This article contains reviews of four demos/intros made by North American
groups that have been released in 1997 so far.  Three took place at demo
competitions, but only two have been released so far.

"Caustic" by Beyond
Released: February 1997 (not publically released)
  Since the 'organizer' of this group is of Polish descent, he thought it
would be nice to release something at the General Probe 3 party.  Caustic
is a 64k intro featuring, tah dah, realtime raytracing.  Well, it has been
done my MFX before, but not in this hemisphere :).  Like Transgression 2,
caustic uses a 320x400 "fake 18-bit color mode" by using RGB triplets.
(unfortunately, my screen cap TSR only supports 320x200 so I could only
capture the top half of the screen during the intro)
  Anyway, the intro starts with a colorful tunnel effect and a polar 
rotations fading between each other.  Then there are a couple raytracing
scenes - the first has some arches and the second has a flower object.
This is followed by greets over a background of overlapping RGB patterns,
then the intro concludes with a series of scenes with raytraced balls 
reflecting over a pool, switching colors.  The only complaint is that
because it is realtime, the raytraced scenes are hard to make out.  Although
one would expect that as seen in TGR2, it is a little worse in this intro.
Nevertheless, it is a fine effort, and I'm rather surprised it did not place
in the top 5 at the GP3 intro compo.

"Kick Ass" by Lumental
Released: March 1997
  There are two version of this intro - one around 80k, and one under 64k
with slightly lower quality music.  It starts with a couple cartoon figures
and the title logo, with a silly 'animation'.  Then there are some words
applied with a water/fluid dynamics effect.  This is followed by, ugh, a
3ds duck, but it chnages from phong shading to cross-hatched 'pencil'
shading, looking very much like the scene from 'Paper'.  Then there are some
greets with a light blur effect, and a strange fire-like effect with icy
colors, that's a little hard to explain.  
  The code and music are by Hornet (the guy not the group :), with a little
help from The Humanoid.  The gfx (title screen) is by Annihilatus.  Well,
it's nice to see a half-way decent intro not released at a party.  It shows
that this new group should have at least some kind of devotion to more 
releases in the future.

"Esperflow" by Miracle
Released: April 1997 (not yet publicly released)
  Miracle easily won at the small Spring Break party with this demo.  They
originally planned to have one called 'Kittania' ready at this time, but
instead made a large 'dentro' of sorts.  Still, Esperflow is certainly not
short on effects or design.
  It starts out with a title pic in 50Hz video mode, then a group of 
kaleidoscopic circles spinning around with the group logo on the side.
<see "esper01.pcx"> The title then scrolls by and rotates on what is 
actually a gigantic textured cube, which crossfades with a swirling feedback 
of the title and credits. <see "esper02.pcx"> The next part is a polar 
swirl with many fast moving colors flowing outward in a star pattern.  This 
part then _decays_ while the next part starts, a 3d city scene covered by 
arches. <see "esper03.pcx"> The camera flies through, showing a series 
of platforms around the buildings.  There is then a bizarre 'scrambling' 
fade to another 3d scene, with strange textures applied on some more arches, 
a large mushroom-like object and a floating cluster of boxes.  Then there's 
a fake-hicolor plasma with splitting R-B-G, and another polar swirl with a 
texture.  Some greetings follow with a scene containing spinning blurred 
glenz balls. <see "esper04.pcx"> Finally, a vector fat-cat object is 
flashed a few times, previewing the next Miracle demo.
  The best thing about Esperflow might be the transitions.  Almost every
part flows into the next through some effect.  There is a good balance of
2d and 3d, and certainly it is very colorful.  It's hard to comment on the
music.  The beta version had 'The Blue Hippo' by Sandman (a '96 Kosmic
release) which to me seemed to fit the demo very well.  The party version
had a new tune by Nemesis which was timed fairly ok, but seemed to be a lot
'emptier' to me and not as suitable to such a demo.  Grimace has said the
release version might have yet another tune.  Oh well, perfectionism never
hurt anyone in the scene. :)

"Desire" by Kosmic
Released: April 1997
  This is another quick 'KMFTV' demo made by jmX to play along with a happy
hardcore tune made by Bert.  So, it was released at X'97 in Holland, where
it took 7th place in the demo compo.  There are only a few parts.  It starts
out with credits (dark and hard to read), then starts out with a group of
cyan polar waves spinning around each other, causing the 'waves' to merge in
between. <see "desire01.pcx"> At first, a light-bump effect is placed 
upon this while some letters flash in the lower right corner.  Then, the 
waves change to a psychedelic red/blue/green color scheme.  This is followed 
by a single set of polar texture waves which changes its color scheme to the 
beat.  Then comes the greets, done a letter at a time in the center while a 
series of 0s and 1s also spell out the letters in the background.  Then 
there is a spinning arrow which moves around with a zoom-blur, a common 
jmX-effect. <see "desire02.pcx"> The demo ends with a light-bump applied 
on the spinning arrow to create a water effect, with a pixelled "DESIRE" 
logo at the bottom.
  So, it's a very simplistic demo.  But, the music is high quality and the
screen synchronizes well to it, so it serves the purpose.  The single-color
screens keep the demo from looking ugly, and it's nice to finally see a
little bit of pixelled art in a Kosmic demo. :)
          
