DT 01 en 15
From C64 Diskmag Wiki
+__________________________________ __+
| XX IN REVIEW: x-dome #09 |
| XX IN REVIEW: x-dome #09 |
| __________ |
| |
| _ released by: ROLE |
| _ releasedate: 99-07-01 |
| _ runs under : YES |
| emulator? |
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Arman/Role recently released the second issue of his mag X-DOME in English language and as the old X-DOME fanatic I still am I couldn't hold myself back from taking a closer look at this issue of course. So let's start! ........................................ _ TECHNICAL REMARKS ___________________ Hm, does X-DOME work together with cartridges or not? Good question! Sometimes it indeed does and sometimes it does not! But in order to read through the whole magazine in one flash without reseting your c64 all the time
you really should follow Arman's hint mentioned in the directory and turn off all your cartridges, REU expansions, SCPU's and so on. The magsystem features a quite fast build in software speeder however. In contrast to former (german) issues, both the keyboard- and joystick controls are now working 100%. _ THE INTRO ___________ There is no intro this time, so nothing more to tell here.
_ THE INTERFACE _______________ The main menu picture pixeled by VIP/ ROLE looks a bit strange in my eyes, it seems to me, gold old VIP mixed up a bit too many different styles this time. However the big "X D" Logo underlayed by a stone-like background pattern looks quite great, the contrast in colours was well chosen. The really "strange" part of VIP's picture are the icons representing the four main groups of chapters the mag is divided in, because you really can't recognize which icon is representing what! Of course you can find it out
quite easily with one single click, but I guess creating some maybe a bit more suitable icons wouldn't have been such a great afford, would it? Would you e.g. imagine a girl with a vibrator standing for the "Editorial"? I guess not! The text viewer comes with a huge and colourful "X-Dome" logo in great shapes pixeled by TMR/ONSLAUGHT/COSINE, its background is kept in dark gray, the chars in light grey, so a rather good reading comfort is guaranted. The status bar placed directly under the logo is rather useless I'd say,
but of course my opinion must not always be right! Just see for yourself. All in all the outfit deserves a rating of 06/15 points, I'd say. _ THE CHAPTERS ______________ These are naturally the most important part of every discmag, so let's take a closer look at them: As already mentioned some lines above the chapters are divided in four main cathegories. Let us call them "Editorial", "Demoscene
Forum", "Miscellaneous" and last but not least "Party Tales". The EDITORIAL Section comes up with a long Leading Article written by Arman, in which he mainly tries giving people some more or less important tips in how enjoying reading almighty X-DOME and so on. Yeah, very intereresting... The second part of this text deals with gerneral information about the X-DOME Staff, Credits and so on. Altogether this is not what I would call a good preface for a c64 magazine, unless you're a ROLE-Member of course!
Reactions contains two individual reactions on issue #8 by RORSCHACH/ PADUA/NO-NAME and a guy called TUISKO STEINHOFF (never heard of him) and several answers on general questions to the editors. Nothing special here, just a chapter nearly every mag nowadays has, I believe. The Adress List has become quite a small one this time, this surely depends on the low annount of snail sheets that got spread with issue #8. OK, so much for the EDITORIAL.
The DEMOSCENE FORUM covers a large annount of different kinds of information about the latest happenings in our scene. The News Part has become quite a big one this time, most of the really actual and varied news on the latest incidents in nearly all active nowadays scene groups got supplied by MacGyver/ DMAGIC, a name that stands for nothing than quality for sure. Next is Charts, with just 17 votesheet fillers this time, due to some mistake the staff made by spreading the sheets.
Yeah, things can only get better... No further comment here. This issues Scene Poll deals with the situation of todays mag scene. It got spread by Arman via E-Mail to some chosen guys (what about making public scene polls, dude?) and the majority of its fillers still regard the mag scene as mega-active and are more than satisfied with the annount of mags getting released these days. Well, I guess you don't have to be Albert Einstein to realize that this cannot be the case, but if you look at the fillers names you might understand.
What the heck do people like MR. SEX, FUNGUS, FANGORN, etc., whose only activity seems to be hanging around in #C-64 IRC know about the situation of todays mag scene? Nothing, because they're simply not involved in this field! Sorry Arman, but you asked the wrong guys about the wrong topic! You can't just surf through #C-64 picking some guys you think are known enough for you and your mag profiling yourself and leaving the entirely topic behind! It really seems to me that Arman just wanted to have some popular names in his magazine, his attitude should be clear...
The Profile of Nastiness, Inc. I guess, there nobody who does not know the name of the former main editor of the legendary Tribune Magazine. Although I really cannot see much sense in interviewing persons who left scene long time ago and have no connection to todays scene any more, this interview really contains some very interesting thoughts not only about scene business. So it's really worth reading after all. Magreview Number 1 starts with a list of all(?) magazines that got released from November of '98 till July of '99. Quite an unusual way to start such a chapter,
why not simply putting this list into the Newsflash? At least one mag, namely Dimension Issue#2 with the releasdate of June 29th 1999 is missing in this list, so be careful with the phrase of "all". After Arman is finally finished with his blabla about active mailscene (yeah, maybe back in 1998, but...) once again, he decides that it's now time for starting with the first review of non other mag than Dimension Issue#1 by Tempest. The review itself could have been a bit more detailed in some ways, also style and use of language cannot be classified as originla or brilliant.
Just look at phrases like "(...)under the lead of the maineditor Floyd(...)" or "(...)during the whole magazine a nice Dimension Logo by JB is filling the right side of the screen (...)" which are neither grammatically correct nor do they represent a good piece of journalistic style. Objectivity is surely given in this review, but it's quality and style that are missing! Magreview Number 2 deals with Xenoglossy Issue #2 by Banshee. No further comment here, just look at my remarks above, because here it's just the same...
Mags Today happenes to be some sort of "Arman's Guide to Magazine Galaxy". It comes up with a list of all magazines "alive" today. Well, I don't think you can call mags like "Driven", "Nitro", "Propaganda", "Relax" (hahahaha!), "Vandalism News", etc. "alive" any more better phrases would be "delayed like hell" or even "dead" (in case of "Driven" and "Relax" (which got NOT released under the label of Oxyron, dear Arman, but PHUTURE) this one surely is the right choise. However the guide also features a second list with so-called "important" mags that died in the course of the last
couple of years. Hm, the question is, do magazines like "Adwarp English" or "Necropsy" really fit in here? I and also many other people do not think they ever played such an important role in the mag scene after all! The last article in this forum is called The Party 8-Music Review (hm, was there just one tune released in Aars?) and it's supplied by ABBADON/DAMAGE. All in all his reviews are nothing special. The only critical remarks that could be mentioned here are that he in some (not all!) of his reviews could have gotten a bit more into detail,
also it would have been a rather nice idea playing the tunes both on old and new SID in order to point out the differences in quality, e.g. concerning RAYDEN's tune! These things meanwhile should be standard in every party music reviews, shouldn't they? MISCELLANEOUS features articles dealing with topics from in- and outside the scene. The C64 XXX Report is supposed to be some kind of "review" of several C64 Erotics GFX Collections. This article is simply pure trash with no sense in it
at all and a pure catastrophe both in language and style! It reminds the reader of the good old XDOME german times immediately, when such articles were published in every single issue! #C64 Everyday Life just contains a (platin old) logfile from #C-64. Well, better check out the IRC yourself! But anyway you get here some really good tips on what you should definately NOT do in #C-64, unless you'd like to be kicked and banned of course! Arman however seems to have confounded #C-64 with #Erotic somehow, hasn't he?
Role Diaries is surely one of the biggest articles in the entire mag, telling the complete group history of the known belgium crew from its very beginning till today, written in the form of a diary. It's really interesting to read such a detailed profile of one of the oldest and still active groups in our scene. The article would have been even more perfect without the catastrophal English in some passages and the strange change of point of views (although it is supposed to be a diary, there are several passages written in the third person point of view and then suddenly COMMANDER, the author, suddenly
becomes a first person narrator again. There are also several remarks by OCHRANA placed in brackets in the course of whole article which are are little bit disturbing, I'd say. Next is an Advertisement on the new SID COLLECTION CD by XENOX/AFL'70, taken from the internet, followed by an article by OCHRANA dealing with different aspects of the Millennium problem. Although the article itself is quite detailed, it does not bring any new aspects the majority of the readers did not know so before already anyway! The article (or at least parts of it)
are seemingly copied from some computer magazine, at least there are a few indicators for this supposition. In the second edition of his column Taxes or what? COMMANDER compares car taxes in different european countries, coming to the conclusion that car drivers from the Benelux States should better move to Luxemburg. Does this article really feature anything new? Well, that's also the question here! OK, so much about this section.
PARTY TALES! Yeah, this one is really great! It features loads of party results, reports and of course invitations. Party on! Hopefully the staff will keep on their good work with this section in further issues. The only funny thing here is (of course) COMMANDER's Mekka+Symposium 2k-1 party report in really "perfect and brilliant" English. Well Serge, I really cannot remember myself having taken an airplane to get home (as you mentioned in your report). Always remember: It's not "to flee, flight, flight" but "to flee, fled, fled", dude!
If you haven't found out already, a click on the grey and sick looking lady in the middle of the right border leads you into the music menu, featuring four exclusive tunes by AGEMIXER, GLENN RUNE GALLEFOS and DA BLONDIE and some three additonal ones by TRIDENT and TAKI. Well, it's surely not easy judging the chapter's quality of the entire mag. On the one hand we have the brilliant News Part and Party Coverage, but on the other hand there is the rest of the articles, whose quality differs from rather good (Role Diaries), average
(Music Reviews) down to lowest pieces of crap (Commodore XXX Report, #C-64 Everyday life e.g.). One aspect which was disturbing me most while reading through the different chapters was the lack of affort the maineditors ARMAN and COMMANDER put on style and language. OK, you judge X-DOME as a second XENOGLOSSY (the mag by Banshee) with spelling mistakes in every second line, BUT if there is one thing that needs to be improved in furher issues than it is definately the use of the English language!
The annount of crap texts also could be reduced a bit, replacing these by quality articles dealing with topics the sceners are really interested in! Sorry dudes, but any rating of more than 07/15 would have been a rather bad joke! _ TEXT LAYOUT _____________ The mag features a 1x1 characterset done by my old buddy SHRI SADHU/EX-WILLOW. Everyone who knows Michael's charsets knows that they stand for quality and readable chars and lots of special
characters and so does this one. Although it's surely not the best one Michael ever did and the fact that (especially in the bold mode) some letters are sometimes a bit hard to read due to the fact that the chars are maybe a bit too small, it is still absolutely readable and fits into the whole magazine (which is quite an important aspect in my mind). The quality of the layout itself differs from chapter to chapter. On the one hand we've got well structured and sorted News and Party Coverages, but on the other hand also very unstructured
articles with loads of layout errors in it such as some of the reviews or the Mekka+Symposium 2k-1 partyreport by Commander/Role for example. All in all I think that the editors made much too less use of all the special characters their character set offers them in order to pop up the whole layout a bit. Sumed up you can say that the text layout surely is not bad but also nothing special indeed. So just an average rating of 07/15.
_ SO WHAT...? _____________ X-DOME #9 features some highlights but also lots of crap that better should have been left out. Also the mag is a bit too much Internet- orientated in my eyes. Leaving the snailmail scene out nearly completely, time will show how long this is gonna work properly (I guess you all remember the spreading mistake in connection with with the last issue, don't you??) Talking about Internet, that's also the source most of the quality chapters in this issue came from! The editors
afford of writing quality articles by themselves at least can't be rated as extremely high after all. To put it in simple words, X-DOME on this level is an average mag, mainly ment to be a forum for #C-64 Visitors and other Netsurfers who like strange textstyles and giving not more than a cent on quality language and style, as these two things definately cannot be found in this mag, at least not in the two english issues that got released so far. The future however is open for everything of course!
_ FINAL RATING ______________ Intro..............................+++++ Interface..........................06/15 Chapters...........................07/15 Text Layout........................07/15 OVERALL............................07/15 ======================================== _______________________________SCORPE___
