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demo or die! - dvd review

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'demo or die!' is a free downloadable demo compilation by abyss. on actually three dvd's it contains some of the most popular pc (windows) demos and volume one also an amiga demo: ocean machine by the black lotus. besides ocean machine volume one contains mostly older demos which are running pretty good also on slower computers. this is also the dvd for the die hard farbrausch fans since it contains six demos and intros from the famous german group. also several kewlers demos are on volume one. i have reviewed only volume 2 and 3 since they contain more high end demos for which you need a very fast machine and/or graphics adapter to watch them in realtime (like 195/95 by plastic, iconoclast by asd or meet the biots by portal process). in general 'demo or die!' is a must have for every demo fan and especially for people which can't watch the demos in realtime on their own machine.

there is also a nice looking cover available which you can download from scene.org together with the dvd images. the music for the main menu on volume 2 is by reed richards^fairlight. on volume 3 the music is from man with no alias^synesthetics (demo music from 'instant zen' but with vocals by caroline). the demos were captured with the farbrausch tool kkapture in the highest possible quality.

Demos contained on Demo or Die! Vol.2

for the best impression you should watch the dvd's on a big widescreen tv, but of course every standard tv set or a computer with dvd drive is also ok. you can play all demos at once or select them from the menu. the subtitles option in the menu is a bit confusing. there are no real subtitles with additional information like on the halcyon dvd. instead you are just turning on or off the basic information like demo name, group and ranking at the beginning and end of every demo. the audio and video quality are just perfect like on the mindcandy dvd - sharp picture with excellent contrast at any time. on a fast enough computer you shouldn't have any problem with playing the dvd's but on some (older or cheap?) dvd players you may encounter problems since they are made with a pretty high bitrate of 8 mbit/s (video). on my old medion player especially 'coma' by cocoon and 'death and taxes' by fairlight are making bigger problems (freezing picture for several seconds). on another player everything was ok.

Demos contained on Demo or Die! Vol.3

on volume 2 and 3 of 'demo or die!' you'll find not less than 8 demos from the greek group andromeda software development (asd). volume 3 contains the '... for the masses' series and their assembly 2005 killerdemo 'iconoclast' but here you'll find also some older popular demos like 'legomania' by doomsday, 'i feel like a computer' by melon dezign or my personal favorite 'still sucking nature' by federation against nature. it's always a pleasure to see (and hear) this amazing raytracing demo in it's full beauty :)

maybe a few more demos (especially on volume 3 with only 14 demos) would be nice for the big download, but probably it's not possible with the used bitrate. 'demo or die!' shows also that it's pretty easy nowadays to make such compilations since kkapture is a very useful tool for this purpose.
update: volume 4 is already available!

download: click here (scene.org) and switch to the 'demo or die' directories