Eon review by Photon/Scoopex
I was asked to write a review of the Revision Amiga Demo competition winner! TBL has previously released for AGA, but in 2019, they turn to OCS.
TBL wants to tell a story using animation.
It starts with a dithered photo montage of a phone call. ‘Earth’ is not answering the call from ‘Home’ – a girl. Then, a space object passes an asteroid field, and there’s an eclipse. The object throws lightning at a dithered picture of a planet scrolling slowly by. The lightning strikes a dithered forest where the silhouette of a dog appears. It steps toward the light. A hundred birds fly in the sky! A dog barking animation is played.
The lightning travels up into space again, and suddenly, against the backdrop of a wet, dithered street, a sine plot effect symbolizes electric magic. The space object is shown in a puddle in another street backdrop of a car in a back alley.
This is disk 1 spent – swapping quickly is expected in order to avoid glitches.
Swapping breaks the current animation and shows another of car wheels, then the alley is shown again, but with the car hovering and lightning striking. Suddenly, a rubber cube effect twists in a different dithered back alley.
The space object now appears in a room, this time electrocuting a girl sleeping in an armchair. Three fake vector animations play to reveal that she is the caller, using a 1980s phone. She is calling the future. 2008, going by the phone in the first scene.
She hovers into the space object. After this, another fake vector animation shows her performing a Qigong-like movement, then freezing in place. Another two animations of her face and two of a man’s face, then they hover to join slowly.
The tryst is not to be, for it is cut off, the previous eclipse reversed, and an end titles picture shown while the music fades out to the sound of the floppy drive motor.
~ THE END ~
TBL has drawn inspiration from the famous SciFi/action movies to tell a story of lost love and time travel, at times using symbols of magic and poetry that match the mood of the music well. Aren’t such stories lovely? Just remember the game intro disks and PD, like Another World and Tobias Richter renders!
But: released as a demo, is it good? When the parts that make some go “Wow!” are animations – presented as effects.
Animation (presented as animation) is lovely. But in a demo context, because animations can fake any effect, without having to make it, optimize, bug fix, or style it, they are suddenly the opposite of impressive.
I believe everyone should create what they want to, and have fun doing it. If the story was the fun and creative part (and with only two effects that’s certainly the case here), then TBL could have made it a Wildcompo release. But per the (minimum) definition of a Demo: “visuals generated by the computer”, this easy exporting of Datalumps(TM) instead became an attempt to make themselves look better than they are and make good demos look bad, relying on fooling most viewers.
So, my review must be that Eon is a cheap, fake release which adds further to the poor reputation of TBL. (No, this is far beyond “cheating, like precalc and tables” – Eon shouts that TBL is utterly uninterested in demo-competing within their target platform by completely side-stepping platform performance. Put another way: if Demosceners are interested in tech, well, the tech behind Eon didn’t make it to the target platform. Because it was prepared before on another platform, then exported as data to play back.)
But if we are big, we shouldn’t have to take sides and force ourselves to love or hate fakers but solve the problem, and again let it be about creativity! If a few groups have the M.O. of, and find their mojo in Presenting Animation As Effect, let’s create a category akin to Executable Graphics, where everyone can do their thing and compete?
Amiiigaaah
eon released 2019 by The Black Lotus. Image ref: emoon/TBL, https://tbl.nu, access: 231223
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