PUBLIC HOUSE

The PD scene is a bit quiet at the moment. Every group in the world seems to be beavering away on their 'forthcoming' megademo to the exclusion of all else. So it's up with the shirt-sleeves and time for a quick dip into the alarmingly depleted YS stock of elderly demos.

Megademo
By Graf and Dr DF0
Reviewer: Jonathan Nash

No beating about the bush here, eh? What a far more straightforward world it would be if people adopted the sensible attitude of Graf and Dr DF0. 'Look Marjorie - New Game for the Speccy. That must be the new game for the Speccy.' 'You're right, Wilberforce. And after you've played it, we could go out to Our Local Cinema and watch A Film.' I'll write and I suggest it immediately to my MP.

There's summat a bit odd with Megademo. It's got eleven parts, but the finale is called Part Thirteen. Deucedly strange. Maybe Parts Eleven and Twelve contained military defence secrets, or something. (Please get on with the review. Please. Andy) The demo (sorry, megademo) opens in fine style with a neat pic of a spaceship and a scrolly rotating around the Earth in the background. And just to ensure you get a terrible headache through clever interference with your peripheral vision, there's a madly jumping scrolly in the corner. Unfortunately (and this applies to the demo as a whole) the text is in Czech (or Slovak, or Polish, or whatever. Look, I'm sorry, but I'm a bit of a thicky when it comes to Eastern European languages.)

In quick succession there's a big face which blinks at you, an odd bouncing ball flanked by some pulsating stars, a scrolly which whizzes the letters round in a terribly circular fashion and a square full of pulsing colours. So far, so average. Part Six saves the day with a neat vector demo - you can select a line graphic from a set including geometric shapes, +3 disks, spaceships, tables and the like, then rotate it all over the shop to your heart's content. Pretty smart.

After a brief hiccup with a load of scrollies moving at different speeds (like that bit in NMI 2, but with fewer messages) there's another neat part. You know all those bouncy bars that appear in time to 128K music? ('Vu-meters' is the techy term, apparently.) Well, Megademo has three skulls that sing! Very effective. (Just a pity the tune's a bit crap, that's all.) Part Nine introduces the sine-wave scrolly (so that dates the megademo rather accurately), Part Ten is yet plain old bob demo (aarghh!) and Part Thirteen (see second paragraph) is an art slideshow with some funky digitised pics. (And some crap ones as well, tch.)

Apart from the Vectors bit and the trio of singing skulls, I found Megademo to be a dull affair. There's very little to do, and although some unexpected effect turns up occasionally, on the whole, the sections just don't grab the attention.