Union/Reviews

Review by Glenn Lunder
Not a bad little intro, though perhaps not quite good enough to reach the very top of the competition. There are some very good routines, like the impressive voxel terrain and the fullscreen HAM zoom rotator. The music is nice too, with a very distinct c64 flavour to it. Not bad at all, is my conclusion :)

If you run the demo with the parameter '?', like 'Rotate.exe ?' you'll be presented with a number of options, like running without sound, showing some messages and playing the hidden game. The game is a kind of simple airhockey variation. This was PP's first intro for Union.

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

Review by Glenn Lunder
Heavily based on Pink Floyd's "The Wall" music and film, that is what the first part of this Musashi tour-de-force occupies itself with. Using demo effects, it recreates several moments from the film, while a sampled rendition of the music plays in the background. Or tries to play, since my machine (030-50) wasn't fast enough! As a result, it jerked and played the music in jerks and spurts. I was much relieved when the second part started, with NORMAL protracked music...It made the routines a whole lot more enjoyable to watch :)

The second part is what I'd describe as the demo part of the show. Here's where Musashi gets to do the usual phongs, bumps, zooms, spacecuts and even a rather wild little doom without sticking to any specific theme. In my opinion, this is the best part of the demo. I felt that the theme of the first part was a little limiting for some of his routines, making him unable to show their true potential. Here he can. One major drawback about the entire demo, however, must surely the ever-present shading. This is not the usual right-left pixel or every other pixel is black kind, however. It seems a little more flexible and variable, but is still quite annoying. I understand that it requires less raster time, but that doesn't mean I have to like it ;) Musashi must have used some kind of amazing internal compression to squeeze all this into one single 867k file - I'd expect the sampled music alone to take that much!! To conclude: Wow! Obviously requires some fast.

tested A1200/030-50/2mb chip, 4mb fast/3.0.