mindcandy dvd review

mindcandy aka demodvd is the result of more than 2 years hard work by dan wright and the ex-hornet staff (trixter, phoenix...). in several discussions they had to select the demos for the first demoscene dvd and i think they made a good job. on one side you will find well known classic demos like second reality, crystal dream 2 or dope. the oldest demo here is the 'megademo' by the space pigs, the newest is riprap by exceed. also the cult demo 'saint' is included. 'kickin' it oldschool' is the right title for this side of the dvd, i'm only missing the demos caero and contrast. the other side contains the newer stuff with demos like 303, wonder, moral hard candy, mikrostrange and le petit prince. the oldest demo here is te-2rb by tpolm, the newest are two demos from the assembly 2001. demos like vip 2 or state of mind are probably because the commercial soundtracks not included. besides the demos you will find a feature about demo graphics with interviews and for each demo there is an audio commentary available. the fans of hidden parts can search for hidden demos and 'easter eggs'.

the first impression is that the whole thing looks very professional. fthr/tpolm made really nice graphics for the case and the booklet. the booklet includes all necessary infos about the featured demos like party, ranking, credits, a small screenshot and a short info about the content. when playing the dvd you should always have in mind that this dvd was realized with a quite small budget and that the makers were not able to buy or rent high end hardware. but probably you won't reach the quality of this dvd with your own hardware except you have a professional studio (and you must be able to run all those old dos demos).

the dvd is mainly made for watching on a tv set and so the impression is not so big when you are watching it on your pc. of course the quality of the dvd can't be the same than running a demo directly from the harddisk. at first you will see the fusecon and hornet logo, then the dvd menu appears. you will always hear some nice music from several well known scene musicians while browsing the menu. the look of the menu is also different on both sides and for the oldschool side they used tracker modules. you can simply begin to play the dvd or select a specific demo from the animated menu. the demos are looking mostly really nice, just some of the old dos demos like crystal dream 2 could be a bit better (but still impressive on a big tv screen). that's the tribute to the complicated capturing process and the lack of expensive hardware. sometimes you have a small border around the picture and sometimes the picture is a bit to big for the screen. no bad words about the sound quality, just the volume could be slightly higher. for each demo you can switch to the audio commentary, but the bad side effect is that you hear nearly nothing from the demo music then. the american english is sometimes a bit hard to understand. the credits of the demos were mostly cutted except they were a real part of the demo or they contained demo effects. to bad that also second reality lost its credits part this way, but for new people the credits are probably not that interesting to watch and there was also more space available for other demos.

the fact that the dvd was made in ntsc format is probably the biggest problem for people in countries with pal standard. i have no dvd player or drive at all and on the quite cheap philips dvd 711 player from my parents i get only a b/w picture. luckily the sound makes no problems, but watching a color demo in b/w isn't really funny. the more expensive dvd player by our neighbors was playing the dvd without any problem, so you should be sure to get a dvd player that delivers a standard pal signal to your tv even when playing a ntsc dvd. of course you should have no problem when your tv set can handle ntsc signals. pc users with dvd drive are of course not affected by this problem.

mindcandy is an awesome dvd for both the longtime sceners and new people to the scene. it's the best way to watch classic dos demos when you are not able to watch them on your own machine and the best way to preserve demo history. but also the users with not so powerful hardware will be pleased with this dvd. for new people it's an excellent way to see what the demoscene is all about and hopefully they'll make the step into the scene. for a second volume it's probably a good idea to make a pal version of the dvd and also the music in the background of the audio commentary should be louder. in general you can clearly see the amount of work which was put into this dvd. saying it with mindcandy: sceners make demos for one reason: because they can.

info & order for asian and european users: maz-sound
info & order for scandinavian users (faster): geekstuff
info & order for the usa and other countries: fusecon