Powerline/Reviews

Review by Glenn Lunder
"Repugnance" is a power demonstration, nothing less. It's a demo that twists and turns, bends and swings, and all perfectly timed to the heavy beat of the techno soundtrack. And I don't mean that in a bad way. There's something a little fresh about this demo, something a little extra that puts it up there as one of the best demos of 1997. It's hard to pull out specific effects and say 'this is excellent', since it's the way it works together that makes it special. There's great performances on every level here, with the coders doing a great job, the graphician turning in an amazing semi-abstract fullscreen, and the musician keeping it all together with a heavy, dynamic tune. Recommended.

Tested A1200/030-50/2mb chip, 16mb fast/3.0.

Review by Glenn Lunder
Before watching this demo, I read the accompanying text file. It told me that although this demo would run on my system, it would be slow and not very exciting, since it was optimized for 060 processors. There was even a requester when I ran it, saying that it would not perform to its best on my system. So I doubleclicked the file, not expecting to be impressed in any way. And I have never been happier about being wrong.

"Enforcing the Law" is the second surprise from the new Swedish hope (well, at least in my eyes :), Powerline. It is a much more bleak, dark and monochrome demo than "Repugnance" was, but in some ways this actually works to its advantage. I don't think I've ever seen a demo in this genre look more 'colorful' in almost total black and white. I know I'm not making sense, but don't take my word for it - go see it yourself.

But let's not forget the speed issue. DO NOT LISTEN TO THEM! I watched the demo on an ordinary Blizzard 030-50, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. There are some stuff in this demo that will take your breath away, even on a humble machine like mine :) You won't believe your eyes when you see that ride along the road, with voxel mountains on all sides...and that shiny box towards the end, wow! And that twisting, zooming pattern...was that an animation? The only really SLOW parts I noticed were the video clips, and they're not really that important to the overall effect.

One last thing I'd like to point out about this demo is the fact that they're actually trying to be innovative here! When everyone else is doing their fire effects, these guys have come up with some incredibly realistic smoke! And I have never seen ANYTHING like the aforementioned road trip before... Powerline are the best newcomers of 1997. This demo comes Highly Recommended from the staff here at Scenery. Wow.

Tested A1200/030-50/2mb chip, 16mb fast/3.0.