Review: "deities" by MFX (Adok/Hugi)
I admit not having watched many demos by MFX so far, but after seeing this one, I've decided that I'll "fix" that as soon as possible. In my eyes the Finnish MFX is an avantgarde group: their demos are not only sophisticated from a technical point of view but they also have a (usually somewhat diffuse) message, and there is one thing one clearly notices: these people are anything but beginners. When seeing an MFX demo you quickly realize that these people have already overcome the phase when you want to show off with your abilities. Their demos contain a lot of blurs, noise and anything but attractive models; yet they cannot be called ugly on purpose. I'd say MFX are the masters of layers and flashes. It may be these two elements their demo deities, the winning entry in the Breakpoint 2006 demo competition, is living of.
In 5 minutes and 10 seconds, we are told the story of several
ugly creatures - a kind of trematode, a fish and a creature with tentacles - and some flying objects (probably space ships). The demo starts with a loading screen in which the credits are displayed. A goa-ish imagine zooms in and music of a similar style begins to play. Action on screen commences fast; all the time colours are fading (which sometimes interestingly results in the dominance of colours resembling the standard palette of good, old mode 13h). Many layers are displayed at the same time and the screen is full of noise. In addition, especially later in the intro, the screen is blinking, as the current scene gets interrupted by a flashing picture of another scene; sometimes it even looks as if several scenes are presented at the same time. (You'll understand me better after seeing the demo yourself.) First the camera is following the aforementioned trematode until it breaks through a wall, then it transforms to an even less
beautiful (to put it euphemistically) fish swimming through some kind of channel. All of a sudden we get to see a war scene with three strangely shaped flying objects looking somewhat fish-like themselves. One of these objects hits the camera and we see blood spreading on the left part of the screen. Now comes a tunnel which looks as if one had moved the "contrast" controller in Photoshop far too much to the right. The music now sounds weird, it kind of "squeezes". Then the flying objects appear again. One of them is hit by a missile, which results in a grandiose explosion. The next scene is about the fish again, which is now desparately struggling to escape from the tentacle monster but is finally caught and hold back. The screen flashes, the speed of action increases rapidly, and finally, a switch to a completely different scene occurs. It looks like a mini Stonehenge. The music has also grown much calmer. From the center of this mini
Stonehenge, a tree is growing up to the sky. Then the credits are displayed again and the demo stops.
In my opinion, this demo is a masterpiece and deserves its high rank in the charts. Although even this demo could be improved; for example, the goa image at the beginning is probably not the best one could imagine.
Adok/Hugi