Three Little Elks (group)/Reviews

Review by Glenn Lunder
When you run "The Tribe" from the supplied icon you're presented with a nice little intuition GUI, allowing you to select various options. This is a very nice idea, and one that I'm quite surprised not more groups have adopted! Anyway, you're given options to show some information, show a small elk animation (as usual :) and select low/high resolution for the demo. You make your selections and press 'start demo'.

The first thing that comes across your screen, after a couple of introductory logos, is a sort of 3D scene with elks dancing around a totem pole! This looks way cool, and we're soon on to a phong object with 'shining' parts, like in CNCD's "Closer" (12/'95). Then we're shown a (nearly) fullscreen picture by Ant, showing the view out from the inside of a cave. This then coincides nicely with the next effect, some bump mapping that's made out to look like it's showing a torchlight shining on the cave walls, revealing the ancient drawings... Very nice! The last real effect is a fullscreen face object in tones of blue which doesn't move, but has the colors sort of floating across it. It's a lot like a similar effect in Artwork's "The Gate" (04/'96), though that looked quite superior. The demo then ends with a reprise of the dancing elks part, with the credits overlaid over the onscreen action.

Coma's music (Scoth.elk file :) is functional throughout, and perfectly suited to the humorous style of 3LE. The oustanding thing about 3LE, I always thought, was the way they were able to combine excellent technical demos with a humorous image - not an easy task, as many attempts by other groups have shown us. 3LE is unique...perhaps we should be glad there's only one of them? There's not any kind of big difference between choosing high and low resolution, apart from a dramatic decrease in speed...

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

Review by Glenn Lunder
This is subtitled 'the strip you never forget', and I'm almost about to agree. This, you see, is a demo I'd like to nominate for 'most unusual demo of 1997'. It's actually more of a cartoon strip than a demo, which details the adventures of Henry, who leads a very boring life and goes off to find excitement. I won't reveal the entire storyline, as that would be ruining the demo. Go check it out yourself instead :)

There's nothing wrong on the audiovisual side, with some good music to accompany the onscreen 'action', and reasonable and clean graphics. Now stop reading and go download this. I guarantee you won't believe you eyes :)

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