Zine

By Adok/Hugi


Zine was originally an Amiga diskmag released by the Swiss group Brainstorm. It appeared in 1989 and faded away after 11 issues. The group Brainstorm was revived in 2006, and shortly after that, they decided to make Zine again. Zine #12 and #13 have been released for Windows. The main editor of these new Zine issues is Axel of Brainstorm. The new Zine issues can be downloaded from the Brainstorm website.


Zine #12

Zine #12 was released in August 2007. The engine was coded by Smash of Fairlight. It features a title picture by Facet of Brainstorm, interface graphics by Critikill of Brainstorm, and music by Virgill, Lizardking, Radix and Scorpik (all of these musicians are famous names associated with the 1990s era).

The interface of Zine #12 is quite unusual: It revolves around some 3D objects which you can rotate with the cursor keys. By rotating them, you select the section and the article you want to read. On my PC, the movement of the mouse cursor is quite

slow, which is slightly annoying. The articles are displayed in a three-column layout on a nearly white background. The layout is fancy, there are true-type fonts, justified and centered paragraphs, subheadlines and graphics inside the articles. It's possible to zoom closer to both the texts and the

pictures. The transition effects when flipping pages are interesting, even though they may be a bit disturbing after a while.

Zine #12 consists of the sections Editorial, Features, Intel Competition Round-up, SIGGRAPH Round-up, and Articles. From the Editorial section, a little article about the history of Zine on Amiga is worth mentioning. In the Features Section, the most striking article is the Lifeforce Development Journal by Navis of ASD. There are also an article about the making of Desert Dream on C64, a 4 kb intro coders' round table and background information on the Bitfellas website. In the Intel Competition Round-up section, we are confronted with interviews with the participants of the 2006 and 2007 editions of the Intel demo competition, and there's also an interview with a representant of the Intel Corporation. The highlight from the SIGGRAPH Round-up section is the interview with Paul Debevec, a professor of computer graphics who is famous for his work on HDR. He is also the creator of some HDR images which have even been used in demos by Plastic.

The biggest section is the actual Articles section. It consists of several sub-sections: Interviews, Reports, Discussion, Reviews and Development articles. There are interviews with Purple Motion, kb, Amusic and Preacher. The Reports sub-section contains, among other texts, an article about the FMX film festival and a Horde party report. The Discussion sub-section has been of less interest to me. The reviews deal with demos for PC and ZX Spectrum (one of these articles is written in the perspective of a game journalist), graphics and music. Finally, the Development sub-sectin features making-of reports about Sprite-o-Mat, Angelic Forum and Rebellion. Moreover, there is a tutorial on Shaders, and in another article, Pirx talks about 256 byte intros.

All in all, this issue is quite nice for a quasi-first issue. Not too many articles have managed to catch my interest though. Several articles are also quite small, which is a pity. Also, I don't like the interface, it's too gray in gray and too slow.


Zine #13

Zine #13 was released in February 2008. It features a new interface, which was again coded by Smash of Fairlight, and contains graphics by Critikill of Brainstorm, who also created the title picture this time. The music was made by Keito, Skaven, Gloom and Little Bitchard.

The interface is more intuitive than in the previous issue: After the title picture you get to a screen where you can change the settings and select the music. If you want to read the articles, click "Articles" and the main menu will zoom in, where you can choose the section: Editorial, Features, Backstage, Reports, Opinion

and Technical are the names of the sections of Zine #13. The layout of the articles is even fancier than in Zine #12. The backgrounds are now not all white, but various colours appear in different articles, which makes Zine look like an artsy paper-mag. Unfortunately the fonts are quite blurred and thus the texts are not perfectly easy to read.

In the section "Features", there are two articles about the Scene.org Awards 2007 including the nominees. Since Zine #13 was released one day before the nominees were officially announced at the Scene.org website, this might have been of interest for some of the people who downloaded Zine #13 on the day of its release. There are also three articles related to the Demoscene Outreach Tour, the trip to San Francisco where Gargaj, Gloom and Steeler visited some IT companies to deliver a speech about the demoscene for the employees. One of these articles is an interview with Rick Sayre of Pixar.

The Backstage section features making-of reports on Candystall and Stiletto, as well as interviews with Keito and Skaven, two of the musicians who composed the tunes used in this issue of Zine. There are also an article about Kefrens and one about the BitJam podcast in this section. The Reports section features an article called "The Demoscene in Modern Games", written by Bobic. It is an update of an article that was first published in Pain #58; it's a list of game companies where sceners are working. Other articles deal with the Austrian demoscene outreach organization [d]vision, Siggraph 2007, the Norwegian scener Zeila, a pub meeting and Aesemoon's demoshows in Canada. The Opinion section contains the review of Chris Hülsbeck's CD "Nine" and various demo reviews (in the eyes of a games journalist), as well as some nostalgic articles about swappers and old demo groups. In the Technical section there are only four articles, which deal with the Amiga Assembler tool Asm-Pro, demos on mobile platforms, porting old demos to current platforms and building one's own music equipment. Except the last one, these articles are more like reports than tutorials, and they're also quite short.

Content-wise, Zine #13 is at the same level as the previous issue in my opinion, it contains some interesting articles and some less interesting ones. Design-wise, it's great that this issue is much more colourful.


Zine #14

More than two years have passed, and Zine #14 has still not been released. However, on the homepage of the artist Antony Squizzato one can find a picture that has been drawn for Zine #14. Maybe the opening picture? The text in the bubble "Not too late!" sounds pretty ironical.

In addition to the Zine diskmag, the staff has made several podcasts with music and talks about the demoscene. They can be found at Bitfellas.


Adok/Hugi