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                        Alive 8... or Late? or Light?
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system .. ST, STe, Falcon, STEEM, 512 KB RAM, RGB/VGA

credits . grafx by Havoc and Cyclone
          musix by Damo (module), Tao, Frequent and Timbral
          texts by CiH, STS, DmaSC, Jace, Sunnyboy, Cyclone, Deez, Paranoid,
                   Strider, SH3, Cooper, Havoc, Timbral, Exocet...

size .... two versions, one extended for Falcon, normal one for ST

release.. o3/2oo4

url ..... http://alive.atari.org

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Ok, as the headline says, you can  choose what you want, may it be the 8th issue
of Alive, the latest or the lightest, all things may match to it, unfortunately.

I can't say how long I was waiting to see the new issue, in fact I counted on it
several  months before, as UCM 25  was still  just a shadow. Later on  deadlines
were set and nothing happened  and while UCM was  groing, Alive seemed to be out
of order... In  the end we got it now... several  reasons are to mention for the
late  appearance, such as  the editor staff  was waiting for an intro that never
came, do I have  mentioned that  we were waiting for an intro by the same coder,
that didn't came in  as well? Without willing  to blame anyone here, but this is
quite strange, to offer some stuff you can't deliver in the end, to several ones
at once...



Whuuuu, male or female?!

In fact the  current issue is the one with the longest development time, whole 7
months needed CiH, STS and their  mates to complete the current issue. So "late"
passes quite well as we mustn't wait that long for an issue before.

Browsing through  the menu I found just  58 articles  including the regulars and
this is the  smallest content  since Alive exists. It  obviously suffers as well
under the slow but steady shrinking support, even though Alive always matches it
to bring a  bunch of guestwriters, apart  from  the steady team, but the current
issue shows this  at the point that over 2/3 are written by the two main editors
alone, while they did  only about the  half of the former issue, that  contained
about 1o articles more... I wont  work out more statistics in here, but here the
synonyme "light" matches as  well.
Maybe this  is also the reason to see STS writing  that he will leave Alive now,
and that the current issue may be the last one... Hu?
Anyway, enough senseless words spread around, lets check it out!

Right at first, Alive 8 spreads a  quite dark atmosphere, the loading picture by
Havoc comes in dark futuristic style, as  well as the menu that was drawn by two
artists, Havoc and Cyclone. The  module is nice  Damo knocking  style, while the
chiptunes are  typical mag tunes, Tao is  buzzing around  while Timbral torments
the Sid and Frequent in the end offers a quite silent and dark (!) tune.

Browsing  through  the contents Alive 8  features still  a lot of stuff to read,
here the wide spread  destinations of  the guestwriters helping a lot, so we get
a bunch of party  and show reports, from smaller coding parties to meetings like
the NAS or even Jagfest shows.
Quite interesting  ideas shows the  scene corner, such  as things like where you
come to while  googling for sceners  names, have you thought that CiH is a virus
while Mr.Pink stands for Striptease entertainment?! Woah!
Furthermore they  take a look at various Atari forums, where demo names are come
from, a short overview about the running time of selected demos on ST and Falcon
and so on.

At next we go on with a bunch of interviews, such as with Corbeau of Dune, Gloky
of  MJJ Prod,  Andrew Whittaker and  Rajah Lone, that  partly offer  some  quite
intersting views and  thoughts, too. And so we go, seeing who deserves the Alive
Oscars, CiH thinks  about the regular  DHS polls and remembers us about the fact
that the Falcon is already ten years out on the streets.

Ofcourse some CT6o stuff can be  found here and there, as Alive team happily has
a CT6o owner as editor, grin :) And as  we go to  the stuff, we can read a bunch
of reviews, beginning from the last years Dune demos, over the few Falcon titles
from LineOut and Evolution for the CT6o owners, finally to few game reviews like
"Zombie Apocalypse" and "Roger".

Furthermore some more stuff was tormented, so we read some bits about the latest
developments on  Highwire, CiH  torments his  CT6o accelerated Falcon  with some
emulations  that were awfully  slow before and seem not to work that well still,
except the Atari 8oo emulation  that now reaches the original speed on Falcon...
hugh... Then we  step forwards with some  code hints about Chunky 2 Planar again
as well as SH3 lifts some pixel secrets.

And we nearly  have passed  the stuff to  read, what  is left? The mixed corner,
featuring  all  you can think off, starting  with CiH congenious  Mini mag, over
several further craptalk bits, up to a check of the Lethal Xcess soundtrack CD.

Reached the end... hummm... erm... Was that all? Are there hidden articles maybe
somewhere? Unfortunately not... Eh, just joking, still enough to read if you ask
me, even though it obviously is smaller now, therefore  still interesting enough
to bound you  onto your monitors  quite a while and  able to entertain you quite
well, as it features again and again some interesting ideas.

Final words...

The mag offers  us a quite well  design, very dark  one, while  loader and shell
matching together  in the best way, like it! Soundtracks are very good, should I
say as always?! And ofcourse  the contents are as well, even though the magazine
isn't  blown up to the edge  this time. The question is, if STS leaves the posse
now, how will it go on? The support is lower than before, as it is for every mag
on the  scene nowadays, but  the question  is, if they  can stand it over longer
time. Even though CiH wrote over 1/3 of the mag alone, STS' part was still quite
big and loosing someone like him can be a very essential problem...
Hope it wont  be the last  issue, as STS often  spreaded around in the magazine,
best wishes  to CiH and Cyclone (who wants to take over STS' part), wont  be too
bad seeing Alive fall in a time as it is well established...

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