Alcatraz Entertainment Software/Reviews
I've Got The Power (1991, ECS Trackloaded Musicdisk)
Review by Glenn Lunder
The main selling point of this musicdisk is a 420k remix of the then-popular "I've Got The Power" track by pop group Snap! Still, it's not a bad little production. Graphics are very Alcatraz - not great, but more than functional. The sword from the top of the screen is particularly good, though. There's not much code to speak of here. Greg's intro music could have been great, but sounds a little unpolished.
tested A1200/030-50/2mb chip, 4mb fast/3.0.
Museum (1992, early, ECS Trackloaded Slideshow)
Review by Glenn Lunder
This is a slideshow from three different graphicians, so the array of style is quite varied. There's 18 different pictures to be seen here, choosable from a picture selector. Some of them (PGCS') have already been seen in Odyssey, but they're the best here, so we don't mind the repeat too much. The music is okay. It doesn't irritate, at least!
This is quite rare, actually - this production works PERFECTLY on an accelerated machine in 1997. Apart from the fact that some of the intro effects are fast as hell (at least that means they're not precalced!), there's nothing wrong at all. That's a refreshing change, hehe...
tested A2000/000-7 /1mb chip, 2mb fast/2.04.
A1200/030-50/2mb chip, 4mb fast/3.0.
60k Intro (1993, 27.03, ECS Intro)
Review by Glenn Lunder
This is good! It's got a good sense of pace, good music, several nice effects and two good logos by Alex! Alex left Alcatraz for Dreamdealers a little earlier, but still made these logos for them... Perhaps as a sign of 'no bad feelings'? This intro announces the joining Orbit, HMC, and Speedbit, and is is therefore a sort of 'welcome' intro. It also announces the leaving of Style.
tested A1200/030-50/2mb chip, 4mb fast/3.0.
The Samurai (1993, 02.08, ECS 45k Intro)
Review by Glenn Lunder
A short intro, and MUCH inferior to Orbit's previous "60k Intro". Nothing very exciting... The music tries to be thumping, but at 26k that's a hard thing to do. I'm sorry, atz, but this never really came alive for me. Those 55 frames of animation weren't very exciting either, I'm afraid :) Try again.
tested A500 /000-7 /½mb chip, ½mb fast/2.04.
A1200/030-50/2mb chip, 4mb fast/3.0.
Ilyad (1994, 07.08, AGA 4MB Multifile, 4 disks)
Review by Glenn Lunder
Whoa! I'm sure this kicked ass on the big screen! This baby features some rather revolutionary (I'm sure) effects for its time. There are some reasonably fast effects here, to be sure! Especially the mapped objects during the main part and the 'flight sim' part at the end impressed me. The music is nothing special, just functional. It's plain to see that both Hornet and PGCS improved their skills a lot since "Odyssey". Especially one of the ATZ logos by PGCS was nice. Still, I expected more from a 4-disk demo... Suddenly it was just over.
The bigfiles are just lots of XPK'ed files linked together. There were additional versions released after the party; this review refers to version 1.3 (25.09.1994). Though it will run from disk on an A1200 with enough mem, the documentation says it suggests a 030 and a harddisk. When installing, remember to assign "Ilyad1:" to "Ilyad4:" to your directory. The documentation makes no mention of this, I believe, so I had to hex-read the executable to find out :)
GLE tested A1200/030-50/2mb chip, 4mb fast/3.0.
Cyberlogik (1995, 28.12, AGA 020-28+ 4MB HD File)
Review by Glenn Lunder
The first thing that strikes you about this production is 'WOW!' The second thing that strikes you, is 'shame about the design'. And that's the biggest problem with it: Virtually no attention has been assigned to the design of the thing! It's got lots of cool, heavy effects, a couple of cool pics (Lazur's Alien pic is FAAAAANTASTIC!), but not much work on putting it all together. With all this graphical talent working on the demo, I can only be disappointed that the potential was far from fulfilled.
tested A1200/030-50/2mb chip, 4mb fast/3.0.
