Review of Response by Avalon for the Amiga 1200/4000

Introduction

I wrote a review of this demo back in 2006 for another website. Today I’m revisiting this classic production to write an updated review. 🙂 Hope you’ll like it!

Response was Avalon’s contribution to the Amiga demo competition at The Gathering 1995 in Norway. It was only beaten by Deep from Parallax and CNCD, which is a very nice demo. It’s worth mentioning that Avalon competed with groups like The Black Lotus, Gods and Subacid in the compo.

The guys behind Response are as follows:

• Aragorn (programming)
• Equex (programming)
• Typhoon (graphics)
• Cujo (ray tracing)
• Typhoon (music)

The whole team came from Norway.

It’s impressive that Typhoon composed the music AND created the graphics. Must have been a lot of work!

Requirements

The configuration needed for this demo is simply an Amiga 1200 or an Amiga 4000. No need for any extras at all. You can run the demo from a floppy disk or from a hard drive. For WinUAE users, I recommend getting a DMS or ADF version of the demo, so that you can watch it with a minimum of hassle.

Response

The first thing you’ll notice when watching this demo is quality of the design. It’s awesome! To me it looks like the guys in Avalon spent months and months of fine-tuning and working their asses off to make everything blend well together. Everything you see on the screen is perfectly synchronized to the music. This makes it a beauty to watch. From start to finish, the same style of graphics and music meets you screen after screen. I believe the word “coherent” is appropriate to use here. 🙂

As usual in demo, there are a lot of effects to watch. Response contains everything from the usual texture-mapped cubes (with great pixled textures!) to a plane flying over a landscape. There is one effect I’d like to mention specifically though, since it really caught my eye. I’ve included a picture of it here, so that you can see how it looks for yourself. It does look a lot better in real-time of course. 😉

As you can see, there is a red ball in the center of the screen. A wire frame carpet falls down onto the ball and it reacts with real world physics. Outstanding! The cool thing is that the carpet changes its appearance after its collision with the ball. It’s fun to watch and looks pretty realistic. It’s safe to say that this is my favourite routine in the demo. 🙂

Apart from the neat looking design and the effects, there are some cool pixel art to see as well. Have a look below and you’ll see what I mean:

Great work by Typhoon, isn’t it?

The music in this demo is good. I don’t think it is a tune that I would listen to a lot on its own (perhaps from time to time), but it works perfectly with the demo and that is the most important thing. It’s very atmospheric and can clearly be categorized as demo music.

Verdict

Avalon did a great job with this demo, no doubt about that. With some more technically impressive effects, this demo could have won the Amiga demo compo at The Gathering 1995. The best thing about this production is the design. It’s incredibly well made. Everything you see and hear fits together like a hand in a glove. Excellent stuff. 🙂 Hope you’ll enjoy the demo, I know I did. 🙂

Download

(Aminet) Response by Avalon: http://aminet.net/demo/tg95/Response.lha

(Back2Roots) Response by Avalon: http://www.back2roots.org/Demos/Files/Response%2C1/

Video

For those of you who don’t have access to an Amiga or an emulator, here’s a video of the demo. Hope you’ll enjoy it.