Pygmy Projects/Reviews

From ExoticA

Extension (1993, 10.08, ECS Trackmo)

Review by Glenn Lunder

Great in its time, Extension rocked the scene. Who would have expected a bunch of unknowns to come along and WIN the ASM93 demo compo? The show opens with a picture of a woman with a snake wrapped around her, while the demo loads. Once it's loaded, we get the name of the crew and the demo presented, in what is a rather unique style. The music is timed to the FX, and there's plenty of that here. Most of the effects are dot- or vector-based, with stuff like a dot-landscape, dot-cityscape, solid cityscape, dots dropping down on a vector cube, vector cube shadow-casting onto another vector object etc. It sort of signalled the end of those two trends! Well, Kefrens "Desert Dream" (04/93) had pretty much buried the dot stuff four months earlier, so I guess this was more of a twitch :)

The music by Jester is liked by many. However, I am very individual :D It's frantic techno with wah-wah guitars overlayed. You've been warned. A file version requiring a little more memory was released in December. This production uses a unique music format, dubbed the Pygmy Projects Packer by the common conversion utilities.

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

G Force (1994, 06.08, AGA 40k Intro)

Review by Glenn Lunder

Wow! I'm sure THIS kicked butt in Finland! Impressive is the only way to describe this pioneer intro. Massive gouraud shaded objects move around the screen, including the infamous fish and a large face object. Totally oustanding. The intro was Silver Eagle's first solo project. His only work before this was an endpart for the TSL trackmo "Maximum Velocity" [08/92].

Needs a bit of fastmem, though I do not know EXACTLY how much. Worked fine on my 4mb configuration.

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

Logic (1995, 13.08, AGA HD Multifile)

Review by Glenn Lunder

Not all that impressive, this production still managed to come in second at ASM95...the party they won two years earlier with "Extension" [08/93]. The effects are perhaps better and more advanced this time around, but "Extension" still has the edge in pure entertainment power. Lots of fx, as mentioned, includes envmapping (reflection, phong), texturemapped tunnel, shade cluster (which Andromeda invented with their The Party 4 winner "Nexus 7"), texturemapped tilting cityscape, morphing rendered gold 'sheet', particles forming words... The music is the usual techno shit, no better or worse than the norm. Paralogic System is a separate group (or single composer, what do I know?), and not a member of PP.

It seems they used a custom replayer for the music once more! Silver Eagle is credited with 'player' (the original Pygmy Packer was by Flame), and there are some files that correspond to the music names, but not to any known format. Any information on this is most welcome! :)

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