Equinox/Reviews
Sonical Fantasia (1993, .03, ECS Trackloaded Musicdisk)
Review by Glenn Lunder
SF opens with a fullscreen title picture while loading, before we launch into the main menu to the first bars of the first tune presented here. This is very nicely oldskool-style designed. An Equinox logo by Jonez resides at the very top of the screen, in shades of blueish grey, looking anything but exciting. At the bottom of the screen, a bar with five clickable icons appear, and each icon can be clicked more than once for additional information. All the space between these two are occupied by a texplotter/music selector, presented in a one-plane blue color overlaid on a 3d starfield. It's simplistic, but - damn - it works =] The text that is choosable with the icons is not really very interesting, and the main thing to attract anyone to this release is probably the music, which in all honesty is pretty good. D-Luxe has three tunes in this collection, and his tunes reminds us heavily of something Phenomena members would make; polished synth-pop with nice melodies but perhaps lacking a little soul. Breeze also has three tunes here, and I like his a little more. They roughly follow the synth-pop tradition also, but the addition of a little more experimental bass and leads makes them more interesting to me. Thug has just a single tune in this collection, but his "Forever Lost" is to me the best tune of the bunch. Others might feel differently, I don't know =] Steam's tune is also synth-pop with a techno edge, with an upbeat theme, and instruments that sounds like they were stolen from Lizardking! =)
The tunes included in the collection are "Infinite", "Calm" and "Universal Dreams II" by D-Luxe, "Forever Lost" by Thug, "Honey Nut Loop", "The Blue Dune" and "Walking Lonely" by Breeze, and finally "Losing The Baluns" by Steam.
A secret part can be accessed by pressing the right mouse button while loading. This part - code Rioter, gfx Budweiser, music Breeze - is hardly a showstopper, with its slightly sexist imagery and squeaky chiptune, but at least contains a long scrolltext =p In it, Rioter announces he has landed a job coding games (with graphcs by Jonez) for Black Legend Software, if anyone can tell us what game he worked on there we'd appreciate it... It also says 'march 93', which is the closest to real release date we could find on this disk!
This review was made possibly with the use of Stingray/Darkage's fixed version, released on the 18th of august 2001. I was slightly disappointed by the lack of documentation for this release, but it works just wonderfully so why worry? Thank you again Stingray for another wonderful fix! =]
tested A1200/030-50/2mb chip, 16mb fast/3.1.
European Top 20 issue #5 (1993, .03, ECS Magchart)
Review by Glenn Lunder
Graphically appealing, the swedish answer to the Eurochart is at first look a competent little mag. The first thing you'll think, however, is definitely that this looks a lot like the Eurochart... There's the obligatory charts, a gallery section and the mag part. The biggest difference, parhaps, is that this one is a little more geared towards the illegal part of the scene. The magpart is fair, and about par with the later releases of the EC.
tested A1200/030-50/2mb chip, 16mb fast/3.0. -- Needs KillAGA!
10 Years of Fun (File)
Review by Glenn Lunder
Not even fast on my machine! I don't know why the routines in this production are so slow - I've seen some of these running at respectable speed on unexpaned A1200's! There's the usual mapping, shading, bumpmapping and the like, all set to a frantic underground techno tune. I won't even go into that, hehe :) The graphics, as such, limit themselves to a raytraced introduction logo.
tested A1200/030-50/2mb chip, 4mb fast/3.0.
