A huge demoparty seems to have occurred right underneath my nose. The Mekka Symposium 2002 held in Dresden Germany on Easter must have been an interesting event. Reportedly 20ish people from the Atari demoscene showed up and something rather interesting happened. The Atari demoscene met up with a nice guy named Ephydrena who’s Amiga demo group rallied for him to make an Atari Falcon demo. And Abehn was born and is a result from attendance of Mekka 2k2. I thought this demo was interesting enough that it deserved a review, but shoddy enough that it could never dethrone the awesome Hmmm.
So what’s this demo got to it. Supposedly the demo’s creator wanted to create something that was out of the ordinary for Atari demos. Something that was a bit more loud and noisy than other Atari demos. I definately think it accomplished this. 95% of the demo is only in black and white and features many interesting effects. There’s quite a few sections where some fast moving graphics will leave you lying on the floor in a fetal position shivering with seizures. I’m not sure I’m 100% qualified to really review a demo, or the effects or complicatedness of what is going on underneath. But I will say this. If Ahbehn strives to be different, it has certainly acheived that. If it strives to show the finesse and far reaching talent that we have seen in past Atari scener native demos like Sono and Hmm, it simply fails. I was quite irritated by the weird rez changes and clicking noises between every demo effect. The entire demo felt like a silly patch work of code sections that didn’t belong together. Some of the effects were really cool and others were quite simply lame. Regardless of anything I’ve said here it is a different flavor of demo and something interesting to watch if you have watched a lot of Atari demos. In a situation like this I will give this demo an 8. It could have been better, but it was still pretty good.
Very important to note is that the beginningish sections and the very end are quite high quality. The beginning features a rather innovative (in my mind) credits section and at the end is featured a white winged fuji that flies off into the sunset peacefully. I really thought this was priceless. What could have been perhaps a little more priceless was after the demo ended a small dialog box popped up to inform me that my 16 MHz Falcon achieved a frame rate of just over 15,000 frames per second. I never knew my Falcon could do such impressive things! ;-)
Related Link: Dead Hackers Society