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                           UNDERGROUND vs SYNTAX # 2
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system ... ST, STe, 512 KB RAM, RGB, STEEM v3.1

credits .. published by Syntax and friends

release .. o2/2oo4

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Quite unexpected  the second issue of this magazine from  Poland popped up and I
have to admit that I don't even right remember when the first issue was released
but as far  as I know it  is laying several  years back. Unfortunately also this
first  issue suffered  under a point  the most diskmags from eastern Europe were
suffering under, too, it is mainly written in polish language...

At the moment I don't know why they turned the groupnames in the title around as
the first issue was called SYNTAX vs UNDERGROUND, but who cares really.

After loading the magazine, that runs only on ST machines or STEEM in the latest
update, a nice menu screen appears, listing all included articles, that are only
1o... ugh. How the shell looks like you can see here...



The shell replays  a cool chiptune by Jess of Overlanders, taken from their last
demo "Froggies over the fence". The first  8 articles furthermore  feature their
own musix, old and wellknown tunes by Big Alec and others.

You can chose  the single articles  with the mouse while clicking on them on the
main menu. For the first 8 articles  the magazine loads  then the article in med
res with  textures behind the text. Therefore  they don't scroll but can be read
page by page using the keyboard.

The articles  contain mostly games related topics, so we get reviews of Vid Grid
for the Jaguar CD, Pitfall for  the Jaguar, Dungeon Master and Superski  for the
ST. Grey  wrote two  quite interesting articles, as he reviews "Fantasy" by Dune
and  takes  a look at  the polish scene. Both  articles  are happily  written in
english so that there is at least a bit to read for not-polish people.

Unfortunately  there already  isn't more  to tell  about, as the  magazine hides
itself for not-polish  people and is quite thin as well as it doesn't brings any
goodies to examine...

So what? Surely nice to see another  mag still alive, but it has only very local
         interest as polish  surely isn't the language any second Atarian speaks
         or understands. The move to write in polish is even more strange as the
         polish Atari scene obviously  isn't that big anymore, so you can really
         say that  some nice ideas  are a bit wasted  here. Grey gives the mag a
         little kick with  his english contributions but overall seen it needs a
         lot more development on the contents and overall a switch to english to
         be something for any Atarian around... Just watching a quite nice shell
         isn't really the thing the crowd wants to do I think...

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