Sunray
Sunray was a review magazine from December 1999 edited by ps, with graphics by Saffron of TBL, code by Reptile of Astroidea, and music by Velvet, Manka, Smash, Distance, Nogsf and Falcon (five tunes in total, Velvet and Manka worked on one together). The idea was to review all demoscene
productions that were released in the year 1999. In the end not all productions got reviewed, but quite a lot of them. Some of the reviews are pretty big (several text-pages), while others are very small (1-2 sentences). Most of the productions have also been rated with a value between 0 and 20.
In the main menu there are five sections: Editorial, The Charts, 1999 Demoparties, Music Labels and Others. The editorial is quite interesting as you can learn the story of how this magazine was created. The charts are based on 138 voters and feature the categories demogroups, demos before Assembly 1997, nonaccelerated demos after Assembly 1997, accelerated demos, all-time intros, coders, composers, active 2D graphicians, inactive 2D graphicians, 3D artists, countries and diskmags. It seems like all names that appeared in the votesheets are published in the charts, at least in most of the categories, since also productions that got just one point are listed.
The main section of Sunray is "1999 Demoparties". Here we have a list of the demoparties that were held in the year 1999. After clicking a party, you can sometimes read one or several party reports, but in any case you will get to see the results. The underlined productions are usually, though apparently not always, clickable and will lead you to the review(s). In "Music Labels", it's similar: There's a list of demoscene-related music labels, and you can click them and get lists of their albums or single tunes, which contain links to the reviews. The reviews were written by ps, Seven, Tryhuk and Knos.
Finally, the "Others" section contains a chronologically ordered list of demoscene events in 1999 (parties, diskmags and music label releases) and some other articles on diskmags, online competitions and music disks.
The magazine is presented in a sometimes contiguous, sometimes two-column layout. The fonts are true-type, the paragraphs are usually justified, and the controls work very smooth.
All in all Sunray was quite an ambitious project that was well-executed, though it's a pity that some of the reviews are so short and bear little information. The graphical presentation and the music are very good.
Sunray can be downloaded from scene.org. It has been downloaded about 800 times. The engine is Windows-based and works perfectly on modern PCs.