SWEETY BUILDINGS
The rise of girl power on the Falcon '030?
There has never been a large participation from the fairer sex on any demo
scene platform. Indeed, the demo scene as a whole has been so heavily male
dominated, that any female involvement at all has been newsworthy. So it
was, that we gasped with awe, when the female nicknamed 'Mascot' cosied up
to oldskool code-busters Delta Force. It was interesting how her nick and
status/role within the group coincided?! Since then, feminine interest has
been stonily thin on the ground, apart from one or two brave IRC'ers (Tilde)
and one or two blatant female impersonators, (Kellis!), I can only recall
the Reservoir Gods Ripley as an active female scener.
I can think of no female coders, apart from the less-aptly named and
somewhat deceased "Lucky Lady", who specialised in the murky area of virus
creation. Now it seems we are faced with no less than two new female(?)
coders, Sandra and Timea, who make up the all-female crew known as the 'Cool
Girls'.
After the Kellis story, a tale of cross-gender assumption of "MiNT
condition" operating systems, the general Atari community tends to be
sceptical of claims of femaleness, and so it proved this time as well. The
Central European location of the Cool Girls hideout tends to point the
finger of suspicion at the robustly all-male 'Satantronic', according to
some sources.
This could be an elaborate joke and we examine the available evidence more
closely, the quality of their first release 'Sweety Buildings' runs on a
Falcon only, and needs a 100 Hz capable VGA screen to run on. This suggests
a bit of a rush job. The demo itself is soon over, with an opening sequence
consisting of a typical fake-crew scrawled 'Cool Girls' logo, and a spinning
vector line and dot represented 3-D world, which looks rather crude in its
execution.
I wouldn't want to meet this 3-D world down a dark alleyway!
This gives way to the second part of the demo, a so-so 'fire effect', with
some kind of afterimage left on parts of the screen from clearing the first
part of the demo? Neat, professional, and well executed, this 'aint! This
goes on until you dab at the spacebar to get back to the desktop. And that
is your lot. There is an unusual sounding audio track, sort of a Slovakian
folk band sound, which adds some momentary novelty to a short and untidy
looking fake demo.
The Cool Girls seem to represent an attempt by their unknown parent crew to
get rid of some elderly bits of code, and have a bit of fun at the same
time, without being slagged off under their real name of Satantronic(Oops!)
This arousal of girl power might prove to be of greater interest, if a
future rather better production bearing the 'Cool Girls' logo comes along,
but I've got a feeling that we won't see too much more of them in the
future.
CiH, for Alive! Mag,Nov '02.
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