Total Disaster
Total Disaster was a Polish diskmag in the Polish language. One issue, which was named "Total Disaster #Black", had a lot of English articles, too. The main editor of Total Disaster was Misha of Tatanka. Total Disaster can be downloaded from scene.org (more than 600 downloads of #Black together with another location at scene.org) and it will run if you use DOSBox.
Total Disaster #Black
Total Disaster #Black was released on the 2nd of November 1998. It featured a sophisticated engine coded by HeY of Tatanka and Pyshtoff of Tatanka, which supported fonts with a variable width per character and which allowed including images in the texts. The graphical design was done by Misha. The music of this issue was by Graff of Tatanka, Core-nick of Tatanka, Bigyo of Tatanka, and Nobbie of Defect.
There are 850 kbytes of articles in total. Most of them are in Polish, but still there's a lot to read in English, too. There are 57 English texts in total. 21 of them were written exclusively for Total Disaster. The rest was taken from other diskmags that were members of The E-Mag Network, such as Defcon, CFX News, Armor of the Gods, Pain and Hugi, or from the website GFX Zone.
There are the following sections in Total Disaster #Black: Editorials, Publicus, Scene, Hyde Park and Art. Most of the English articles can be found in the Scene section.
One of the first texts inside the Scene section is the news corner. It consists of news the voters submitted. In total, 71 vote sheets were gathered for
Total Disaster #Black, 56 of which come from Poland; that's why there are a lot of Polish sceners and Polish productions on the charts. The categories are coders, demos, graphicians, groups, intros, diskmags and musicians. In each section the 10 best places are listed. However, outside the interface, in the BONUS directory, you can find a text file containing the full charts with everything being mentioned that was voted for.
There are quite a lot of interviews. The exclusive interviews were made with me, Danny, Made, Peachy and several members of Pulse. From The E-Mag Network, interviews with Skal and Shodan were taken. From GFX Zone there are interviews with Unreal, Haplo, MRK and Deckard. The interviews are pretty interesting, there are good questions.
Several articles deal with graphicians. One of them, for example, is a tutorial that shows how to draw an eye using the airbrush tool in a common graphics program. In another article, called "Paper Scene", Nazgul explains how the habit of replacing the covers of C64's 5.25" disks by self-drawn ones developed to a whole sub-scene focusing on paper art and posters. Several scans of some pieces of this kind of art are included in the article, which gives you a vivid imagination about this fascinating scene.
Other articles exclusively written for Total Disaster a party report about The Gravity 1998 and a Spanish scene report.
The Public section contains only one article in English, which is a love psycho-test. The same applies to Art, it's an inner monologue here. In Hyde Park, there are also just a few English articles, e.g. a funny short story about a boy and a frog.
I've really enjoyed the good quality of many articles and the way they are presented in the mag.
By the way: The hidden part of Total Disaster #Black can be found in the music menu. Click the picture, and you can select a secret chip-tune.