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OXYGENE SOUND DEMO

Or when some guys think it's necessary to show us crappy old stuff...

   Some months ago Master Leonard, also known as the guy who saved the ST Scene
all alone (refer to  Nostalgic'O intro text  for exact quote), dug out the very
first demo he coded, gosh like +10  years ago. I can't  remember the exact date
of theis screen but I guess  it was somewhere  in the late eighties. While some
guys, like Chuck of DUNE, are still reluctant to release  long hyped demos such
as ILLUSION, Leonard dares give us this intro. DoH! Call me lucky :(

   Okay let's get thru the boring zip-msa-disk  process once again and see what
Leonard has to say. This screen being kind of really old, I guess it only works
on STs. Yep, Falcon owners won't have a chance to see it :)

    The first screen, displayed in overscan, features a huuuuuge  red and green
OXYGENE logo  on  top  while  some  text  in a  one plan  font (but filled with
rasters) is shown below. The tune is damn famous but I just can't put a name on
it. Still I remember it from many crackers intros.

    Next screen shows  a painted chessboard  with mountains in the background.
Funnily enough there's a Leonard logo  carved into the  mountain, thus showing
the extent of his ego :) A crappy blue OXG logo  stands on top of it while two
wireframed OXG logos keep spinning all over the chessboard. Last but not least
a huge raster filled horizontal scrolltext stands at the bottom of the screen.
Definitely feels brutally designed like most demos were at that time.

    After some loading we reach the main part : it features four sprites on top
that will shrink with the music, some sort  of equalizers. In the middle of the
screen there's a box filled  with a  vertically scrolled  red motive while some
white text gives you the same  info about who  did what... Another  scrolltext,
this time green, fills  the bottom  and tells  us about all  kind of stuff. The
whole screen is just ugly.

    Press F1 to F10 to change soundtrack, as we are  talking about mods here.
Unfortunately, due to the lack of mod composers at that  time I suppose, most
soundtracks are the same as in almost all mods compils back in the late 80s :
some JM Jarre, Depeche mod, Axel  Folley... That total absence of originality
added to a  low replay quality (12.5 Khz I think), make me think I should NOT
have wasted time downloading this demo. There's no reset nor endscreen... You
just reboot the ST.

    Bottom line : if this old demo had been good stuff like the Animal Mine and
Synergy screens released  about a year  ago, I would  have felt the  old school
vibe go thru my spine, but it's no good at all : crappy design, already heard a
million times before soundtracks, no originality and almost no effects at all !
Don't bother wasting a disk for that crap.

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