Silly Venture 2012 Demo releases Round-up..

The 2012 edition of Sillyventure didn't quite match the heights reached by the previous party for demo releases. Nevertheless there were still a high number of releases with some truly outstanding productions featured here.

'Jacktro' - Paradox - Atari STE - Invitro

A combined tribute and invitro, and probably some of the best use of grey scaling interlaced pictures of old computers anywhere! There's a bit of STE specific coder porn too, with a huge virtual high resolution picture of the greyscale Tramiel family being scrolled around the screen casually at the start. To round off the general air of goodness here, 505 is giving it some of his best effort on a suitably themed STE enhanced sound chip tune.

Jack Tramiel, rest in peace, Paradox, keep going!

Rating:- 80% - An apt tribute to one of the great pioneers of home computing.

'Sillyventure 2k12 invitro'- Extream - Falcon 030 - Invitro

Whilst not as ambitious as the other invite demo, the rather wonderful 'Jacktro', this invitation ticks the right boxes. Falcon specific, so nice mod file soundtrack, yep. True colour graphics, yep. The coding side is competent but not world shattering, yep. The main screen resembles an old style BBS or even a disk mag text displayer and is word heavy, but with a nice reflective layer at the bottom.

Rating:- 60% - Nothing special, but still nicely done.

Skit - Live! - Atari STE - 4ktro.

This has been described as an 'overflow' production for an effect which didn't make it into their 96k smasher, 'Muda', because there wasn't any space. A story which was confirmed by Ukko.

Like its bigger perfectly formed brother, Skit manages to pack in a lot to the small amount of space. A rippling wavy brick wall, the incredible complex rotating textured blocks combining TWO textures, including one cunning re-use, followed by a cube made of a spectrum of colours. (I counted 14 x 17 separate blocks of colour on one of the cube faces, which is interesting.) Then a final ripply wall, and a decent tune galloping off the fingers of DMA-SC fills those last few empty bytes.

I've got a feeling of deja-vu in repeating myself when saying the art of the 4Ktro has been redefined. Did I say that last year too?

Rating:- 87% - A thimbleful of awesome!

'Fading Twilight DVD Edition' - RNO and tSCc - Atari ST - 96ktro

The combined efforts of RNO and Lotek Style resulted in an appealing and slightly old school feeling 96ktro, but it had the supreme misfortune to be up against the genre redefiner of the decade, namely 'Muda' by Live!

Britelite has coded up an intro which has good design elements and decent execution, without seeming to heavily tax the limits of the ST hardware. The morphing face on the main screen is the most accomplished part. Bracket and Lotek successfully complement the code with their work. All in all a nice piece of work, but I still think RNO could still push the metal more if they chose to.

Rating:- 75% - An accomplished and relaxed piece of work.

'Muda' - Live! - Atari STE - 96ktro

What can I say that sums up this master blaster of a 96ktro in a single paragraph? There is nothing I can say in that small amount of space, so this will get its own full review elsewhere. What I can say, this is some of the best used and hardest worked 96 kilobytes on any (Atari) platform realised in the past two decades. It can hold its head up high in the company of other more mainstream systems too.

There's over five minutes of demo goodness in here, not a single byte of data or a second of screen time wasted! Watch it now!

Rating:- 98% - What else can we say? Read the full review!

'Atari Sextape' - ISO - Atari STE - Demo

Sillyventure managed to stay hidden for a good long time, but the deathly fingers of Finnish demoscene humour have finally prodded the previously undefiled sectors of innocent Atari disk space in Gdansk.

The nicest way of describing this production, is the end result of an unholy gang-bang between the muses of 'NuN/Ipir' for the challengingly coarse 'faketro' aesthetic, a bottle of Salmiakki for inspiration and Diskbusters (DBA) for that vital last minute rushed party entry (lack of) quality.

And that, dear reader, is all you need to know!

Rating:- -4% - Ah good, so the ratings system doesn't break with applying minus values then!

'Chasey' - Checkpoint - Atari ST - Demo

On the surface, this is a confusing miscellaneous bag of components formed into a demo. Looking a bit more closely reveals quite a lot going on underneath. This is a music or song disk, a 'love song' to a pornographic actress. It is not one of the simplistic chopped riffs and repeat sample disks of ancient times though, as the end text kindly informs us that there is a whole unedited two minutes and twenty three seconds, compressed down to 580 KB. The decoder is something special and custom made, so the resulting playback is a none too shabby 16 kHz on a plain 1 Meg STFM.

Almost incidentally, the intro code, transformations and graphics are flawlessly done, you would not expect anything less from Checkpoint. The credits suggest almost everyone in that group had a part to play. Well done to you all.

Rating:- 72% - More of a tech demo for the sound system, but very well done.

'Wake up' - Mystic Bytes - Atari STE - Demo

This one feels like a less tightly co-ordinated follow on from the 2011 'Electroilluminations' demo, and tends to lose out when compared to that previous work. The overall standard is fine and there are some individually excellent parts, such as the textured 'greetings from planet Earth'. At the same time, there are one or two places that are variations on previous effects, so this did not quite work as well for me.

There's lots of potential from Klocek and company, so a complete refresh for the next one would be a good suggestion and worth watching.

Rating:- 70% - Very strong in places, but did not gel together too well overall.

'C++ is Forbidden' - Cerebral Vortex - Atari STE - Demo

So what does Orion do for relaxation when he's not busily creating an awesome multi platform graphical adventure game? That's easy, he brings this demo to the party!

This is another production of many diverse parts, all of them good, but it is tending to pick up and feel more authentically 'STE only' when we get to the midpoint. Have people mentioned the excellent tunnel sequence already which reminds me of the mini game in 'Stardust' towards the end? Generally, this is one where the effects have been subordinated to the 'design' elements. There are some very nice graphics from Templeton in there, and tasty music from Xyce. Another feature, in common with the Checkpoint production, is that it is a floppy disk boot loader, with means you're looking for a dusty and hopefully still working floppy, or the (non existent) Mac version of STEEM! (Hatari seems to cause problems in places.)

Rating:- 80% - A lot of hard work on display here.

'Meet !Cube' - Aggression - Atari STE - Music Disk

A small but perfectly formed music disk from !Cube of aggression. Unfussy and unpretentious. There isn't too much else to say, apart from some graphics by a welcomely revived Samurai of Inter. It is always nice to find a new source of home grown music.

Rating:- 60% - Not a reflection on the quality, just noting what other prods it was up against.

'UFO' - Dune - Atari STE - Demo

Strictly speaking, this demo is a Numerica 2009 release. However, this UFO had managed to remain elusive and mysterious, just like its real life counterparts, until Dune had finally managed to summon up the time to finish and release it.

As you may recall from last year's 'Antiques' megademo, Dune are the supreme champions of flowing effects through a story at an effortless pace. They make a lot of undoubted hard work on their part look easy. UFO showcases this ability to the point where the demo is over before you're really ready for it to finish. And such a nice end screen as well. The sound and visuals are the toppest of top notch, as you might expect.

Rating:- 88% - As I've said elsewhere, I hope this isn't the last we'll see of Dune.

'Modulation 4 Preview' - Checkpoint - Atari Falcon - Music Disk

This one looks promising. A Falcon music disk with Ace Tracker tunes from 505. The version we saw was just a little bit too 'previewy' to form an opinion on. I'll wait until the final finished article comes along for a review.

Rating:- Not yet, you'll have to wait!

'The only Survivor' - Extream/Mystic Bytes - Falcon 030 - 96ktro

This was the second entry to arise from the efforts of Mystic Bytes, combined with Extream, Emphii providing the main code for a standard basic Falcon 030. The entry is slight but pleasant, with a full colour static picture of the last survivor and his Falcon dominating the intro, with the effects taking place in the skyline. Did anyone spot the 'life' game made from text in there? Another reason for me personally to like this, is that the 'Maggie Team' are greeted! - It's 'Mag Team' now, there, fixed that for you!

Rating:- 65% - A pleasant and easygoing party intro. Hope this isn't the last.

'2x1287' - Paradox - Falcon 030 - Demo

At least someone remembered there was a birthday! It's down to the masters of the (almost) last minute production, Paradox, to bring the 20th Anniversary of the Atari Falcon back into sharp relief. As the read me text indicates, this is the first time in a long time that they have come back to the Falcon. In some respects, this demo looks like it was made on an STE with a faster processor and a truecolor mode (which is not too unappealing a prospect in itself.) Still what we get is satisfactory, a nice textured Falcon and screen near the start included. The polaroid timeline seems to have been cleaned up a bit from the party preview I saw and is still maybe a bit long, but that is bearable. It's still all too revealing of the paucity of productions for this machine in recent years though!

Punctuating throughout, is 505's extremely fine soundtrack, a medley remix of several classic Falcon demo tunes. Started with the Lost Blubb intro and ended with the opening bars of 'Warum'.

Rating:- 80% - Has it really been all that long ago?

CiH for Mag! - Various to May 2013.

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