAE for Amiga does have one and I don't know it. Or about CPC? (Winape32 has the option but you have to do it from settings. I want a button that goes fast forward while you pressed it and then you can release it and everything goes to normal). Oh no!

At least when I want to watch again some old classic demos I don't do this. There are two kinds of demowatching, the one where you want to enjoy the demo as a demo and the one you are in a hurry to pass through it's parts in the hope you will enjoy a good effect. Also if in the middle of this heresy I discover that the demo I fast forward is actually worth it for it's flow and transitions and presentation then I do the exception to quit and lay back and watch it from the beginning in it's normal pace.

Imagine what would happen if I watched demos with friends and I suddenly touched that keyboard :). I did it in other ways though, like pressing and un-pressing manically the turbo button on my 386 at each part while my brother was watching, and I was talking to myself: Wow, the gouraud shader runs smooth even without the turbo button. Wow! Like who cares? Hahaha!!!

I am just insane about coder effects and performance. I do it in dosbox by changing the cycles up and down while watching a particular demo :)

p.s. Actually dosbox has become really good. There is even a mode (if you set machine to vgaonly) that tries to emulate the VGA properly with it's right timings so that games and especially demos that might use hardware tricks to do raster effects and splits and cooper bars and all that stuff work. I tried it with my 256b intro kefrens256, a quickbasic secret part for Deedline Sax where I was displaying similar stuff, my CPU meter in demos, then tried it also on some PC demos using tricks (DoWhackAdo, David CopperField work great, but Copper by S!P doesn't work very well). Also you can choose the CPU strictly, for example a 386 only CPU to not have to emulate 486 or Pentium if you don't need to, etc. And that's not the only cool think about new things dosbox brings. I am curious to see what the next versions might bring.

Why I still play doom?

2010-03-05T02:02:00.000Z

Many people (mostly newschool gamers) have asked me, why do I keep playing this highly pixelated (texelated I would say :) game from 1993? There are so many modern FPS with next generation graphics, more interesting story and lot's of more interaction. Why?

If they knew I am also into level editing for Doom they would wonder twice. But both playing and level editing seems to be so much more fun in Doom than modern FPS. About playing, I do sometimes play modern FPS, but they start getting so complicated or realistic that I just prefer the arcade style of old good Doom. As for level editing, I admit Doom is the only FPS I have tried to create a level. I only have seen how a modern level editor looks like when I tried to do it with Max Payne (because I was helping a friend who wanted to learn it for a project) and only for a little while. But all I see is that to create mods for modern FPS can be far more complicated than in Doom. I simply don't have time for that. Also, the limitations of the doom engine allow the level designers to challenge themselves by trying to overcome these or find tricks to make "impossible" things running in the vanilla doom engine. And the community is BIG!

How is this happening? What is so special about Doom that many people are still playing it, lot's of ports are coming out, level designers create hundreds of maps and some of them still show new never seen before ideas and amazing beautiful design and the community seems to be much bigger than the ones in modern FPS?

One article that attempts to answer that is here.

Also, as a complement I give you this link and a screenshot taken shamelessly from his blog because I like the comparison. The guy is, as I read the news in doomworld, a lead designer of Bioshock 2 and he just decided to remake a level from Bioshock 1 into old good doom. Wow!

Best racing ever?

2010-02-26T23:44:00.000Z

I am in total love with Test Drive Unlimited, so much that I have bought the original from a computer store (the pirated still loads faster and doesn't need the CD-Rom or ISO :). It's a hidden gem, obscured by the regular boring brand titles, mainly Need for Speed and others too. I can't play anything else now in the category of racing games (except for good old Lotus 3 on Dosbox of course (Don't ask me if I have played the Amiga version :)). I don't know anything about the previous Test Drive titles after Test Drive 3 in DOS (too fast and clumsy to play but I used to like on my 386 (or maybe 286 iirc)). But this is definitely the best from the test drive series (also according to the grading in mobygames and other sites).

The single thing that makes it rule is the fact that it's an open space racing games. I miss these kinds of racing games (that's one reason I loved Carmageddon in the past, not because of the killings). The developers have modeled a whole island based on satellite images of Oʻahu in the Hawaii Islands (that's actually the place where Honolulu is, also Pearl Harbor, also Lost and many other movies and series where filmed). You are free to drive around 1500kms of roads and discover various beautiful places on your way.

Of course this alone wouldn't make it the best racing. Say something was very hard with the controls then it would be impossible to enjoy. But here things are playing great! I don't care much about realism, I am not an expert in this, I don't know how much is there or not in TDU but there is an menu option to select driving realism from something that is very aiding and feels like arcade to more hardcore modes. So, I am free to race for hours in endless places and enjoy it because the controls are good enough. Then the graphics, not always very important, but here they are beautiful enough when driving in a highway and watching the nature, the mountains, the sea from far away. Maybe someone would notice that some 3d models are funny, especially those of characters or things that are out of your reach (you can use some cheats and make your car fly to get inside an airport or above building, etc) but that's because it was not necessary to add more detail since it's beautiful enough and good for quality/performance adjustment when driving. The cars are very beautifully modeled though and the outdoor scenes look great. Now imaging driving a good looking car in the highway, having great feel of controls and a whole island for you in a truly open sense. It's the best thing ever!

But what? Only driving? No gameplay? No challenges? Of course they are here too! When you start you actually choose a character. You arrive at Hawaian airport with 200000$ and you rent a car to go to the nearest place to buy a home. Then you can choose your new car from three manufacturers. Then as an introduction you take your first racing challenge. You have a PDA that tells you your itinerary root to those stores and your first challenge. After this the real fun begins. You can drive through the whole island discovering icons that prompted to take part in various challenges like racing, best time or hiking quests or enter stores to by cars (there are a lot of famous brands from everyday people's cars to Ferrari's, Lamborghini's or some classic oldschool cars, also motorbikes. One hundred of beautiful vehicles!), clothes or a new house and quite more. There are hundreds of them placed in the island. You can either ignore them and free roam to the roads or play the game by winning these challenges and getting more money, new cars or houses with bigger garage to store all your babies. It's like a MMORG (massive multiplayer online racing game). It's funny that in the game while you drive for hours randomly, a number of other NPCs (AI players) drive around the island and sometimes one is approaching from the other side and either tries to tease you or ignores you. There is also traffic and police. The island is alive! I haven't tried the online play with real people (imaging 16 real life players driving in a big virtual world) but I bet it will be exceptional!

A sequel is being planned. I am curious how fun it will be. I am not even sure what I'd like as an improvement because I have everything in this one. Maybe pedestrians. There are no one of them in TDU and adding them would make the island feel more alive.

In a nutshell, open big free to roam environment, good and easy driving controls, beautiful cars and endless nature and roads. A dream of the racing gamer!

p.s. Photos from mobygames. Didn't have any time to make my own..

Cacoland.wad

2010-01-28T01:12:00.001Z

Just some screenshots of my latest Doom 2 WAD, Cacoland.

The beginning. Don't care about the caco's now, you can't kill them. Get into the cave behind you and hide.

Inside the cave.

Ancient ruins, broken columns. Nice.

Main hall entrance.

Ceiling has fallen, light comes in this room.

Main hall again, alien technological graves, many traps.

Just a funny thing with multiple sectors.

Back again in the invaded city by Caco's.

My next map will be a speed-editing map. I am tired of making maps with detailed shadows and broken things and other tech stuff. Too much effort into looks for few blunt negative reviews..

Doom Engine code review.

2010-01-16T13:40:00.000Z

Have you ever wondered how classic Doom renders a single frame? Then this is the site for you. Even if you are not a programmer or you are not into doom editing (to understand what a linedef or a sector is), this is still for you. You might enjoy the videos of the rendering of a single frame slowed down so that you can observe the order and see the effort it takes to render a single screen. It definitely makes me curious to download the source code of doom again and try to have a look at it for a second time.

Be Selfish

2009-12-05T23:08:00.001Z

It's funny! When I loaded this WAD, I had the feeling of a double deja vu. I thought I have played this before twice, the second time wondering if I had played this before. For some reason it appeared three times in my hard disk (normally, I download new WADs and put them in a directory, later I delete them or put onto favorites. Now, this one appeared for a third time in my WADs to play dir).

Yet it was so nice that I wasn't bored to play it for a third time. I am even inspired now to continue creating some old levels I started making months ago.

I love Paul Corfiatis levels. They just have the right balance of gameplay, design, architecture and size. Levels with excessive details are interesting, although when you can create atmospheric worlds with more simplistic geometry yet still enough detailed then it's a must. I like minimalistic worlds that inspire me to imagine that I am in there. I like interesting architecture. I also like a kind of gameplay that is not too hard yet it provides enough action. And sometimes few sets of interesting traps. Other WADs overdo it with detail (which is interesting though or nice to look at) and difficulty (this one is not interesting, just annoying).

I've just seen that enough time has passed since I last posted something about a doom wad, yet there are quite more good ones that I should one day review. I just love playing doom wads and especially taking nice pictures of interesting looking spaces and writting reviews about.

My new Dingoo has arrived!

2009-12-03T23:28:00.000Z

Dingoo.

First impressions? Surely it's not as good as the Wiz (but I already knew that and the price is lower anyway) but I am quite happy with the new device. What I like is that in contrast with the Wiz, it's coming with several emulators (GBA, NeoGeo, Capcom System 1,2, NES, Mega Drive, SNES) integrated in the menu and you don't even run the emulators, you just select a rom and it runs directly the same way you would run an application or native game for the machine. It comes with more games seemingly made from the company who made Dingoo, few of them aren't that bad, like a 3d alone in the dark/resident evil style game called 7 days. And the 3d engine is quite good (also, software rendered, no 3d accelerator on the device) and is also used in few more games provided by Dingoo games division.

What might be better than the Wiz is the fact that the battery time is quite nice (7 hours or more) and what additional it has that the Wiz might miss is there is also a radio. A TV-out port is also on the device and even a cable is provided in the box (I am not sure if the wiz has tv-out but it seriously didn't come with the box. Also, what is enjoyful is the vast amount of Chinglish (all your base are belong to us :) both in the manual, website and game menu. Firmware is Fureware, Video is Wideo, also there are two options with funny names, '3D Game' (to run any APP files, from games to applications) and 'Interesting Game' (to run emulator roms). Just funny.

I also tried the official devkit for windows. It uses their own SDK (s2dsdk) that was maybe used for the developing of their own games. It's quite object oriented and I had to use to send pixel objects to the framebuffer which maybe does some inner conversion because a simple rendering proved to be not as fast compare with everything else I have tried. I'd like to see if there is a more low level to access the frame buffer. Many people have moved to Dingux which is a linux port for Dingoo and a lot of released emulators and ports of games require Dingux (which is unfortunate if you haven't installed it yet and you want to run regular Dingoo APP files, you find not many stuff). I had problems with mounting the device in Vista but in an XP laptop it worked just fine. I also had problems updating the firmware (there is an official and an unofficial from homebrew devs, most people prefer the unofficial). I hope Dingux doesn't need a new firmware to be installed..

I also managed to compile something for the Gamepark Wiz under windows. Originally I had installed Ubuntu to compile with the linux devkit (there is no good Wiz Devkit for Windows yet :P) but I gave a modified devkitGP2X a third try under windows and this time I succeeded. I get very good framerates. And it's all SDL. So easy to port!

A lot of goodies!

2009-07-25T10:38:00.000+01:00

A lot of 8bit goodies were released since the last time (and it's actually only oldschool stuff that I can watch on my PC recently). A good surprise was a new multipart CPC demo, Pheelone from No Recess. Another one of his releases that mix C with assembly in the slow CPC, yet it produces an impressive result of a kind of demo we rarely see on the CPC. There are some nice effects (smooth vector balls, wireframe 3d) and some slow ones yet never seen before (rotating scroller) and a big ammount of spacey graphics. The interesting thing is that most of the effects are in front of a background. The usual thing in the past was your background to be a black (blue, purple, whatever) screen that is a free area for the incoming effect. And it's interesting because I think it will be more CPU consuming to also have to update the background. It was already a pain to make an effect run smooth enough in not so small area assuming the next frame erases the previous. Especially impressive in chunky effects (rotoscroller, weird distorting thing). The music is also quite nice and this demo has the right kind of feeling that I like (no newschool noizy stuff but dreamy old/midschool design with pleasant gfx and sound). Finally a new demo on the CPC that I can enjoy.

Now the real fun was the tons of releases at LCP2009 demoparty in Sweden. The first four winners are already quite good and there are at least two or three others that are worth to watch.

First we have Andropolis by Booze Design and Instinct a quite nice small release after their last (Booze's) masterpiece Edge of Disgrace, well not exactly small because it's still a well sized demo, only compared to their bigger stuff. The presentation and flow are really nice, the graphics and sound are good and there are few specific effects that I truly enjoyed, like the smooth rotating diagonal image splitter (you have to see the demo to understand what I mean :) and an impressive polygon 3d engine (moving inside rooms with stairs and structures, although slow) at the end. And yet there are the usual zoomer/twister parts in there. The rotating chessboards were also impressive and the best I have seen so far. It's truly a good release!

Then it's time for Resource with Still Ready. A nice C64ish theme, very very well presented, some nifty logos and newschool chunky effects, good ideas. Although at first I admit I was expecting more (most of the chunky effects seemed ugly or hard to notice but that's because I was running them in an emulator and a big PC screen) but the more I watch this demo the more I appreciate it. It certainly has style. The effects even if chunky, they are quite smooth and modern. There are twisting polar effects, tunnels with moving plasma both in a strange resolution with half dots that makes it a big dark, then 4x4 color bump mapping (the best and smoothest I have seen), polar distorted 4x4 bitmap (again smooth and nicely done). The code is tight. The style is good.

Third on the list is 3deh by Oxyron. I am very happy that Oxyron are back and they have certainly their own style. Maybe it feels a bit oldschool (although with new 3d effects at speeds and quality never seen before), maybe there is not much of the newschool design several people are begging for but I prefer these kind of demos where the highlight is the single good looking and smooth running effect. When it's 3d polygons, glenz vectors, dot/bob records and such kind of stuff it becomes a very interesting watch for me. I have to admit that the interrupting screen between the real parts with the nice 3d bobs took a bit too long and I had to press Alt+W on the emulator to move further. It's not a demo for newschool design aware demofreaks. It's for people who love coder porn (although there is enough of it in the other more well designed demos of this competition). Also it's clear that the demo shows to be something like a reminiscent of the golden Oxyron era especially the Coma Light series (something reminds me that in the music, something in the parts (shadow on the plane, now a plane as a mirror :)). I enjoyed ever part, from mirror plane and big glenz to the nice smooth 3d star scroller (I love star scollers =) in the intro. Even the style of the gfx are into my liking (I love the picture on the screenshot). More Oxyron please!

The music of the 4th on the list, Artillery by Shape, is stored in my USB MP3 stick from now on. It's simple sweeeeeeeetttt!!! The same sweet it is as Archmage's graphics here (a lot of his old ones are reused here). Is it maybe something more like an art disk than a demo (ARTillery)? There are still some kind of chunky effects, especially mixed with the images in as similar way as another demo at last X that used the same Archmage's graphics with the girl at different stages. It's still a demo and at the same time a slideshow of Archmage's past works I guess. The beginning with the falling tetris pieces is also truly original especially matching the sweet beginning of the music. There is also a nice twister in this demo. I really enjoy watching it especially for the music and the gfx.

Last but not least, at the 6th place we have 12 years later by Miracles from a group I haven't even heard before (I am gonna download their best oldies and watch them out of curiosity) which has nice smooth effects but in my favorite resolution (not chunky big pixels or dithered modes but pure pixel effects) and they are smooth enough for the size I think. Maybe not something new but well done and pleasing. If it wasn't only for the ugly colors. But still as a fun of coder's stuff I can personally enjoy this one.

I wouldn't be able to close this post without mentioning a new Crest release. Crest Slide Story is not a demo but an artdisk. Although the interesting thing here is that it introduces you to yet another new video mode on the C64. They call it MUFLI which stands for Multicolor Underlined(?) FLI. I can't find right now where I read that but there were also several confusing explanations and since I am not into these image trickery and new video mode stuff I can't speak more about it. The interesting thing is that I remember some of the graphics to be 160x200 interlaced (with lot'sa flickering :) masterpieces and now they managed to convert them into 320x200 non flickering images with full 16 colors. Like the amazing image in the screenshot. I am really impressed that even in 2009 some C64 coders still discover new video modes or music tricks. I would normally think that hardware tricks have reached their limits (especially in the C64 scene) and only more newschool software rendered effects are open to innovation and optimizations but things like this constantly disprove me. It's great when the scene is so innovative and still trips into new undiscovered ground.

I'd only like to notice that the 5th and 8th places might also be interesting to some. It's Faux Visage from Panda Design and Allen mussen machina from K2. They are more on the minimalistic side of demos, not my cup of taste but some people have written positive reviews for them too so I mention them here.

It was a very interesting scenewise week. I am waiting for releases from the next parties now (Euskal, Evoke, Assembly, etc). There are also a few not extraordinary but nice PC releases that I watched in a netcafe recently, from Solskogen or some older parties and even few Speccy ones (I predict they won't be so great but let's better check before talking :P) and I promise I will write something about them soonish..

Recent demos

2009-07-14T17:17:00.000+01:00

I am not very demoactive these days and sometimes not even bother to watch demos. Most of the recent VIP demos failed because I am back in time with an old motherboard with an Athlon at 1.5Ghz and my Radeon 9600 (the new Radeon didn't even managed to cooperate well with this old piece of hardware). However it's not the main reason I do not watch recent demos. First of all I was kinda off, busy with other things, not wishing to bother with the demoscene (not hating it, just having no mood), then it's a dead period anyways. I think I will be off for more than 3 months (since the last time I visited Breakpoint) because I deliberately wish to shift to other activities.

Another problem is that I actually self-banned myself from Pouet (by changing my password to something quite random that I don't even remember it and then forgetting the whole incident the next day) so even if I see a good demo that I feel like writing something about it it's not possible, let alone if I ever did a new demo I wouldn't be able to upload it (although with my lack of motivation and wish for change to a different field (game developing?) I doubt that time will be any soon). Anyways the good thing with that is that it makes more sense now to write things about recent demos I liked in this blog. Thus it will be more active. Writing a stupid review lost in hundreds of reviews and silly comments on Pouet was easier but less inspiring that writing something about one or two good stuff in here.

Of course the demos that I could see in my old crap PC and I would like the most are a good bunch of oldschool 8bit or 16bit demos. The first one is an Atari STe release by MJJ Prod and while it's a small release with only two effects, both of them are good enough and are accompanied with some kind of story and atmospheric graphics. I think it has something to do with the Matrix but since it is a bit of cliche and I care about the effects anyways, I don't even remember what it is exactly. The effects are a smooth scroller mapped on a 3d surface with green dots like some old kind of computer monitor of terminal, very effective to the atmosphere. The other one is a smooth fullscreen zoomer of various images that have something to do with the story. A nice surprise for the STe. Get it here.

And then there was that screenshot on a new Pouet prod. A gameboy monochrome demo! Not only I didn't expect a new gameboy demo but feared I would be not satisfied by them recently. There were some recent jumalauta (and from another group too) stuff which are not bad yet for some reasons I forgot them, maybe because I am not as much fun of their newschool in your face style with ugly chunky effects. But 20y by Snorpung just has all the fun I need! Oldschool style with both hardware based effects (kefren bars, twisters, distorters (ok, not sure if the last two are hardware based here)) and cpu based effects (polygons, 3d dots), great music, smooth transitions, nice graphics and an end upscroller to give you the creds and greets (yes, I want this!). It's made to celebrate the 20 years since the release of the original gameboy. A very nice tribute! (Since this demo might fuck up in most emulators, it's better that you watch the video at the pouet link in the comments).

That's all for now. I have yet to see some recent modern PC demos, there are few interesting 4ks, maybe a demo or two and there are also the dihalt entries for spectrum (although I don't expect something extraordinary). There are many things I might have missed although no major release. Maybe I would see some of the modern PC demos in a netcafe a day that makes up for the mood. I just hate going to youtube for the 4ks.

Antisocial

2009-06-18T07:44:00.000+01:00

Antisocial, a demo in Javascript satirizing social networks.

I purely enjoy the message of this demo. I never liked social networks at all.

What have you done during Duke Nukem Forever's development time?

2009-06-05T10:14:00.000+01:00

It must be few years back since I first read The Duke Nukem Forever List. It strikes you with awe when you think of how many things have happened during that time. Of course, twelve years is a long period for everyone and thinking where I was in 1997 and where I am now that the DNF project is over strikes me with awe too.

In 1997 I was a teenager without much computing experience and then I had a dream to become a great programmer or something like that. It was some kind of obsession like "I don't wanna be the average joe chasing behind chicks and going to disco or something but I won't to become some great scientist or legendary programmer or anything". Which didn't exactly worked that way. Then in 1998-9 I learned about the demoscene and spend whole ten years with it (might have released more than fourty demos and other scene related stuff), I also took 8 years to graduate from a university (twice the normal years), went to the greek army between 2006-2008 (it's obligatory here), I worked on three different jobs (in one of them I even participated in the development of a our own released casual game, Crazy Space) and now I am almost turning thirty.

If you compare what you have done in this part of your lifetime and how things have changed it's going to strike you. Another question not asked though is which things took or still taking longer than duke nukem forever?

Hard to give an answer to this right now, not because there is nothing there but because I am too lazy to do some research. I could only think of something in my own lair, especially demoscene related projects on the Amstrad CPC, one of the most inactive and lazy scenes ever. Palatine demo surely beats the crap out of DNF and maybe ASIC inside demo from Futurs about which I can't find a starting date but probably it's almost as old as Palatine. Long awaited CPC productions that were either finally released or are still in production yet their time length is shorter than DNF must be Demoizart (I think the oldest and best imho part of it started in 1996, could be surely be released as separate small demo back then and beat the past I think) and of course our own Ovation 6 diskmag (preview here). I think it was 2000 when we first released this preview and maybe it never sees the light. Maybe releasing a teaser of it as Ovation Forever would be a nice parody to do, yet I think I am even too lazy to do that. Since I speak about diskmags and 8bits, I remember another one that I have even written some articles (It's over 8 years! I might hate my writting by now :) but it goes through the same destiny as Ovation. Subliminal Extacy #4 for ZX Spectrum. Last but not least, 4096 colors a demo for which I did some gfx (later used in my A step beyond CPC demo) and might never see the light (except from the preview).

Now, I started wondering which were my demo projects longest in development. And how this affected things. I think I know which they are and they were actually my best works in the scene. But that's maybe a subject to discuss in another post.

Eye of the Beholder 1 - Speedrun

2009-05-12T14:35:00.001+01:00

If you have played the game (I have finished it several times), this is an amazing and very funny speed run!

Referrer ballz!

2009-03-31T08:28:00.000+01:00

This is so cool!!!

I am wondering if by having this link here or someone clicking on it, it goes there or it needs a certain amount of hits? I am also wondering what will happen if there are a lot of balls touching :)

p.s. Lol, I just had a feeling of Deja Vu. Like I remember I have posted the same thing with referrer balls and the screenshot or like I have seen it in my dream that I have posted this right now. Wow!

Crazy Space

2009-01-02T10:26:00.000Z

It's finally out!!!

This was a project which a friend initially started and still maintains (both programming the game and keeping the public relations of the dot red games casual games company). I have also written some code for this game in the past (the special demo-style effects like 3d stars, box filter, radial blur, etc). There is a java (applet or webstart) demo on the main site and a link of where to buy the full version. Have fun!

The feeling that almost came back..

2008-11-01T21:55:00.001Z

It's not really like the very first time though but the releases at X 2008 makes me want to bring back my C64 and start watching demos on the real thing. It also makes me want to start coding again. I wish I start with a new project soon..

I won't say much, just check at the 1st four demos here (either the videos or watch them on an emulator or the real thing). I am wondering how the C64 demomakers can still surprise me when I thought I have seen everything..

The feeling that is gone..

2008-09-28T10:23:00.000+01:00

This is a complement to the previous post. It's all about this magic feeling of the demoscene, the demos doing the impossible thing and how it is gone. Not because of age, not because of modern hardware, not because of any cliche reason you'd think (like the scene is dead). Because it's different when you watch the first demos, trying to code your first effect and imagining how the hardware works. It's different when you go to your first demoparties, it's different when everything is new for you than when the demoscene is all you were doing for years.

I still can stare back at C64 achievements, CPC effects or 386 demos and respect the effort and genious behind some "impossible" ideas. But they will never give me back the same feeling as during the first times. The feeling of the impossible, the feeling of my dreams.

Someone said that democoding is like magician's work. You are trying to do something which in the far end can be explained but seems to be impossible. It's programming and trickery combined. The young democoder starts as a newbie, trying to learn the basic trick with the cards while staring with awe upon the cut in half with a saw high level magicians, wondering if it's really a trick or they have sold their soul to the devil. As they learn more, they figure out that even the most amazing tricks are nothing really extreme in reality. The magic is gone.

We used to stare at effects like the above done on an 8bit and wonder how is it possible? Today, most of my favorite C64 effects (bitmap manipulating, precalculated mapping, etc) are just big unrolled codes of LDA/STA. It only remains to precalculate the 3d to 2d coordinates and correlate the pixels of a bitmap to the positions of the screen for a bunch of pixels to be written. Then you only scroll the bitmap or increase/decrease an index register (depends on the size of your bitmap and what you want to achieve), rerun the unrolled codes for each frame and voila! It's no big deal (the biggest pain is to generate the unroll codes and fit them in memory I think), though the first time I would see this effect on an 8bit I would think it's impossible. Now the magic is gone.

The magic is gone even for the more clever codes. Or at least, I have seen now what a C64 can really achieve, I even know that if these things are possible on the C64 they can easilly be done in the CPC too at similar speeds, I have a big idea of what is possible in 8bits, 16bits or early 32bits today, so it's really hard for me to feel the magic. I may still be impressed, especially when C64 coders continue to do slightly better versions of these effects today, as they continue to improve when you first think there is nothing more to be done. I think the best times for someone in the demoscene are maybe the first years.

The magic was getting even bigger as someone started learning to code. During the first years I didn't know much about optimizing Z80 assembly, my code was slow, I didn't even thought someone would unroll codes to the last pixel and that would save him from other things too (no need for compare/jump, values could be given directly instead read from tables, etc) and when I tried to scroll say 1000 bytes the screen was almost refreshed once and then I thought "If I need a vbl to move 1kb then how can they move and even manipulate whole screens? I never expected it to be soooo slow..". Then everything seemed more impossible because I didn't had the experience to know the tricks and the limits.

I believe that small fractions of the feeling can come back at times. At rare times someone tries not to do a slightly better version of an effect but something new, not done before especially in this speed (for example, the free directional tunnel of Error 23, not seen before on the C64 and thought it was PC territory because it needs floating point calcs even with subdivision). It's not because the scene has changed and people code less impressive things, it's because you have seen everything and have a wider view of why they are possible. Maybe it really is because we have done a lot and it's harder to impress (like in music when a new genre appears and everything after that is copies, because the original is done once) but maybe this feeling was always present at any age and maybe when people age in these territories they feel that everything is stagnating unlike their first years. Maybe it's just a feeling. But one I can never experience in the same sense again. I just long for those rare impossible effects that can bring the feeling back for a while..

Why I love the demoscene?

2008-09-25T16:27:00.000+01:00

Some funny things I have heard from people with old computers hating hardware requirements.

"Hardware requirements are illogical. It's a conspiracy of the software and hardware companies. 386 is enough for everyone!"

"I can't understand why 3d studio needs an FPU coprocessor. It doesn't do anything extreme that can't run on my 386."

"3D graphics are 2D really. Projected on screen. So, they should run as fast as 2D games.

"Myst has better graphics than Quake but it only needs a 386 while the latter requires a Pentium. It's a conspiracy!"

"My TV set can show movies with perfect video featuring explosions and a lot of crazy action and it's just a cheap chipset. Why can't FPS on my 386 do that?

"That game is a 10 MIPS software while on PC we write code of 3 MIPS, that's why consoles can do it better" (pointing at some lousy prerendered animation on 3DO console =)

A PC Master reader: "I assure you that need for speed can easilly run well on a 286."

Some friend pointing at an arcade coin op: "Mortal Kombat 4 should run on my XT. Why not?

When you are an illiterate user you can't understand the difference between realtime or not, you don't have an internal knowledge of the process that is required for a game to render something on the screen, you only compare the final image thinking that your average 3d engine should be the same fast as a prerendered animation or an action movie on your TV set. There is the moment when a coder comes to explain you how things are, sometimes although the software MIPS dude sounding knowledgable, is enough to make you believe.

I remember that time when two guys were discussing about that 3DO game, I knew nothing about programming then but somehow I was curious about the whole high requirements/performace issue. I wanted to know in deep what is the truth. So, hearing someone speaking the word "MIPS" I was immediately hooked. I couldn't understand though that saying this software runs at 10 MIPS wasn't exactly the right way to say it. But now I understood that he maybe meaned that the consoles were build with more processing power (he didn't mentioned custom chips) or that the game programmers are targetting a machine with lower performance than PC, optimizing their codes for a hardware with less MIPS or something like that.

It doesn't matter. What mattered was that by using some tech-jargon he sounded credible and knowledgable. But most of us users then were either seeing things on the surface (the graphics of Monkey Island are more beautiful than Doom but they are faster, why?) or listening to the "experts" without actually understanding in deep.

I will make a parable here. One that will get me to the point of why demoscene rocks!

Say that the clueless users who maybe wish their C64 could fly are something similar to the people believing in ufos, ghosts, fairies and yetis. They claim things with little or no knowledge, dreaming of their wonderland. The programmers are like the skeptic trying to show them what's the real deal is and land their C64s back on the ground.

Personally, I was into that anti-requirements craze (through some articles in an old greek magazine, PC Master) not because I couldn't afford a computer but somehow I was always fascinated about the software performance/hardware ratio. I have been dreamed of Quake engines running on a 386, SNES games on my CPC, MP3 players on my XT, perfect OS with high performance on low CPUs, just because of the idea of how impossible would that be! It was like a dream, till someone came and grounded me to the floor: "You know, the CPC runs at 19968 cycles per frame and smooth texture mapping would need at least a 4MIPS machine while the CPC isn't even close that!".

This was the time when an expert was talking and you couldn't say much even whether you were literate or not. The thing that I like in the demoscene is that there are times when dreams come true, where the impossible happens, where the expert sounding dude analyzing the limited performance of the hardware and requirements of the software would fail.

Say that someone comes and tells you that he observed an UFO doing impossible manouvers in the sky and then disappearing into the void. Say that you have also photographic or video evidence. He'd probably think that it's either fake or your idea while arguing why it's highly unprobable.

Say that there comes a dude claiming he has a video of the best Amiga demo running like a charm on a C64. He has video on youtube. You can be skeptical but it's the first time someone actually analyzes why it's not possible, how the C64 has not even multiplication and couldn't run 3D so smoothly, sounds (and possibly is) knowledgable, seems logical on how this is impossible on a hardware 10 times slower than Amiga (you could base upon his words if you never had the actual D64s on your hands to see it for yourself) and yet he fails. It's the first time that things we always dreamed and laughed upon are actually real! Things like Desert Dreams for C64 or Second Reality for C64, a windows like OS on the CPC, wolfenstein 3d on AtariST or Doom in spectrum (almost :). Wouldn't you say that's impossible? Wouldn't you be skeptical? Of course it's not the same doom, not the same second reality, not the same windows as in their high versions but would you still believe such a functional windows like OS would work like a charm on the little CPC? It's like the silly dreams of the people quoted in the beginning of this post, but this time it's here and it works!!!

The screenshot above is from Parts by Oxyron, a C64 demo that stroke me with awe. (Unfortunatelly it's nowhere on youtube but check this with similar tricks (Dawnfall by Oxyron)) It's a classic example where if you described the desired effect, the skeptic or knowledgable would argue that it's not possible.

I can do it myself. There is a big zooming and distorting bitmap in one part of Parts, it's not blocky, it's manipulating the bitmap so smoothly and pixel perfect! Now you'd say, C64 has around 17500 cycles free (I really don't remember) and that bitmap say it's 144 pixels * 128 lines = 18432 pixels (haven't counted really but they are a lot). For each pixel we would need 17500 / 18432 = less than 1 cycle left to run this on 50hz. Impossible! Most opcodes take 2 to 4 cycles on the C64. By using 1-2 opcodes per pixel this would even need 4VBLs. You need to do interpolation, calculate the pixel shift to make a byte and write it, maybe little more things, you'd need 6-7 lines of code. Even with LDA/STA style speedcodes you'd never make it 50hz. All the data are against your dreams!

This is why I love the demoscene so much! The impossible becomes possible. It's there in front of your eyes. No magic! And there are two other reasons why I love demos so much (especially those in old computers):

1) For such impossibilities to work, someone should shift his perception of how he stares at things. Because a bitmap manipulation is calculating interpolation for each pixel and writting it, it doesn't mean that what looks like pixel rendering should be done by pixels. Because something is fullscreen it also doesn't mean every byte of the videoram is really updated. You have to think out of the box! The effect in the above screenshot is done by different shifted and zoomed version of various graphics tiles done in char mode on the C64. But it looks like the perfect pixel manipulation effect!

2) The one who claims it to be possible should sit down and code it. This is how the demoscene works! In the parable above, it would be like searching for aliens and then putting a real extraterrestrial body on the top of the table surrounded by skeptics. Of course there is a big difference between searching for the unexplained and democoding. There is where the demoscene gives you the tools to be creative and show the impossible.

Demos do amazing things but why never games, those dudes would say. The craziest letter on the PC Master was one where a reader screamed that Second Reality surprised us in a way that noone in the commercial software companies could ever do even in a Sextium. I liked that one and wondered what is the second reality demo he mentions and if it's sooooo impossibly amazing then why I have never heard about it (similar to what skeptics say, if such crazy unexplained phenomena were real, we'd be fascinated for sure but where are they?). Though it was real! I found it and later discovered the demoscene community too.

There was a time when someone in greece formed a 8088 club. They were angry on the excessive requirements of software and wanted to go backwards. It was mostly about playing games on our XTs and stuff. They say they had a programmer. I sent them some demos and spoke the best words about the demoscene but they didn't seemed to bother. But demos were the means to say that impossible things can be true in even the lowest of hardware! Yet they were not impressed. If second reality was the greatest software ever, then why it's not heard? Now you know..

So great, so magnificent, making my dreams true, yet so few people understand it. And they still worry why Quake can't run on their 386..

NV scene releases

2008-08-30T10:31:00.000+01:00

I thought it was time for me to buy a new PC. Most demos wouldn't even start in my old Radeon 9600 these days or being too slow to enjoy. The timing was good but useless, since I learned too late that there was something called demobox. I am wondering now, would it motivate me so much that I would have made a new accelerated demo or 4k that wouldn't suck so much? Or would I just take the demobox and say goodbye? I don't know about me, but it really worked in a way for the rest of the scene. This year we had an assembly party empty of demos and all effort went into nvscene. 15 demos and 19 4ks, where several of them are quite decent is quite good for the american scene. Even amateur sceners who got a demobox evolved. Some are skeptical though about such a motive, how it presses you to finish the damn demo because you have to and how fun it isn't. And I don't think it will ever become a trend in the scene.

Normally this post would use half of it's text for praising Andromeda. Well, it wasn't just Andromeda but Orb and gloom too. But it was the Andromeda kind of demos since their first attempt on PC done much better and more impressively this time. What can I say? You know, there are most demos today which have 1-2 (if real) effects, several 3d scenes with tons of alpha images and noise to cover something that doesn't look as nice when naked. Ok, andromeda demos also use some noise effects and blending but only in the appropriate places and the effect/scene alone looks great and is the highlight of each part. I am not sure how to describe it. It's like the old style brought up into the new tech. When other good demos have plenty of 3d scene and the effect of the demo in the last parts, this one has at least three effects that stand on it's own, and also the music, sync and presentation is simply perfect! Awesomeness in everything!!! I was really wondering what they will bring after Noumenon and I think that Stargazer fulfilled my expectations were.

So, after this (over?)praise of the 1st place at the demo compo, let's move to the rest. I will try to be shorter here so that this post will not get 40 pages long. I am thinking about the half 3rd position right now. The ASD demo. It's like a sequel of Metamorphosis but maybe better or bigger. It doesn't have that gloomy or melancholic feeling of the first, the music is kind different, maybe happier, maybe weird with some silly greek lyrics that,. I am not sure but I laugh everytime I reach the part where the lyrics start. I will watch this demo few more times again. The other half 3rd place was the XPLSV demo. For some reasons I really like the colors even though they are too bright or too coder's. I don't care, I like them and the style is pure demostyle with some nice blob and other effects (I have to see it again to remember which were them :) and energetic music. I like this demo. More demos similar to this style at NV scene were proton by science & black maiden, maybe but not exactly Ersatz by Limp Ninja (I adore the 3d blobs effect) and maybe also visage by Nah Kolor. Other nice classic demos you should watch are rarefaction by Youth Uprising, life on air by SystemK (a japanishe group that improves), echoes by Anadune and yin by Brainstorm. I think most of the demos had something to show.

And the demos I have forgotten to talk about are the 2nd place by Plastik which has impressive visuals as usual (ahh,. that bugs are creepy :P), is simply state of the art, but for me it fails to give me what Stargazer and few others in the compo do. But I still adore it and it will make a nice benchmark on my friend's PC. Binary alchemy by northern dragons (5th place) has a nice pencil cross hatch rendering (long time since I have seen a demo based on some artistic rendering) but it's getting a bit boring after a while. Still I like that they try to experiment with something. And moove! by fresh!mindworkz was a nice attempt (with some original ideas for effects) to bring state of the art style demos back on PC, although the soundtrack and movement is not energetic as in the old Amiga demos of this kind. More red bull is missing in this one but I adore the idea and I would still watch it (for the girl? :). I am also happy to see Extrait's best effort at demomaking although some ugly 3d scenes and the too annoying camera movements ruined most of the experience. And the guideline demo was a funny joke. As if they have chosen the colors intentionally. And yes, I have forgotten to check on the music box :P

I will write less about the 4ks here. Because it's kinda lame linking every demo up there and I can't manage doing the same for the 4ks. Just have a look at the pouet page with results and link for each of them. The 1st place was really great at the video. It was dark, atmospheric, into your face. It needs Vista and steals some sounds from it they say. I purely enjoyed The TBC intro again with it's great music and visuals and Photo race 2 is an interesting experiment at raytracing with the GPU (it even has caustics!) even though the framerate jumps at times. From the rest I really liked Kybernetic by Still effectwise and I am happy to see Lord Graga from the GBA making his first attempt at 4k coding on PC (although this one ate up all memory on the PC at some netcafe and forced me to reboot :P). Astra has stars (even though they should be glowing or something), statics was nice, eco was nice, solitude was nice, ok,. you get the point, everything was nice, not spectacular but nice. Spectacular were the 1st, 2nd and maybe 3rd position. Ok, maybe not everything was nice, maybe I am exagerating (I am the guy who has one of the highest thumbs up percentage on Pouet, shame to me for not being objective and just happily praise everything that makes me happier in the demoworld :P) but what the fuck. Surely it was a great compo!

And yet again, Stargazer. You know, now that my PC doesn't run most demos I resort to videos. I download and watch the video once and then delete it. I never keep videos of demos because it doesn't make sense. But with stargazer it was the first time I wanted to download the video and keep it in my HD at least till I buy a new PC that can run this baby. Andromeda saved the scene for another time and this is not senseless praising or because of the name, I really felt like that again after watching this demo for the nth time. Maybe taste (because I am surprised to see anyone thumbing this down at Pouet) but that's it. I adore this group!

Urban Brawl (aka Action Doom 2)

2008-08-26T19:30:00.000+01:00

I wasn't even expecting this! Long time ago, a massive work of art that turned Doom into a classic action game was released. It was heavily inspired by Metal Slug and Contra and there were a lot of great surprises here and there. Even different paths to follow in the game, secret weapons and funny easter eggs and graphical reference to movies/games or anything. The ammount of graphics and scripting should be hellish and everything was very well presented. This wasn't doom, this was action doom! :)

Suddenly, I get informed that something new is out. I never expected of a sequel. When you do such a work on the first one, you usually retire from the scene or something. Very very happily I downloaded the demo (which even doesn't need the original doom wad) and ran it on my computer. It was different than expected, this time not an action game, but a beat'em up with a cartoonish look, some cutscenes and voice acting that reminds me of Max Payne and being inspired from various beat'em ups, mostly the punisher, maybe Streets of Rage and Final Fight too. What I liked in this sequel (or prequel, since it's taking place several years before the timeline of the first) in comparison with the original, is that it's not extremely hard. It's playable, fun, easier and smaller (except if you buy the full game). And there are still a lot of surprises there! I think I am having much more fun with this one than the first.

As you start in your room, fires ablaze around the building. You can grab a pistol from the drawer, a bottle of jack daniel's (which you need to drink first before using it as a weapon) or a fire exstinguisher (and hell knows how many more secrets I have missed ;). You go out in the city and various ugly dudes are waiting for you. Punksters, pimps, bitches, gangsters, fat dudes or emo's (That one was hilarious for me, because here in greece the news talk all the time about emo's vs trendies and how easilly they get beaten by everyone. Here in the game they are the most weak characters for another time, is it a funny coincidence or was it intentional? :). You have in your disposition every kind of brutal weapon you always wanted to get and beat the crap out of something, like pipes, chains, peg with nail, baseball bat, french keys, big hammer, knifes, bottles, billiard sticks and way more I am surely I have missed. You can break trashcans, piles of tires, smoking cans, etc where you find food, weapons or money. It's really the game for the young hooligan inside you :)

There are a lot of places to visit that are classic in most beat em up's. Dark alleys, subways, bars, a bridge (this reminded me street's of rage 2) and of course elevators which the stop and more dudes are coming in each floor (another very classic thing in most beat em up's). And the high building with the rich boss at the end (although the demo does not reach the very end I guess). Also funny stuff like a casino where you can even play poker or jackpot (hell of a scripting!), rotate the roulette, smash vending machines and get cola and chips. And there is a secret with action which reminds me of kill bill. And the two pink girl ninjas that always annoyed me in streets of rage. And more surprises, way more!

And I am missing more because I haven't bought the full game. Support the developers because they deserve it! (You get Action Doom 1 and more stuff too for only 9,99$). This is a hell of a great work! And plays well and much easier than their first.

The City of The Damned : Apocalypse

2008-05-10T13:22:00.000+01:00

It's a long time since I've last played a good WAD. And this one I am reviewing now is not the only recent good one. But I will just start from this one and maybe I'll write later about the rest. There is a long time since the weekly doom wad reviews gone missing from doomworld. I don't know what happened and didn't have the time to ask the community about or search for any announcements or news in the doomworld forums. I found this one from the Outpost of Doom 2 site which features reviews from only the greatest WADs released. Maybe it's a nice alternative resource to discover the recent diamonds now that doomworld reviews are missing.

Looking at the screenshots of this one on the reviews site, I was immediately obsessed to play it as I happen to be a great fan of the game blood. The WAD doesn't only use gfx and sound resource from blood but also from several other games and WADs and it builds a dark and gloomy atmosphere running on the GZDoom port. It has the same adventurish exploration style as few other WADs I played back then, like wandering in forests, abandoned buildings, cemetaries, etc and discovering notes that reveal part of the story, only though this time it doesn't have much searching around as the other WADs. Nor is the map very big which can be good or bad for some. But personally I prefer it this way. It gets too annoying if the map grows big sometimes..

What impressed me very much was specific parts of the graphics design. Judging by some details at some places, it's tailored enough. Even when you try to read any message you find in your path, you look at some greatly detailed torn papers with beautiful and different calligraphic fonts each that only make the game more beautiful if not more atmospheric. Even at the finale credits, there is a nice upscroller with great antialiased fonts and shades that fade to black in the upper and lower corner. It's very well-looked after in these terms. I can't speak about the rest of the graphics because they are not new but old reused resources, although they are greatly used for sure.

What dissapointed me a little is how hard the game is. Not only you are getting low on ammo and health too easily but the enemies have to get too many bullets to fall, much more than the regular doom monsters. At the beginning you start with the trident from blood which is a very useful weapon since several monsters need quite more hits with the pistol (which you have to use for half of the map till you find more interesting weapons) and there are not even enough bullets there. Also, the WAD uses the secondary fire mode of Zdoom (as in blood too) and baring the trident in hands, this mode will throw the trident and inflict enough damage (Like, the beginning monster needing to take around 10 bullets, can only be killed with two trident throws. Also sometimes the gun carrying monks can be hit with a single good trident shot!). It's not only useful at times but also fun! It's much later when you manage to get the shotgun in your hands which does enough damage and has a powerful secondary fire mode.

Still, after being frustrated with it's difficulty, I restarted the game in the easiest mode and there were times I was still in serious trouble. Only the final monster was quite easier than I thought, hopefully. Usually in such total remakes, the end bosses are not only total killing machines (e.g. throwing a blast of BFG that throws smaller BFG balls scattered all over the place, nowhere to hide) but also have x10 times the energy of a Cyberdemon. Here the second is not valid and you can easilly hide from the first issue. I thought it would take aeons to reduce it's energy to zero but it ended so soon after 15-20 bazooka blasts and several hits with the tommy machine gun. I liked very much the particle effects on the boss and also it's motion blur effect. Neat!

There are quite more surprises in this one and quite many beatiful places! It's one of the best doom WADs of this kind (Total conversions, big adventure style, using zdoom resources) I've played so far. Recomended! (Play in easy mode except if you like hardcore and watch out to not loose your ammo or your trident(I threw it over an unreachable fence but I found two more through the game so it's ok).

DelphiDoom

2008-03-09T08:57:00.000Z

I just stumbled upon this doom port yesterday. It's not the fact that Doom is ported from C to Pascal language which impressed me but what is more interesting is the software engine and it's features/tricks.

First of all there is something I had in my mind trying with some doom source port but someone else did it before I even started. How would doom look like with bilinear filtering on walls and floor/ceiling and how feasable is this with software rendering. I have even seen how the walls would like if interpolation is done in 1D over the vertical wall columns (which is the initial interpolation on wall columns I was thinking trying to code and never did :). For some reason, when you select the highres texture packs the interpolation on walls is 1D while it's only proper 2D with the original textures. Also with the highres packs the port doesn't filter the floor/ceiling texture which makes the highres texture mode much faster than the one with the original textures where everything in the screen has true bilinear filtering. I don't know why this happens and if I could also change some setting to see how the highres textures look with 2D filtering (but with 1D they also look great not very close enough) but that's still great because the game is faster with the good textures.

In my PC in 1024*768 I only get 10-15fps with ultra detail while 20-25 with the highres textures whose options don't filter everything i the detail the lowres textures are filtered. In 640*480 or 800*600 it's more playable. Except from the cases where some lightning effects suddenly drop the frame rate. Maybe I should uncheck these ones from the options. There is also support for 32bit color and more smooth shading on Z (light diminishing) which feature I don't think I have seen in some other ports I play frequently (at least in Zdoom I don't get anything more than 8bit mode).

The most interesting feature is the so called true 3d emulation technique. I haven't heard of this before. It's a very unique and interesting technique to solve the wall shearing that happens in Doom when the player looks up and down. Because doom does not render textures but scales vertical lines of a bitmap, to look up and down the makers of various ports shifted the Y positions of the columns according to their distance. This resulted in a rather distorded view (which also makes me motion sick and that's why I never play doom with the mouse view :P). What mr. Jim Valavanis do here is if I understood correctly, a post processing of the already rendered frame buffer, taking each horizontal line of the screen and scaling it on X according to... what? That's what I wondered. To the Z of some collumn in the center? To the total average Z from each column? Of course that Z is altered on Y depending the angle of the view, but some walls far away wouldn't have to be scaled as much as the walls near the place I think. Here a whole line of the frame buffer is scaled (according to Z of some selected column pixel in this line? Or the average of all?). If you go to some corner and try to look up down you will see there is something wrong here. But the idea is a very interesting solution and I haven't heard of something like that before!

I would never expect to see software bilinear filtering in games. It's a bit rare anyways. Especially for Doom in Delphi :)

You can find more info and downloads in delphidoom website. I suggest you first have the Doom1/Doom2 commercial WADs and download the big package with highres textures and MP3 music. If you wish to see the tricks explained here in software run the launcher and uncheck the OpenGL support (Someone would joke that this makes the software tricks useless anymore, full true 3D perspective, bilinear and lightning at 200fps in 1024*768 with the help of the GPU :) But what I find interesting is the software part :P))

Phun

2008-03-05T18:59:00.000Z

I really liked the recent 2d physics engines that appear lately after the release of crayon physics. My favorite is Markerworld (more reliable and playable than the first imho) yet one of the most impressive recent attempts is Phun. Except for the regular stuff I am really impressed by it's liquify option that turns a solid object into hundreds or thousands of tiny balls that together form a liquid mass. Be carefull though with placing lot's of water because it starts slowing down extremely! The engine has a GUI with several other features like changing various physics variables (friction, gravity and more) or you can draw chains, strings and circles attached together and build physical machines, catapults, rigid bodies or ugly cars :)

Just watch the youtube video presentation and then go to phun's website and try it out!

Hugi #34

2008-02-22T18:48:00.000Z

Hugi #34 was just released. Probably one of the better Hugi issues out there. Not only there are a lot of interesting articles to read (from Shane's story about Fearmoths to how scener's wives understand our hobby) but the quality of graphics and music choice this time is at it's best! For this issue I have written two articles, a review of the CPC activity in 2007 and another one entitled "disorder" (With thoughts and ideas similar to the ones from articles in my primary blog).

Visit the Pouet link. I am gonna read some more now! :)

Damn Interesting

2008-01-27T17:07:00.000Z

My blog is about everything I like, from beer and women to websites :)
This is the first entry of this kind here and only rarely I will be motivated to include websites when they really deserve it.

So what is Damn Interesting? It does look like a blog at first sight, though it's one where several people contribute. What made me bookmark this site at first was the discovery of this article which dives into the insight that "mentally disordered" people might be thinking more logically than "normal" people who seem to be living an illusion they call reality. But that's not what I want to say about the site though read the article asap!

What's interesting about damn interesting is that it contains articles of scientific nature that are damn interesting because they offer insightful stories and strange facts you don't happen to read every day. What I mean is that the selected subjects are a bit not so known or heard to most people, even those who fiddle around scientific sites, yet each of the article is so inspiring and shares such rare facts I haven't heard before that drives me to read more and even more. In a nutshell, those little known facts and stories about history and science you don't happen to encounter every day, which although tend to be rather insightful. It's the selection and the narration. It's Damn Interesting!!! =)

You won't stop reading article after article. One of my favorite sites! Visit ASAP!!!

The Shrine

2008-01-19T19:18:00.000Z

The AtariXL scene produces maybe the most impressive demos I have ever seen running on an 8bit machine. I was wondering why this machine can display 4 times more complex 3ds than the C64 for example who share the same CPU but it is 1.5 times slower than the XL. Those demos usually use the 320kb memory expansion where there may be a possibility for cheating by precalculating lot's of data. That would be one explanation for this.

One of the most impressive demos I have seen recently on the XL is The Shrine by laresistance. You can also watch a youtube video of the real thing running this beauty! Simply stunning!!!

Of course the XL demos mostly use a smooth shade of a single color, either blue, red or green, producing great shades for polygon lighting or other newschool 2d effects. Most of the times they use big pixels of 4*4 size (Or it is 2*4 in a pixel width that occures in a 160*200 resolution (I don't know if the XL also shares this resolution but the pixel width looks like C64 multicolor or the Mode 0 of CPC)). Maybe there is a video mode that makes it easier to output such pixel block, much easier and less CPU wasting than the ways used in C64 or CPC to achieve this? Who knows..

But then we can see some great smooth fullscreen crosszooms (also used in a fractal zoomer) but the quality of the 3d scenes is stunning! We can see a 3d sierpinski gasket, shaded, with proper polygon clipping rotating in your face with a fairly good speed, which is an object that is stunning for an 8bit. Even in Amiga/AtariST 16bit demos it's not too common to see such 3d models in demos. Usually you see cubes, pyramids and 3d models with 10-20 polygons, not 80 in your face! Not even the later scenes where a background, a great floor mapper and some 3d structures like a zigurat, an easter island head or the stonehedge are combined together to create an outworld environment. I also like the environment mapped spike object with the reflection on the floor in the beginning. Simply awesome code for an 8bit and not only!!!

But maybe there is a secret magic in the atari hardware and lot'sa memory that makes this possible :)

The Source

2007-12-26T23:31:00.000Z

I just found this one again, watched it and felt like writting something about it. It's a kind of demos without much code or special effects but just the usual thing that is called art (minimalism, ambience, noise or anything else). In the past when I was hungry for codepr0n, when I tried to watch such kind of demos I either pressed esc and/or gave bad critics on demoscene sites. Nowadays I seem to enjoy those strange demos more and generally when I start watching I am aware that I don't have to expect a classic demo style rather something weird I'd feel like diving into.

It's a scrolling text that is hidden by a rubber bar and scanlines on the screen are displaced randomly bearing noisy patterns. It's like there is something important on the text but we can't totally see it. I can relate to keywords in the text which motivates me to try to fully read and understand it. Later, buzzwords from the text scroll up. The message is fuzzy to read but are the specific words enough to get a meaning? Or is it that there is no real meaning in the text, totally randomly written, yet our dedication to words and sense makes us understand something that is not there?

As much as I am thinking it, it gets more interesting. The second time I have watched it it had the same effect on me, I was totally sucked into it, it has some great atmosphere or something in the text had me stuck there? I don't know. I just felt like writting about this demo (someone wouldn't call this a demo). Btw,. it was originally for ZX Spectrum but there is a PC executable now that everyone can download and watch without the need of an emulator.

Check it here!

Action Doom

2007-12-25T15:29:00.000Z

It seems that I spend a lot of time playing doom WADs, so here is another one :P

What can I say about Scuba Steve's Action Doom? In fact I have played it years ago and remembered it again and tried to replay it again to stare at it's level design and art. I think it is the most genuine doom WAD ever, a marvelous idea, yet it's a bit unplayable at some points.

What we have here is taking the doom engine (zdoom actually) to create an action based game similar to metal slug and contra. The work is astounding, several of the textures, weapons, screens and objects seem to be pixeled and the quality is great (unlike other gfx enhanced WADs where they are mostly taken from other FPS), the gameplay is linear in a sense of walking forward like in action games and if you want to play all the levels you have to not select the very easy difficulty. In the normal difficulty if you are hit by a bullet you die. Just like in 2d action games. And both you and the enemies shoot bullets which float like spheres in the air, yeah just like 2d games. Crazy idea but it gets too difficult at some places where the area is small or there is some tank or cannon which needs many hits to be destroyed,, just like metal slug and contra, but here it needs way too much bullets.

What can I say? It's a wonderfull technical and artistic work as a WAD, there are different paths to take in the 2nd level either driving a boat, jumping over cars in the highway (once you fall off you die, this was extremely hard even with save :P), there are coin ops you can actually play, a super mario world secret, alien bosses inspired from contra, laboratories containing farming aliens in containers, various jokes and references, even great music that is module based I think and not midi, there is a great amount of cool stuff in it and you can only see a very tiny ammount in these screenshots. Freakin amazing stuff!!!

Also check the youtube link of the 1st level to get an idea. What can I say? A WAD of great quality which is although is annoying to play. Will Scuba Steve make Action Doom 2 in the same quality but maybe more playable? (I'd suggest that when you are hit by a bullet and die to continue from that point with a life less instead of starting the whole level from the beginning. That would still be like an action game, wouldn't it?)

More WADs

2007-12-24T21:21:00.001Z

I've just finished Community Chest 3. I have to say that while the detail and amount of work are very high, it started bugging me near the end. The levels are too big and it's getting too hard near the end that I had to IDDQD in order to finish it (Not that I wouldn't be able to win by pressing the save key every 5 seconds :P). I am playing B2B right now and I'd have to say my favorite recent megaWADs in order are B2B>1monster>CC3. At least in terms of how much I enjoyed playing not detail or amount of work. In the CC3 screenshot above you can see my Doom SNES and XBOX =)

Back 2 Basics by Espi. IT ROCKS!!! Pure oldschool Doom 1 gameplay with some great looking areas, not extremely detail but I like minimalism and here the use of texture and architecture looks great, episode 2 replacing with a great looking sky and simple gameplay that I purely enjoyed. The two screenshots just above and below are from this one.

Trilby: The Art of Theft

2007-12-13T22:36:00.000Z

I was quite happy to play the new game release by Yahtzee featuring the Trilby character. In the past I started playing his adventure games created with AGS engine (in the future I plan to write some articles about his adventure games and other AGS games in general) and also his action adventure games (flashback like) that always kept me playing not just for the gameplay but especially for the story/atmosphere he very well plants into his games. When I download a game from Yahtzee I know that I can't be disattisfied.

Art of Theft is an action adventure game similar to his 1213 series but with a stealth based gameplay. Personally these kind of games, while I find them clever, frustrate me a lot because I am too inpatient and have to start all over again. In few words, you must steal some houses without being noticed or tripping onto the laser alarms or zap too many guards with your umbrella. And you get to know that if you are spotted more than e.g. 3 times, Trilby throws a smoke bomb and dissapears. And then you have to play the same stage from the beginning. Someone needs patience with this kind of games and if he doesn't own any he plays more recklessly each time he looses :P

Still, because I was too curious to finish the game and there is also a nice conspiracy story build in the scenario, I did managed to break my nerves and it wasn't as hard as I first thought. Playing the game again from the beginning, I am getting better while I discover that it's not that hard to finish the levels with a perfect mark (which is a Trilby hat :). After finishing the game, there is also a challenge to play all levels non stop with a greater yet limited number of watches and umbrella zaps. I don't know if I'll have the patience for this..

Yet if you learn to play well, it gets quite fun! Finishing a level in less time, without any guard/alarm noticing you, no zaps used and getting as much loot as possible gives you better marks (C,B,A and a hat for the best) which either gives you reputation points or reveals more surprises at the end of the game. Gaining enough reputation points you can buy various moves/tricks, like rolling down, climbing on the ceiling, more zaps/watches, better door/safe unlock abilities and quite more stuff I haven't bought yet. There is even a wardrobe where you can get several new outfits as a bonus :)

You will love it, especially if you are patient enough and enjoy stealth games. I did like it while I am not used to play such games!

Sequential by Andromeda

2007-12-12T12:43:00.000Z

I recently watched this demo in youtube and I liked it very much. It has something unique compared to several other still good Amiga demos. Something that makes this demo very special to remain in my mind.

Usually, I enjoy most Amiga trackmos for their code, music and transitions but most of them look the same. They bare some usual characteristics that make you think this is a genuine Amiga demo but you feel like you have seen that somewhere before. There is always a glenz cube, a dot sphere, flat polygons, transitions using those flat polygons that hide parts of the screen, the same sine scrollers, shadebobs, cooper effects, similar minimalistic color design, the same dot effects, etc. Well, I always applaud these demos since they are very well coded and designed, yet they all look the same.

Sequential starts with a very nice presentation with jelly letters and bubbles and there are at least 3 effects/parts that are very unique and haven't seen them somewhere else before. There are still polygons, vectorballs and lines yet it's not only the more unique 3d objects they build but also the special way they are used here. I loved to see a nice smooth flat shaded magnet attracting some vector balls upon it's surface and was especially astonished by the combination of lines and vector balls to form a plant that looses it's seeds as it waves around in the air. I think every screen in this demo is unique, like the flat rollercoaster, mirror cube, the electric plasma sphere, even the regular 3d wireframe show which now has unique objects, not the predictable ones.

I like the demos which instead of showing the regular cube, tetrahedron, dodecahedron objects, they show human like objects like a hammer, a keyboard, a computer chip, a bottle, etc. Why doesn't everyone try to think of more original parts instead of copying screens and ideas we have seen before? I guess I should ask the same about my own demos. Sometimes it's the urge of newer coders to create demoparts resembling those made by our scene grandfathers. Or maybe lack of time before the deadline to think of something more original. And other reasons too..

The Man from Earth

2007-12-11T11:31:00.001Z

Yesterday I laid back in the couch to watch some movie with my brother and we have randomly selected The Man from Earth. Judging from the poster and the genre it was not what anyone would expect. Yet I was immersed from the very beginning and wondered if it will be similar to this all the way till the end. I loved it and I am gonna watch it once again more carefully!

I think this is a kind of movie that a specific group of people will like and the opposite group will get bored of it. There are people out there who get sattisfied by the inner substance of things while others stare at the package/external beauty. The movie starts with a man who packs his stuff and says goodbye to his close friends as he decides to leave his homeplace. Everybody wonders what the reason for that decision is and the man while hesitant at first decides to reveal his secret. His origins goes way back in the Cro-Magnion age, who as a caveman for some unknown biological reason does not age over 35 years old. He has lived through all human history under diferrent identities accumulating knowledge and wisdom from different places and times. Of course nobody believes him at first.

Later, this emerges into a thrilling dialogue with his friends (Who are professors of anthropology, history, religion and similar fields that match the story) combining philosophy, history, religion, psychology, being a wonderful mix between scepticism and belief. It's really interesting to observe how people react to his story, their change from disbelief to belief, their anger, their bore, their hypothetical questions that challenge the reliability of his story, their feelings, their primary beliefs being challenged. "How would you react if I just told you that I am a caveman who has survived for 14000 years till this moment?" is the first hypothetical question that the protagonist raises to carefully start this conversation. Really, people's attempt to find flaws in his story and the challenging hypothesis that the protagoinst shares remind me very much of John Titor's timetraveller story. Hmm,. the protagonist is also named John in all his IDs..

While someone would expect the plot to shift from the philosophical forum under the influence of Johny Walker to some kind of action/different setting (maybe a visual flight from the beginning of John's past till today?) it ends up in the same room where the caveman reveals more about his story to his friends while being challenged to the bone. Boring? Fascinating!

If you like philosophy and you can enjoy the inner essence and atmosphere of a told story without expecting something external to please your senses then this is for you!

1 monster megawad

2007-12-09T16:52:00.000Z

It's finally here!

Each map contains one single monster type. I especially enjoyed the first imp map, the shotgun troopers and chaingunners maps, the first demon map and the cacodemon one. There are 25 levels (Few monsters share more than one map) with lot's of action and interesting details and textures. I really enjoyed beating the crap out of this map!

At the same period I am (still) playing Community Chest 3. It's a huge megawad finished by various members of the doom community and each map is unique in detail and size (sometimes I am tired running around specific confusing maps though) and there are several good maps with great surprises either in design or gameplay. I might post some more screenshots and details when I finish playing this one. The screenshot below is from CC3 and not from 1MW, while above you can see a screenshot of the cacodemon only map with a very atmospheric archway.

What the bleep do we know!?

2007-11-18T17:29:00.001Z

I have just finished watching the documentary "What the bleep do we know!?" and I was totally fascinated!!!

I am currently reading the skeptic reviews and the controversy around this one. Well, there may be several inconsistencies in this one and I do agree that the film sometimes goes into conclusions that might be a bit far fetched, though it really helps me to see reality under a different viewport. I know I will be heavy thinking upon the concepts and ideas discussed in this one and I am still curious to see their second "Into the rabbit hole" documentary and also another film suggested called "The Secret".

Normally I would fill 50 screens of blog text if I was going to deeply analyze all the things in the documentary plus my arising thoughts, though I'll just recommend you to watch this film with an open mind.

Geeks

2007-11-16T17:12:00.004Z

I should be writting something here. It's hard to get the motivation and I don't want to push myself but somehow I feel I have to fill this blog with 2-3 starting posts so that it doesn't feel empty. So,. I'll start by posting my favorite funny videos having to do with geeks or computers in general, even though I had something different in my mind at first. Maybe next time.

Atari geeks. LOL!

Qbasic nerd. Just like the above..

LOL Internet.

The IT Crowd anti-piracy add.

OMG teh internet is down!!!

Documentary about teh geeks. LOL, hilarious!

Plasma!!!

2007-10-20T12:44:00.001+01:00

Plasma fun? Well, I couldn't find a more appropriate name. The "Quest For Fun" blogname/account was already taken and so I made up my mind with something from the demoscene that is quite fun and then the word fun itself :)

Plasma stands for a lot of things from physics, space, tv screens and demo effects. However only the last one matches my initial idea of this blog. It's the most common effect I have coded in my demos and looks similar to a kind of animated plasmas from physics, thus how the name came in.

In this blog I will write about everything that I feel like it's fun like demos, games, software, music, movies, girls, etc. Everything that happens in my PC and I'd like to share with you. Think of it like an almost review blog of oldschool and newschool demos, games, Doom WADs, funny or interesting or scary or weird videos, my favorite celebrities, commercial or demo music that I like, youtube videos, weird pictures, anything media like that happens to play in my PC and wish to write about it. Sort of like that!

In the youtube video you can see some trippy plasma effects. I don't know if they are captured from a physics experiment or are generated on a computer but they are quite more complex and beatiful than any plasma effect I have coded in the past. This post is just to start this blog, something relevant to it's name..