'Circus Back2STage' (STE)

We came, we saw, we infiltrated Revision 2013 with this release, exclusively for the Atari STE in 4 Meg.

This scary clown fest is a natural next step for the creator of 'STreet Art', the demo which brought Spectrum 512 coloured effects to a stock STFM back at the Sillyventure 2011 party. Since then, Cyg and the rest of BlaBla had a Japanese interlude at last year's Sommerhack party. We were expecting this to appear at the 2012 edition of Sillyventure, but it seems that Cyg wasn't quite ready yet, as the empty space missing his limit smasher was taken over rather neatly by the stunning 'Muda' 96ktro from the good people of Live,

This year has been different though, as a decision to attend the Easter party called 'Revision' was partly based on curiosity and partly on an expected Atari demo release from Checkpoint, which got cancelled in the end. At the same time, Cyg asked for volunteers with an Atari STE loaded with 4 MB to enter a demo on his behalf. It seems that I was the only person going there who owned such hardware, so the mission was given to me.

From a technical preview, which *barely* ran, sent to me a few days before departure, Cyg accomplished miracles to make something which could be shown on a big screen in front of a sceptical audience. The struggles to get this together and entered are detailed elsewhere, I won't go through this again. Needless to say, Circus Back2STage made it and was duly shown in the oldschool competition at Revision.

I'd like to think it could have placed a bit higher than seventh (out of ten) place, but I guess there is still a little pavlovian resistance from the mainstream audience. Also I might mention this was a party version too.

Apart from the start, which is a blue study of a blue clown in a high resolution interlaced mode, the rest of the demo consists of more of the gorgeous colour limit smashing that made Cyg's earlier demos so memorable.

The effects vary between spin and rotate, most conspicuously seen near the start of the demo, some fairly uncomplicated colour cycling to emphasis some of the still graphics.

A variation on another theme seems to be selectively blurring then re-emphasising parts of a picture, which was used to good effect in a couple of places.

A full colour bump-mapping gets in midway with a very scary clown.

There is an extensive zoom and rotate near the end, from a clown's eyeball point of view. I have seen an extended version of this, but this was too space consuming to enter as part of the party released demo. There was a nice little water ripple effect right at the end of that too.

My personal favourite is a clown's face morphing as part of a credits and greetings screen. Cyg mentioned there was at least one other major effect which didn't go in here because of time and space constraints. We may see this and other changes in a two disk extended remix. On the other hand, Cyg may well come up with another demo, depending on how well he can motivate his artist!

Some comments have been made about the effects being 'messy'. This is a valid point, as the graphics suffer some degrading during these effects and the more dynamic moving animations are sometimes less than clear. Also some people consider the effects to be 'simplistic'.

On the other hand, those people seem to have missed the context in which this demo was made. We're talking of a 400 x 200 pixel overscan mode, no side borders, in an unofficial STE high colour mode, which is normally only any good for displaying still pictures. Also Cyg has freely admitted this is an imperfect 'party release'. We'll have to wait and see for the proper extended remix version.

I'm trying hard not to forget the role played by DMA-Sc, who has come up with yet another winning sound track, thematically perfect for this demo. (There may be digi-drums on the STE stereo channels?)

I hope there will be a finished extended remix. I also hope fervently that there will be more coming from Cyg, Nytrix, DMA-Sc and the rest. I'm also proud to have done my part in bringing this demo to a major demo party and a wider than usual audience.

Rating:- 92% - A definite next step from Cyg for the STE's extra capabilities. Is still a party version and slightly rushed to finish.

CiH for Mag 2013 - May 2013.

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