Release Review for Senseless

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!All About Senseless
By Various
All About Senseless

Don't Call It A Comeback!?

   The Black Lotus are around for years now. Tint, Goa, Captured Dreams you name it they done it! With TBL's Rain demo from The Party 1999, TBL made a comeback on the Amigascene after a long biogenic wall of silence on the Amiga Scene. The Scene adored it. Weren't we surprised to witness yet another TBL demo in the beginning of the new century. All about Senseless by The Black Lotus. Extra Extra, read all about it!

The Box, You Opened It, They Came

   Senseless isn't just a TBL demo as we all used to know from the glorious TBL history books. Luckly Devotion got a nice little talk with the main coder Rubberduc to ask him some questions on need to know basis :)

Magic:
"When did you start working on Senseless? And how did it finally get released?"

Rubberduc:
"I started to code on Senseless sometime in August last year by putting together some leftovers I had on my harddisk during a couple of rainy weekends. It was never meant to be anything in particular. I also had some graphics I had started on earlier that I thought could suit it so I worked a bit more on that aswell. Everything was more or less finished already long before christmas and Kalms was just supposed to finish the part with the voxelmountain flying in the sky and then we thought of releasing it at Dreamhack but Kalms is a lazy bugger and he didn't finish that part untill after christmas :)"

Magic:
"People say its not a typical TBL demo, I mean it's more focused on the design than on routines what we were used to in previous TBL demos.. Can you give a comment on that please..?"

Rubberduc:
"Well we are quite a few people in TBL and we all have a different style. I wanted it to be a bit minimalistic when it comes to colors and stuff and then Kalms came over to visit me and we wrote some more stuff. For example the voxelscape."

Magic:
"What about the music? No Azazel or Supernao modules this time. Can you tell a little bit about the module(s) used and the musician involved?"

Rubberduc:
"Hmmm Omen did the music. He used to be in Noice and was the musician at the company where I currently worked. He is a great musician and a good friend and besides I met him every day at work." 

Magic:
"To end the questioning, where do you rate Senseless in the list of the best six TBL demos of all times? Could you name the list?"

Rubberduc:
"No I wont.. Senseless is aimed for 060 Amiga's while the other previous TBL demos (except for Rain) aren't and are also not based on leftovers during a short period of time.. The name Senseless sums pritty much up what it is. Routines that no-one thought ever would be used, put together just because it would be fun to do something.."

Review: Senseless by The Black Lotus (By Dr. Dreyer)

   It's a bit hard to review a demo like this one from TBL, as it is absolutely vital to like the style to like the demo itself. Senseless is not about innovative effects, you see, but about design. Well, the effects are nice and nicely presented, but also they have been seen before as it is mostly 3D - phong and wireframe objects. The demo's atmosphere is a bit gloomy due to the fairly dark blue colors used all the way through the show, and in my opinion it gets a bit boring not seeing another set of colors just once in the demo. Seems as if they've chosen "the easy way" by only letting blue being the dominating color. It surely would be harder to put together different colors and make them match, but also more interesting.

   So what do we actually see in the demo? As mentioned 3D, lots of it too. Also, in the beginning of the show, the title and creator's names are shown on some collage-like pictures with lot's of text in the background. The effects are presented very stylish, using effects like transparency and light effects to make it look more interesting, and all of it runs in 1x1 resolution. The drawback about this is that it takes up quite a lot of CPU-time, apparently more time than my '040 has. An '060 does the job though, but it may be a bit out of breath afterwards. One effect that I like in particular is a hilly 3D-landscape with beams of light rising vertically from sources in the ground. Another thing to emphatize the rather dark atmosphere is the music, let's call it industrial newage, that in itself isn't too gloomy, but some parts of it makes it a good choice for the demo. Not least the lazy drumbeat. The music is somewhat timed to the demo, but the timing is not perfect: At one point you see a phong object bounce towards you, but it doesn't move correctly to the sound, seems to be running at the wrong pace.

   If you've seen TBL's previous demo Rain you'll see that the style is much the same. In the readme-file it's said that due to some lazy coder (no names mentioned here!) they did the Rain demo while waiting for Senseless to get finished. This could explain the similarities. So, is it worth anything? Yes, it is. If you're catched by the style you will have a good time the 4.30 minutes this demo lasts, if you don't you can always focus on the seen-before effects, 'cause they are so well made.