"After a long winter-sleep".
That's the slogan this demo starts with. After a long winter-sleep, a group
returns to the Falcon that had released the vertical scrolling shoot'em up
game named Painium Desaster. And after a long winter-sleep, everybody is
hungry.
The slogan disappears to make room for a lot of little snow flakes, moving
from the right to the left and waving softly while the white background
uncovers a picture of a part of the Falcon pixel by pixel, the Atari
Falcon-logo in a close-up shot. As the picture is fully uncovered, the
snow-flakes vanish and instead, the HDD-control light of the Falcon blinks.
Fade down to black, fade in a small background picture, covering probably
1/3 of the vertical space on screen and displaying a phantasy landscape
(including burning villages ?), over which the credits are being displayed.
At the end of these, the music starts to get real hectic and on the screen,
you see a wireframe 3D-object with a line-based motion blur effect over a
"Falcon Contribution"-logo. The 3D-object moves around for a while, bouncing
on the edges of the screen, but is soon to be replaced by another bouncing
3D-object over a black screen that is made up of either coloured blobs or
bobs, that's hard to tell. The b(l)obs rotate around the y-axis as well and
when they move off-screen, they are being replaced by other-coloured
b(l)obs.
A more classical Falcon effect is coming up by showing a tunnel, featuring a
very flower-full texture and an Atari-logo made up of dots in the middle,
which rotates around several axis. As the tunnel is slowly removed, the logo
keeps rotating until a graphic fades up, which shows a "Kendo"-like
equipment.
The helmet has a very large Atari-logo on it and the wallpaper in the
scenery behind it says "1993" and "2003". This theme is repeated in the next
screen as a silver Falcon, sitting on a silver stick, is built on screen,
looking a bit like an award-trophy and also saying "10 years Falcon". The
left and the right part of the screen are then filled by a lot of red and
blue b(l)obs that seem to bounce and/or rotate around the X-axis in a very
shower-like fashion.
When this effect is removed from screen, the screen is being filled by a
colourful bird sitting in a tree that has the word "Cruor" sketched into it.
After a while, this picture is removed, too, to make way for the final
effects: Several 3D objects, Gourraud-shaded, are being displayed over a
moving background-pattern: A cube in blue, a pyramid with several little
holes in it in gold and The "End"-logo in red. Sadly, this part features no
music.
After a long winter sleep, the people from Cruor went to the Error in
Line-party, sat right next to the Paranoia-guys and at least from my side,
it was a fun weekend next to the Cruor-guys. They gave this demo into the
competition as their first sign of life and i certainly hope, they will stay
with us some more time.
Some of the effects displayed here were obviously written before their long
winter-sleep. All of the effects are CPU-based and slightly old-fashioned,
but then again, movement on screen is always fluent.
Also, the demo could have done with a bit more design but it has obviously
been finished in a hurry. I also remember the "CPU-boat" Gourraud-shaded 3D
object that has been left out in this version and was replaced by rather
standard 3D-objects. Transitions between some screens show that the idea
behind the transition was a really good one, but that the technical
realisation would have required far more time. Like the dot-based Atari-logo
that surely should have "transformed" into the Atari-logo on the
Kendo-picture following.
However, as a first sign of life, this demo is really not a bad start. It
runs on unmodified as well as modified Falcons thanks to Evil's
demo-engine, it features 3D-effects as well as classical 2D-effects and
features a well-fitting soundtrack, too.
This demo will most probably not lead the "best demo"-lists for the next
couple of months, but it's nice to see that the guys from Cruor are back and
are - hopefully - going to stay some more time. This demo primarily shows
that they're alive and haven't forgotten about the Falcon.
Maybe the next demo will already show how quickly they're catching up with
the current Falcon demos. The potential is certainly there.
The Paranoid
Paranoia
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