Interesting... for Floyd fans!,  Wednesday, 09 April 2008 This is an interesting Demo. Based on the Pink Floyd album, The Wall, this production interprets the album via sampled music and digitized artwork taken directly from the album, mixed with the group's own ideas and graphics. It uses a number of different graphic styles, with some working, but others looking a bit too basic.

The biggest criticism though is how long winded this whole production is. Some sections make you wait over a minute for them to load, and then only last a few seconds. And for a production that comes on 6 disks it doesn't seem to contain enough to warrant such a big release. I've seen demos with much more content spanning just 2 disks. They obviously used a lot of digitized graphics and sampled sound which quickly eat into their storage space.

It doesn't really use any special effects that stand out, although the number of fields used within some sections is nicely done.

It is worth watching at least once, especially if you are a fan of the album.

 Visually outstanding!,  Wednesday, 26 March 2008 I've just watched this production for the first time in ages and have to say that it is now back up there among my favourites again. The quality of the graphical effects are really outstanding and all of the scenes gel well together and make this well worth watching. I would also recommend you take the trouble to run the proper demo on an Amiga or via emulation rather than just viewing the video we have included here as it is much nicer to see than the low resolution video can show.

This demo centres around particle, light, reflection and refraction effects, mixed with some nicely textured 3D objects, that are blended well throughout the whole production and used to create some nice graphical effects within each scene, as well as during transitions between different parts of the production.

I especially like some of the parts from around the middle of this production starting when the word "Pulse" is brought into the screen using a blue and white particle effect, and then explodes back out of the screen again. Then followed by a very nice abstract moving ball and then onto the splitting of images in a familiar but well done tiled effect leading on to a 3D translucent face. All very nice.

If there is one part of the production that slightly lets it down for me it is the music. Mainly because I've never been a big fan of drum and bass style rhythms, but I suppose the music does work with the production quite well all the same.

So overall this is a highly polished production with some very high quality effects used to create a visually outstanding end result.

 We owe this program a lot!,  Thursday, 06 March 2008 Sculpt 3D started life as some code written by Eric Graham, used to create the first ever Amiga demo production called The Juggler, which was used to show off the capacities of the Amiga at its launch (This animation can be seen above in the media section of the page). This was the first time that ray traced graphics and animation had been seen on a home computer, rather than a powerful mainframe, and due to the immense interest this animation generated, the full 3D application was programmed and released later in 1986.

Sculpt 3D became the first 3D Ray Tracing package for the Amiga, beating TurboSilver to market by 3 months.

I never had chance to try out Sculpt 3D back in the day due to cost, but using it today it is easy to see that the package was easy to use and intuitive. This might be due to me being familiar with modern 3D packages, but everything is straight forward and easy to find. The interface is uncluttered and by today's standards quite minimalistic. The different orthographic viewports are fully movable to resize and arrange, which some modern 3D packages don't even allow today.

And the features available for the time when this package was released seem quite good. As with all 3D packages it is never that easy to create something that looks good without time being spent to get good end results. By today's standards the rendered end results will never look that great, but had I been given a copy of this back in 1987 I would have been very pleased and used it a lot to create imagery to be proud of.

Sculpt 3D is not a 3D rendering package that has much practical use these days, but is a great historical reminder of where 3D ray tracing on the Amiga began. Worth loading up just to see what it was all about.

 Christmas Game?,  Wednesday, 26 December 2007 This is an odd little piece of software. It isn't a game at all because it isn't even interactive! This disk boots into Workbench and then launches straight into the software. It begins with a splash screen, and then some quite basic Christmas themed graphics load and you gain control of the mouse pointer. But you can't actually do anything with the mouse pointer other than hold the right button down to access the menu to quit the software. Strange.

This a actually a non-interactive music disk. Once loaded it displays a basic animated image (think Deluxe Paint rotating colour animation), and then starts to play a Christmas Song related to the image, along with scrolling the words for the song up the screen, below the image.

Once the song has ended it then loads a new image screen for the next song and then continues playing the next song with lyrics. I managed to sit through 6 songs before I got bored and quit it.

This would be OK as a little Christmas music disk if it were not for two problems. The graphics are very basic and not very professional, so don't really hold any interest. But worse is the music which is completely chip based and doesn't sound any different to that produced by an older 8-bit system. Sad as the Amiga could have been used to create some nice sounding traditional Christmas songs.

Quite a missed opportunity for a Christmas Music karaoke style disk for the Amiga.

 Good short term fun,  Tuesday, 09 October 2007 The first Zombie Apocalypse game started life as a shareware title and quickly became very popular with many magazines included it on their coverdisks.

This sequel follows exactly the same gameplay as the first, but with improved AGA graphics. These two games are based on the Operation Wolf style shooting game, where you shoot the on screen enemies using a mouse controlled cross hair. The main difference is that the levels in this game are fixes screens without any scolling levels.

As the name would suggest the game features Zombies, with you being the lone human trying to wipe out their onslaught. Each level runs in a similar way, with the zombies shuffling onto the screen and you blowing their brains out. There are different types of zombie, with some just moving from one side to the other, while others will come towards to to attack. If any manage to reach the other side of the screen you lose some health, and the same if one manages to reach and bite you.

Shooting the zombies produces a lot of blood and guts which slowly get spread around the levels floor and by the end of a level the amount of body parts and blood can get quite extensive. So if you don't like violent games with lots of gore I wouldn't really recommend you play this! lol.

Obviously with this style of game you have limited ammo. And as the levels play, extra ammo clips are dropped into the scene and you have to shoot them to obtain the extra bullets.

To begin with it's very easy, having enough bullets to easily clean out the levels, with more dropped and the zombies being slow and not too interested in you. But the levels quickly introduce more varieties of zombie and you are soon trying to shoot a lot on screen at once, making the action frantic and out of control.

This game is great for quick 10 minute blasts some some quick fun, but all of the levels are very similar and other than the different backdrops they don't really contain much variety. This means you will get bored quite quickly, but you will want to play it again and again, just in short quick bursts.