STreet Art by Blabla

In a party marked by many high quality bar-raising releases, to say that this completely transformed my expectations of what to expect from the humble Atari STFM, would provide a bare minimum of words to describe this phenomena. I might even go a bit further and describe this as the cherry on top of the cake of a party which could take its place proudly among the classic parties of many years ago.

Yes, Sillyventure 2011 is part of the great legacy of the Fried Bits, Siliconvention. and especially the Error in Line series!

I still don't know what motivated Cyg to return to the Atari after many years away. It seems to be part of a welcome trend of returning Atari heroes that has also seen Doug Little and Mr Coke return to coding activity. A subsequent search on Pouet finds that their last demo called 'Oldiez', which contained a precursor scene to what we witnessed here, was released in 1999. Which is quite a long time later to be following up with a sequel.

There were also clues in the Atari forum, as Cyg had been discussing at length his methods for improving the display of high colour modes on the ST. I just hadn't made the connection with this demo being released at SillyVenture until afterwards.

Anyway, dragging myself mentally back to the time in November 2011, where I was in Gdansk, it was very late at night, and we'd already witnessed several top-notch Atari releases for different era's of Atari hardware. I was extremely happy, bordering on euphoric as it was.

Then this appeared.

My first thought was, possibly influenced by fatigue, extreme joyfulness and late night supplies of vodka was, "Who the f*ck put an Amiga A1200 in that ST?!"

My second thought, and further thoughts were identical. What indeed was going on here? Maybe it's time for some blow by blow narrative goodness.

So we start with a chunky graffiti wall being zoomed and rotated with a smoky sound chip tune coming from the hands of DMA-SC. Was it back in 1993 that this effect was being presented on the Falcon 030 by Sanity as the opening door to a brave new world of demos? it seems it was.

This screen closes down and then the title screen fades up. Which is a higher resolution scene of a street artist at work. In one hand he has a paint can, in the other, a vinyl playing record deck. So on top of the contemporary art and music scenes, multi-tasking at the same time! Staggering!

The next hardcore effect is next, the left hand portion of the screen is given over to a partially viewed tunnel style effect, with static 'design' graphics at the bottom and to the right. All of this is running in many colours and hues. Some of the border graphics look a little bit like placeholders done in a hurry, but these fit in with the theme of this demo. Future releases would have more care and time taken over these incidental bits.

The next part starts more straightforwardly, as two dissimilar pictures are held in place and the screen fades back and forth between them. There is a little subtlety at the end as upward travelling waves or ripples of the second picture become visible through the first pic.

We then return to something similar to the screen before the last one described. This time, with something resembling a SNES Mode 7 textured moving floor effect, rather than a tunnel.

In a demo full of them, a particular stand-out moment. A picture explodes out towards the viewer in a burst of chaotic colour, then is sucked back in again, then repeated in a heartbeat pattern.

The next screen shows something similar to the tunnel effect described previously, but with a still graphic overlaid over the top. As if the coder was saying "We can still get more stuff in here!"

We have a credits screen next, which is yet another series of pictures subject to changing. We learn the code is by Cyg, the graphics are by Acet,

Whilst we are following demo convention. There is a simple greetings screen, with a picture to the left that is being subjected to a strange rippling or distorting effect, as if you're looking at it through a layer of frost. The greetings are off to the right.

Possibly the 'money shot' moment of the demo comes up now, with a gaudily coloured column spinning slowly, which then suddenly turns into a fast and fluid mad twister! This effect is generally impressive on Atari hardware, before you add in the the hundreds of extra colours!

At the conclusion of this, the demo wraps and returns to the beginning, so an infinite shop window mode is possible here.

To say we were blown away at the party is completely correct. I wasn't sure I had been dreaming or hallucinating this, until I watched Felice's camcordered evidence the following morning. As the following days passed, some facts became clearer. It was not an STE only demo, as I had supposed at the party. The technique was applicable to the 'FM as well. A lot of the effects used a very sophisticated variant of colour cycling. It needed 4MB to run, partly from coder self-confessed laziness. And best of all, they were willing and able to do more in this vein!

We next saw activity from Blaba with their Sommerhack release, 'Japan Beauties and Troubles', which was an evolution of the techniques used in 'STreet Art'. We are promised at time of writing this review, the next step, which could well include fullscreen and Atari STE only screens as well!

Whatever Blabla does next, it will be keenly anticipated by us all!

Ratings.

Graphics:- 85% - High marks for high colour. A good theme (Street culture) cleverly disguised the fact that some graphics did not convert so well or were downgraded a bit.

Sound:- 80% - Smart and soulful bit of classic YM from DMA-SC fits in nicely.

Tech:- 96% - When first viewed on the big screen, a real stunner and expectation transformer.

Overall:- 92% - A powerful antidote to any "Atari is lame" commentards.

CiH for Mag, Nov 2012

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