Review: Silkcut by TBL
Reviewed by Magic of Nah-kolor
The Black Lotus (read: Kalms, Rubberduc, Louie and co) won again with a smashing Amiga demo! It has been 8 years since TBL's TINT demo - my god, never stop making demos TBL! A loading screen appears which looks like a man standing in front of a bigscreen at a scene party? :) Then the typical white TBL logo appears like in other TBL demo's and then it's on to a new TBL demo!
The demo starts off with an atmospheric sound introducing the makers of the demo while the camera is moving trough a Hall. In the middle of the Hall a huge clock is to be seen while moving around. Very impressive to look at! A door opens and we are in a new hall. At the end of the hall there is a opening with light. Suddenly a train moves along towards the opening. The camera moves forward the train! Wow! Cool!
Next comes a routine involving some ball with spikes that zooms in and out. Then a man figure appears. He looks like a man who is in charge of a circus. He starts to talk and it looks like if he is saying some mean things. Too bad I can't hear what he is saying. The quality of the samples is to poor. Maybe some subtitles would been on place :) Anyway Rubberduc told me that this had been taken from a scene from the movie Gangs of New York so I have to watch that movie soon :)
Up next, a woman going around in circles with ribbon going around in circles with her. The room she is in is quite nice in the background. Again very cool to see! Light is coming from beneath shining up, which also looks cool. Great stuff!
Next scene: WOW! A ride along a mountain. Looks like those mountains from The Lord Of The Rings :) Very impressive! Definitely a cool thing. Is it a animation? :) Doesn't matter - it looks awesome! The camera looks up in the sky and moves away from the mountain. In the air 7 ufo's are to be seen moving next to each other in sort of a circle. How nice! Up next a ride through some tunnel / tube (according to Rubberduc the tunnel had animated textures inside a panoramic cube. But nothing else was animated in the whole demo!) At the end of the tunnel light is to be seen in the colours of... fire!? Think so. Because now we have a shading routine in those same colours. They are moving around and around.
Greetings time. The first greeting is for SILENTS :) (Probably because Blaizer/TSL did the music for Silkcut.) Anyway, nice greetings. Well designed. Two layers. In the background design stuff moving from left to right and in front of the screen the greetings moving from right to left.
Up next some boxes with light moving around in a screen which is very green. Looks nice. Then again those mountains but seen from above moving on top of it. The title of the demo Silkcut is appearing on top of it in black. Rubberduc: "The demo is named Silkcut because we had to give the demo a title still at 7 o'clock in the morning. It doesn't really mean anything." On the other hand someone told me Silkcut is a cigarette brand :)
It's already the end of the demo. Awesome to see though. The music fades out. That's it. The music is ok. I like it but I liked the music in the Mawi and Suspend demo Fluffy Digital Snowflakes, which came 2nd after Silkcut in the competition at Breakpoint 2004, more.
What else to say? This demo obviously won because of the 'WOOOOW' and 'OOW' scenes and routines. The Black Lotus have access to great scenes and they have a good engine. Louie did some great design stuff as well! A great demo! I hope that Kalms/Rubberduc/Louie aren't getting too old for demo making as Kalms stated in the .readme of this demo. Because I definitely want to see a demo from them every year at easter! Raking 9,5 out of 10! (Because the demo was a bit short, and the music didn't stand out that much. Otherwise it was a classic masterpiece soon becoming a legend demo.)
Amiga demos can be watched on PC using an emulator such as WinUAE, which is available at www.winuae.net.