Insight - "KILLER"
- THE DEMO -


__"Killer" was ranked second at The Party Seven. Seen from the technical point
of view it was not inferior to "My Kingdom" by Scoopex and Haujobb. The fact
that we deal only with the second winner must be associated with the
voters' preference for 3D-landscapes instead of nicely animated, but rather
two-dimensioned backgrounds. 3D objects weren't missing nevertheless.
Like "My Kingdom" and "Elektroboy", "Killer" is a multiload demo consisting of
different files in different directories. You get the whole thing started
by executing the batch-file "Killer.exe" via Shell or Workbench.
The demo itself requires at least 8 Megabytes of your Fast RAM, having an
030 in your machine isn't a bad thing either.
__The demo begins with a credits part: Some kind of big "wheel" keeps
turning, while in the inside the credits fade in and out; nice
alpha-blended b/w pictures are also to be found in the center of the wheel,
reminding me of the fifties. This and the following two scenes were
technically performed via realtime calculated displacement map with
environmentmap and flatshade (according to Case).
__The credits go as follows: Code by Case, Sly and Hmd, graphics by Destop
and Louie, music by Yolk and Legend.
__What follows afterwards looks like a texture tunnel with a morphing
env-object in the lower left corner of the screen. In front of all this the
Killer-logo appears on screen, beautifully drawn and somehow similar to the
logo of the Elektroboy-demo. Then some other envmapped blobs rotate in the
middle while nice-drawn hands move in from the right and left screen
corners, until they stop in front/behind the blobs.
Now we see the first girl in a row of many others throughout the demo. Her
head has been replaced by an old-fashioned typewriter while some gouraud
flashing takes place in the background.
__What we see next is a weird composition of images (including women again)
with a vividly moving and blurring background, with vector bubbles flying
around for example. Then a texturemapped object with light-rays going out
from it blinds the observer's eye, directly followed by an effect similar
to the second-last one, with a rotating cube on the screen this time.
__Again some hands cover the screen, while a transparent polygon object
appears and flares fly around. Then another morphing blob continuously
changes shape on the left side of the screen, whereas on the right we find
a girl again. The whole scene is backdropped with a tunnel effect similar
to the one at the early beginning of the demo. Some flares are added as well.
The following scene contains an environmentmapped spikeball on the left, in
the background a tasty nude body, and a transparent object on the right,
overshadowing another image of two humanoid bodies.
__Afterwards the portrait of a Negro kept in blue colors fills the screen,
A blue twirl takes place in the foreground, and again the flares are not
missing. Then a disturbing noise and a colormix as if we had a dead TV
channel in front of us wipes away the picture.
Later a huge morphing object and the body of a woman are posed in a way
which make you think there's some substance bursting out of her stomach.
__Another twirl with flares follows, then a keyboard moves from above into
the screen, while some blurring takes place in the background ("4th degree
fractal delay with noice calculation" - I asked Case about it).
In the end another picture is displayed, showing a clown-a-like picture,
with flares coming out of the middle again.
__Throughout the whole demo a pleasant ambient/jungle vibe accompanies all 
effects. The quality of the graphics is very good, the color palette contains
a lot of metallic and also pastel colors, which creates in connection with
the music a cool, moody atmosphere.
__Although code, music and graphics are very good, there are no real
innovations concerning the technical side of the demo. The only thing which
can be called innovative is the style. Indeed this aspect struck me most
when watching the demo. I've already seen other releases pointing at the
same stylistic direction as "Killer" does, so maybe we have to do it with a
new trend here, which is about to dominate the scene for a while.


by Bytebreaker (c) Insomnia'98