Amber #2 - review

szum.cryogen

A few days ago I jumped onto #polishscene and #pixel, and on both channels I found a topic suggesting to "download Amber#2 mag". The suggestion was right, I just set up the connection with Amber and got the file. The archive had quite a normal length, about 3 megs, but as I had a good opinion of the mag, I guessed that it'd be all worth downloading. I was a little dissatisfied when I found out that the mag featured only one graphic. The mag design is based on the idea that the cover, panels and end cover seem to be the same picture. I think, that Misha didn't have enough time to do more detailed panels. Maybe the Amber editors should think about looking for another graphician. Let someone else than Misha make panels for Total Disaster and Amber, because otherwise Misha has got a monopoly on that. Also I have to admit that Misha did a design based on the same style idea for another Polish magazine, Merge#1. I don't really like that... I like it more to have different panels in every issue, a nice cover done specially by some other graphician, and done caring a lot about details. Especially for an issue's panels. Don't just rip the cover, put some buttons on it, apply some filters, and add transformations on the overall gfx... it's wrong to do this that way. Well... let's look for the panels from a more datailed view... they are quite nice, but (!) the buttons were done by some rendered spheres and put on the text using a standard font. Also the main title of the mag on the lower panel seems to be just a font, nothing special. All in all the panel design isn't ugly but it's not any revelation. The ending cover is a moved and applied greyscaled version of the cover with a red heart and a dedication on the bottom side of it. I'm really curious about if any Turkeys saw the mag, is the Turkish scene alive?

The next thing on schedule is music. The mag features four diferent main modules, and also modules from a 100kb music compo, which I think I already heard in last Total Disaster. I liked mostly the first module by Lluvia, and from the compo pool Traymuss' module seems to be asskicking. Btw, now I know why the mag is so big - the amount of modules is really BIG. :)))

The code didn't crash any time while I was reading the mag, so I guess it's fine. It's based on Total Disaster's engine, so it wasn't a big suprise that it worked. :) The code is a very good point of these mags. I mean of their latest issues, because look at the first TD issue - it can crash many times.

The article section is split in editorials, scene, and bonus. In the scene part you can find some inner sections. There are the TD+Amber compos results, which were already published in last Total Disaster I think, and an article about the new compo edition, so there are: 256b intro with only three entries, 100x100 pixel gfx, where AE took both first places and my friend from Cryogen, Scyzoryk, took 4th place, with one point less than Fuzzy. Next came the 100kb music compo I mentioned before. The article also introduces the new 4kb intro compo...

Next come charts based on with 131 votesheets, quite a big amount of voters. The charts are featuring normal scene categories like demo, intro, graphician, musician, coder etc., and also bonus crazy charts such as best woman, drink and so on.

The scene section of course contains a large amount of English articles about scene matters. Almost all of them were taken from Total Disaster. This scene section also contains seven party reviews. Then we got two invitations, and about three pages of party results... no comments... but for that we have e-magz like DemoJournal... Ah, the news seem to be just cut and pasted from some votesheets, the editors probably forgot that they should be edited too! Overall the article part is quite good, but the editors should work a bit on that, especially get some other guys for correcting and proof-reading. But as it is a mag that comes from Poland, the article section made a big impression on me. Ah... I forgot that the editors also served the readers with seven bonus articles concerning different matters.

szum.cryogen

P.S. I wish all Hugi readers Merry Christmas and a Happy Millennium!