POM Baer

POM Baer is a demo for the Nintendo 64 by Kid Stardust of The Secret Force, released on 26 April 1999. It’s pretty much just a bunch of 3D effects placed upon various bitmaps. It was made for the Presence of Mind ’99 competition, where it won 7th place.

You can download the ROM from its download page by using the password icantbaerit.

This is a very simple homebrew demo. The demo progresses very slowly with only four visualistions, the first of which is the TSF logo which is built with puzzle pieces, and is then made to be wavy and embossed with the TSF letters in 3D.

It then continues with a sort of fiery text saying “The Secret Force” surrounding a spinning 3D model with the letters “TSF”.

We then get to the point in the demo where all the greets and thanks appear. There’s nothing really to say about this since it’s pretty much just a list of names.

Kid Stardust TSF

The Secret Force

Greetings

Rene, Twinsen, Frac, Ste, Major Rom, Nagra, Wildfire, LaC, Jovis, Harter, Actraiser, Sispeo, Zeronine, FX, Nil, Cybo-d, Rudeboy, Jihad, Curtmac, Desmond, Steve, OSI-C1P, Brettb, Immo, Widget, Ego UK, Gilligan, Shroomz, Acid, JL Picard, Maxx, Segmond, Renderman, Cforman, Stan, Lem, Kid, Bpoint, Stumble, Silo, Jeb, Trilili, Placebo, Saska, Titanik, Rip, Redbox, Rbubba, Sneaky, Stage, Rainman, Locke, Netfucker, Cliffi

Thankx##Rene – You knoe for what
my girlfriend – for all
Twinsen – for the yummy stuff
Frac – for the cool logos
LaC – for lacmod
RARE – for being the coolest game-developers on earth

The END

The final section of POM Baer is just an end card with a wavy effect. That’s all there is to it, really.

POM Baer is a visually interesting yet very bare-bones demo in terms of any kind of insight into its development. Usually we can find some kind of interesting story in the readme or the scroll text, but it really does provide nothing at all.

The pacing is also pretty bad. It takes about seven minutes to get to the “the end” screen because each animation loops about a dozen times before moving on to the next one. It would have been better if Kid Stardust made each section shorter and then just loop it back over to the beginning after every run.

Where it does shine though is in its visual effects. The mixture of 2D planes with 3D effects is pretty creative and interesting to look at. I particularly like the ones where the 3D letters are engraved into the bitmap. It just takes too long and never really says anything interesting in it. It just becomes a bit too boring.