Balance/Reviews

Review by Glenn Lunder
The very first issue of Magbox is a little thin when it comes to the amount of articles, and was meant to be a combination of diskmag and messagebox (like Chit-Chat). Graphics are only passable, and the music is not particularly revolutionary either. The best and most interesting articles this time was Wolfman's history of Balance DK, interview with Hannibal/anarchy and a report and interview concerning the controversy surrounding the recently held Hurricane party. There is also a lot of really unnecessary humour stuff. The news item about Nexus 6/23 Celsius Crew (also spelt wrong, btw! =) forming a Hungarian division of Anarchy is false. In fact, he joined Frogs and later - when Frogs merged with Balance - became a Balance member! The mag needs KillAGA to show graphics and play music correctly, otherwise it works perfectly. tested A1200/030-50/2mb chip, 16mb fast/3.1 -- note: Needs KillAGA!

Review by Glenn Lunder
Much improved graphics is the first thing that you notice, as well as some nice music. Much more articles, and the music is better than in the first edition too. The mag itself works fine with KillAGA, despite some hiccups with the music replay and slight problems with the larger proportional fonts. They also correct the incorrect news item about Nexus 6/23 Celsius Crew from the earlier issue. tested A1200/030-50/2mb chip, 16mb fast/3.1 -- note: Needs KillAGA!

Review by Glenn Lunder
A nice, polished trackmo from the coder of the MagBox, later Upstream diskmag. It has the polished feel of Andromeda or even Phenomena...I guess it's the graphics that give the impression. Some of the logos or fonts could have been taken right out of any demo by those two groups! Testament to Connor's talent, I guess. Nothing TRULY out-standing here...except perhaps the spacecut routine - that was unusual back in 1992. Also, they present a glenz vector with LOTS of faces, though the 'this is a new world record' effects failed to impress me a long time ago. Who cares if you've got four more faces on your glenz than the next guy, when you can't even spot the difference with the naked eye? It's the visual part that matters. Excite me! Apart from the 'slime vector', which had graphical errors, I had no problems running this on my system. tested A1200/030-50/2mb chip, 4mb fast/3.0.

Review by Glenn Lunder
Why this requires AGA is totally beyond me, but there you go. The only remotely interesting bit is the afterburned large dot routine, which was slightly original if nothing else. Avoid. tested A1200/030-50/2mb chip, 4mb fast/3.0.

Review by Glenn Lunder
Another good issue of Upstream surfaces. Contentwise, this is perhaps not their strongest issue, but I believe that is a mirror of the demo situation at that time; before the big AGA demos started appearing. The scene was at a crossroads, people were busy experimenting with AGA and consequently weren't releasing demos. Visually, this issue is OK, if not their best. Subject's music sounds like he's trying to do a Lizardking cover...which is a little ironic, given that the next issue came with a Lizardking soundtrack :) Not a bad issue, but then - Upstream rarely is! The original disk also contained the 22k intro "Smalltalk" [10/93]. tested A1200/030-50/2mb chip, 16mb fast/3.0.

Review by Glenn Lunder
Another not-bad intro from the Norwegian section. There's no 'wow' routines here, but overall a nice intro. Chagall's 'no smoking' picture is cute... tested A500 /000-7/½mb chip, ½mb fast/2.04.

Review by Glenn Lunder
Not bad at all, with some fairly tasty dot routines. It's not exactly 'Desert Dream' in the dot respect, but not bad at all. Surprisingly much grapics. I once tried running this on my 1mb A500, but didn't have enough memory even when depacking the file first. I can't positively say it's an AGA production, though. tested A1200/030-50/2mb chip, 4mb fast/3.0.

Review by Glenn Lunder
Upstream delivers quality with this issue, with some very nice and interesting articles - like the Chromag interview. There's nothing wrong with the audio-visuals in the mag either; the backgrounds and the panel both have nice layouts. This was the first issue with a third 'main' editor, Mount. You won't notice much of a difference, though. The option to save an article to disk is nice. The only reason this qualifies as a multifile mag is the fact that the module is a separate file. Not much more to say about this, except it's one of the best ever mags. One slight sniggle, though - a BIG BUG! When attempting to load a new module, the mag crashes the moment I press the mouse button! The intro is a rather bland affair, to be honest. It resembles those old trailer intros Brainstorm used to release for Zine, without any of the excellence of those. On the A500, the intro seemed somewhat unstable when setpatch wasn't run first. The tune 'Water Below' by Lizardking was later used in the Razor 1911 musicdisk "Memorial Songs II" [01/95]. tested A500 /000-7 /½mb chip, ½mb fast/2.04.

Review by Glenn Lunder
I'm actually a little surprised that this didn't do better than 14th at The Party, though ofcourse there were a lot of good releases that year. This one has very fast, mostly vector, routines timed to the usual techno music. Some interesting stuff here, a.o. what was probably the first HAM8 plasma. Did anyone do that earlier? The fire effect is ugly and blocky, though. THAT effect has been substantially improved with time! R.W.O's picture "Zailorpower" also participated in the graphics competition at The Party, and finished on a split 39th place. On my 030 machine, the road part fucks up graphically. I do not know what causes this, really... Perhaps the routine is timed for a standard 14mhz 020 in some way...who knows? The demo works fine on a standard A1200, no fast needed. tested A1200/030-50/2mb chip, 4mb fast/3.0. note: See review.

Review by Glenn Lunder
One of the greatest diskmags of the time, Upstream has both interesting articles and top presentation. You can't go wrong with this. The reason for the ECS/AGA at the top needs a little explanation; the intropicture by R.W.O is in 256 colors, and if you're running on an ECS machine, you'll just get an explanatory text, like: "No aga - no pic!". The mag itself runs fine on most configurations. Needs req.library to load modules or save articles. tested A1200/030-50/2mb chip, 4mb fast/3.0.

Review by Glenn Lunder
An acceptable production from the Swedish division of Balance. Nothing outstanding, just nice. The music is frantic demo-techno, and not the worst of its kind. The demo includes two fullscreen pictures by Grid, one of a screaming man's face with a twirl effect around it, and one that's reminiscent of Hajime's metal people art, though of a kitten. I did a search, and as far as I can see Grid did not enter any graphics competitions during 1995. This probably means this is the only place you'll ever see these :) One thing I noticed about the effects is that Confidence seems to use a rather unique method of 'smoothing' his effects, almost reminiscent of the raster effects used in comic books. Interesting... To conclude: Acceptable. Does not require fastmem, but takes advantage of it if it's there. tested A1200/030-50/2mb chip, 4mb fast/3.0.

Review by Glenn Lunder
To the sound of a heavy, boombastic tune by Smartass we're given a demo without much soul. The effects are of highly variable quality, some are very impressive and others are not so hot. The big tunnel routine is nice, and sort of reminds me of the tunnel in TBL's "Captured Dreams" [03/97]. The morphing (env?) object is too blocky though, I think Confidence should have spent some more time on that. There's only one real piece of graphics here, a fullscreen picture of a woman's face - not signed but presumably by Grid, since it resembles his style. The best effect here is a truly great one, though - an amazing light routine, where we're sort of looking into the light, and it changes a little. It's awfully smooth and nice, and lifts the demo as a whole a lot. I guess this is worth getting for that effect alone ;) I tried to run this with only 4MB fast and my Kickstart mapped to RAM (eating 512k in the process), and found I didn't have enough memory. So if you're gonna run this on a 4MB machine, be sure you're not remapping your kickstart, oki? tested A1200/030-50/2mb chip, 4mb fast/3.0 -- Note: See review. A1200/030-50/2mb chip, 16mb fast/3.0.

Review by Glenn Lunder
The best part of ENDOLYMFA is the opening, which with it's fast texture mapped and animated surfaces create a nice mood... which unfortunately it fails to sustain through the rest of the demo. It's a rather short demo too, which doesn't help matters that much. The effects consists mainly of the usual env and phong objects, with an overweight on toruses. The music's nothing special. A little disappointing. In my eyes, Syndrome's "Subzero" (6th) is a much better demo than this. Ofcourse, results are not up to me, but to the voters at The Party :) Seeing as the (unpacked) file is over 2MB in size, this will obviously need a little more memory than the 2MBs of chipmem in AGA Amigas. I do not know exactly how much, though, since the distribution doesn't have any text describing requirements. tested A1200/030-50/2mb chip, 16mb fast/3.0.