Psychodelic
Psychodelic is a homebrew demo for the Nintendo 64 made by Blackbag and released on 01 March 1998. It is a very long sequence of scrolling text and random graphical animations, both 2D and 3D. It was made for the Presence of Mind ’98 competition, where it won 3rd place.
To get the ROM and accompanying files visit the download page and use the password apsychopsycho.
The music is No Good (Start the Dance) by The Prodigy.
The text
The marquee in Psychodelic is presented in a way that is interesting yet kind of hard to read. It uses 3D letters placed in an annular formation that come in from the right towards the left and then back towards the right. This ring shape keeps moving around so sometimes the letters coming in appear below or above the screen and can only be read in reverse on the other side of the screen. This, along with the slow movement of text makes it quite hard to read but at least gives it a bit of a sense of uniqueness that you don’t see in other marquees.
That said, the text itself is pretty dull. Many other text marquees at least give us some insight into the production of the demo or something about the team but this is pretty much just credits, greets and special thanks.
Blackbag POM Presence of Mind ’98
Ste of Blackbag presents Psychodelic my first Nintendo demo for POM Ninty Eight.
Greets and hellos come later
Current blackbag members are: Stumble, Ste, Silo, Shroomz, Nagra, Mcbain, Jovis, Fractal, Datawiz, Breakpoint
Time now for the greets in no particular order:
Greets go to Fractal, Silo, Tac, Stumble, Sispeo, Rene, Steve, Nep, Jovis, Nagra, Bpoint, DataWiz, Titanik, Trilili, Nan, Stan, Widget, Hartec, Actraiser, Locke, Icarus, Mutronix, Ego-UK, AC3, Shroomz, McBain, Immortal, KidStarDust, Netfucker, RainMan, Twinsen, Lem, Kid, Kabal, Moneypenny, Dsilence, Decypher, Arctic-cat, Newt, Blob, Cyborg, KingRasta, Wessi
Credits for this demo: Code Ste, GFX Fractal, Musix The prodigy
Special thanx goto Lac for Lacmod, Hartec and Actraiser for organising POM.
I would also like to greet all the dewds from the old Amiga scene especially all the members in crystal which I was a member of for a very long time. Flux, Indio, YSL, Scott, IBM, Harmonica, Craig, Lerky, Samir, Mario, Tango, Nitro, Icarus.
Ok I’m outta here. Byeeee
The End
Don’t forget to visit us
Psychodelic’s graphical effects
These (plus the text marquees above) are all the graphical effects that you’ll find in Psychodelic. For a 20 minute demo, there aren’t really that many bitmaps or special effects. Some are even recycled in other demos.
Conclusion
Psychodelic definitely has to be the longest demo out there. Clocking in at around 20 minutes before reaching the ending screen.
The demo’s length can make it tedious to view as approximately 70% of the time is taken up by the marquee and blue spark effect. Furthermore, the text scroll is slow and overly magnified, making it challenging to read despite the mundane content. It just feels very padded. This could have been all done in 5 minutes.
That said, I do like the non-text effect they show – the 3d wave thing, the smiley and the matrix mask. I like that last one the best since it reminds me of screensavers from back in the day; truly mesmerizing.
Overall a nice effort but way too tedious to even consider a second watch.
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1 COMMENT
Mitchell McCutcheon
Thanks Mitch