** Maggie review / 1055 words **
Any Colour You Like
Coded by the Shadows

** ACYL.JPG here **

Poland seems to be bursting with talent and ideas at the moment. The flag bearers of this scene were the Shadows - they burst onto the scene with "Firestarter". They consolidated their position with the excellent "It" demo, which was unlucky enough to face such stiff competition at Siliconvention. But with "Any Colour You Like" (ACYL) they finally walked away with the top prize at the Orneta party.

ACYL is an ambitious effort. Like Sonolumineszenz and Escape's "Sili-Con-Carne" it approaches the demo format in a different way from the rest. ACYL concentrates more on the actual visual appearance of effects rather than their technical merit. This is not a demo aimed at clock cycle counting coders, it's a demo for the people. Like "Lost Blubb", this demo will impress eople who wouldn't know a bump map from a plump cat - MTV fodder.

Although the title holds out the promise of any colour you like the demo begins with dark, drab colours which didn't show up too well on my trusty Atari SC1224 monitor. Some text announcing "Shadows" then ACYL blasts its way onto the screen with a pleasant swirling background followed by the credits displayed over some excellent smokey plasma.

The first "proper" effect now appears. Anyone who has seen "It" will know that the Shadows are great fans of bump-mapping. This time there is a cluster of bobs flying over the lit area creating all sorts of pretty patterns. The bobs look more like glass beads and the overall effect is rather magical.

We now don our miners hats for a rather lively tunnel expedition, scrolling about the screen and going through a succession of atmospheric colour palettes. There is even a big design style strip of splattered colour overlaid over the tunnel.

The next effect is certainly very original. In the background we have a monochrome scanned picture of a motorway and a succession of irregular blob shapes appear over this then sucked into infinity - intriguing.

The next screen has two circular tunnels overlaid on each other and bouncing around the screen, which made me wonder if I was suffering a severe case of double vision.

This if followed by a more straightforward tunnel effect. Unlike the others it doesn't leap around the screen like a demented raver. It just smoothly takes down the hole to infinity. Like Sono, the colours of the tunnel change as you move down it, but the palettes chosen are all very dark and moody.

The next effect is... well, my helpful set of notes say "bump map". Hang on, I'll have another look... (some time passes)... oh dear! I'm still none the wiser. It's some sort of grey bump mapped fadey thing - will that do? (Ed: You're sacked!) Looking more closely I see it's some sort of bump mapped motorway scene - anyway it's a nice effect which perhaps they should have concentrated more on.

Guess what's next? Yes, another tunnel effect! This time the colours are much brighter almost garish. The tunnel edges distort into a star type shape and back again.

Next we have a plasma type effect with two circley type things that seem to attract then repel each other, again these are nicely done.

It's getting harder to describe now! We have what appears to be some sort of tunnelly type rotzoomy thing with a nice bright star shaped white light in the centre which zooms up to cover most of the screen then zooms out again - one of my favourite on the demo, if only I could describe it!

It's time for the 3D world! Well its more a collection of 3D objects than a world per se, but its one of the few examples of multiple texture mapped objects on the falcon. Unfortunately the "plot" behind the world is quite poor. An object flies through a torus, flies around a cube and then decides to go through it (a good time to show off the z buffering).
We've seen some quite interesting 3D worlds in Falcon demos (my favourite being the robot shoot out in the Digital Chaos/Avena Fried Bits 3 demo) but this isn't very exciting. The textures themselves are drab shades of brown. Speedwise, compared against the likes of Avena and EKO it's a little slow. To do this sort of effect impressively you really need to hammer the DSP.

Moving along swiftly we get a very straaaange picture to wrap the demo. A very oldly drawn person and a duck stare out into the camera. Like Niko, the artist certainly has a unique style and it surely won't be long before everyone starts imitating him. And that's where ACYL ends.

The music is absolutely superb, a very atmospheric track, bordering on the ambient at times with some very large beats kicking in to jolt your senses. It fits very well with the style of the demo.

The effects are not timed to link with the music and the effects all seem quite disparate - a screen is loaded, we see it, the screen goes black for a bit and the next effect appears, with no presentation between effects.

If The Shadows want to become the number 1 demo crew on the Falcon they'll have to pay a little more attention to details such a presentation and music timing and shove some of the more polite effects in your face more. Overall this a brave and fascinating demo with a brilliant soundtrack.

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Mr Pink / RG
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Technical view

Shadows go from strength to strength - it's a shame they've split when they were on the verge of creating something really outstanding. The graphic design and music are excellent; it appears to take inspiration from some PC demos doing the rounds at the moment.

The main problem is that the Falcon really wasn't designed to do a demo like this well. The table effects and overlaid graphics require both a large amount of pre-processing and memory movement. 

The pauses between effects while the next part is loaded and unpacked can be avoided by combining effects in memory and better underlying code design would have helped. But these are fairly minor niggles - overall one of the best Falcon demos in recent times.

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Tat
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