Bizarre Arts/Reviews

Review by Glenn Lunder
Who would have known Azure would rise to such heights? After viewing this effort, you could easily have been forgiven for thinking he'd end up like all the other uninspired coders. What you get here is ONE routine, 'the world's first' Ham8-plasma, as they claim. I have no idea whether that holds true or not, but I do know that even back in 1994 full-screen plasma routines were hopelessly old. I find nothing here to recommend this, other than the later fame of some of its creators. GLE tested A1200/030-50/2mb chip, 4mb fast/3.0.

Review by Glenn Lunder
Dice is a very, very cool little 40k'er! It opens with some cool fullscreen plasma, then goes on to show us a few objects of what can best be described as 'plasmamapped vectors'. It looks a little like very colorful gouraud, if that helps any... Then it moves on to texturemapping a cool picture by Fiver onto a cube (and later a torus). The cube starts spinning around, and so does the graphics on the cube! What can I say? tested A1200/030-50/2mb chip, 16mb fast/3.0.

Review by Glenn Lunder
Oh, this was fun! Of course, the tune is what MAKES this demo. It's a groovy techno thing, with some melodies that just kind of eats themselves into your head and refuses to go away... The effects here are timed to the music IN EXTREMIS, the effects sometimes changing to every single beat of the music... The drawback here is that the effects are repeated a little too often. Had it not been for that, this would have been very close to a perfect production! The effects on display are not too numerous, but a full-screen rotzoomer and a gouraud-donut are perhaps the best ones. "I *PARTICULARLY* enjoyed that...Let's see what's next." In june 1997, Azure released version 1.4, which fixes some problems on 040/060 machines, and fixes the classic The Player 6.1A bugs. tested A1200/030-50/2mb chip, 4mb fast/3.0. Note: Both original and 1.4 version tested.

Review by Glenn Lunder
Not nearly as good as "Zimbabwe", this production is still very much Bizarre. It's - as they say - an experimental attempt to combine videoanimations with demo effects. In my eyes, they do not entirely succeed on their experiment, mainly due to two reasons: 1) It's too long. Halving the size, using some of the better video (like the cornflakes), and throwing out some of the less interesting stuff would make this a lot more desireable. And 2), the effects do not blend together in the way that I suppose Bizarre wanted. It's two very different aspects, and there is no actual successful merging. Requires an accelerator. tested A1200/030-50/2mb chip, 4mb fast/3.0.

Review by Glenn Lunder
Now, here's a very good intro! Lots of bump mapping here, and some seriously FAAAAAAASt env and phong objects make this a very enjoyable ride indeed! No wonder really, this is actually just the code to Azure's "Phi" [07/96] (released for Artwork one week earlier) with the added value of Axis' cool water ripple routine (later used in his "SILIConvention 97 Invitation" for Arsenic). But hey, that doesn't matter, since this is STILL a very cool intro ;) Azure released a fixed version 1.1 in february 1998, which should work fine with 040/060 machines, and had that good old The Player 6.1A bug fixed. tested A1200/030-50/2mb chip, 16mb fast/3.0.