TITLE:By Macno, Uyanik, Blitter, Lord Helmet, Mop, Nimrod, Posdnuos PALETTE:0223 088a 0978 09bc 3 SLEDGE HAMMER issue 13 by ABSOLUTE! 2ALTERNATIVE SLOGAN1: Experience the ultimate multimedial filling What is a diskmagazine? How should it be done? What kind of articles should it contain? There are some mags that have the power of confusing your inner convitions, they can break your conventional mental schemes and possibly bring you into a bizarre status of uncertainty about mags and everything. What is right? What is wrong? What is reality? How is it? What's a mag? The ancestral questions that humanity has always tried to reply to, possibly running into religious explanations, collapse in front of a diskmag that breaks the diskmags' schemes, that confounds your mental image of how a diskmag should be. To define Sledge Hammer a normal scene disk magazine would be an error, it would be reductive and superficial. Sledge Hammer is an accomplished multimedia production, it's a music disk and a slideshow, a game and a demo, it's a trivia and a challenge for the reader. We already had the occasion of underlining such facts and we have justified them with the need of filling space on the mag. Still Sledge Hammer is not necessarily a filler mag, it could just be something else, something we can't define diskmag. Maybe the editors had not the ideas and the possibility of making a normal magazine or maybe they really wanted to sacrifice articles with chip tunes, here stays the difference between a caused or a wanted decision. The result, whatever its origins, is Sledge Hammer: an innovative multimedial experience or a fill-in-with-whatever-you-can diskmag. The result is the same, what is what remains a matter of discussion for scenologists and spandimerdas. After all a magazine on 221 disks with less than2 200 K1 of text must be something worth a good filling debate. 3SPANDIMERDA VALUE A big question has been raised lately in the whole scene. Is Sledge Hammer actively taking place in the MagWars or not? After a complete study of the issue 13 (ie. I have read it all) I can say that the answer is "not much". The spandimerda diatribes had by Sledge Hammer have always been replies to spandimeda attacks. I would say that their attitude is defensive and not aggressive, even if when it's time to defend themselves they perform a worthy spandimerda covering featuring lateral remarks, short witty jokes, direct and indirect accuses, acid statements and other juicy tools. Generally the tone used is the ironic and friendly one, their spandimerding is all in all light and sober, it tends to spandimerda without hurting too much. Their new slogan 2 "We fill harder"1 is a nice ironic reply to our "accuses" of being masters of the filling art. This and other sentences in the mag show some self irony which is often missing from nowadays diskmags but also worrying symptons of Fillophobia which should be cured before it degenerates in a patogenic state. The most spandimerda article of this issue has badly collapsed into a huge Golden Pearl, as you can read in some lines. 3SO-WHAT? ARTICLES There is nothing more irritating for the So-What? jury than a writer who begins his piece stating that he is writing a So-What? article. Are we mad? Why don't we respect our roles? Articles writers do write their articles and leave to the official jury the decision to consider them So-What? pieces! 2Fester1, main editor of Sledge Hammer, begins his article 2"The scene stock 2market"1 with this sentence: 2"Another So What? article by Fester dedicated to 2Abnormalia! Now Marcio, you can fill Scenarium with an article about why we 2fill SH with comments on why you fill Scenarium with an article about why we 2fill... Another 7 lines filled". Despite the light spandimerding tone, which is always welcomed, I wonder who the hell gave Fester the right to say that his article was a So-What? one. The same article indeed proposes a new, interesting and funny idea that should be developed massively, since it may offer many occasions of entertainment. In other words, one of the most original idea ever appearead in Sledgehammer is presented as a So-What? one. Are we joking? That's the evidence that it's necessary a well trained jury to judge So-What? articles, it's not a game that can be handled by everybody. Please, Fester, write real So-What? articles like in the good old times and don't try to wonder if they are fillers, so-what? or spandimerda. That's a job for me and it's also the only scene thing I am able to do. If you want also a good tip, Fester, pay a visit to a doctor, just for a general check, I fear that your Fillophobia could degenerate into a real illness. Trust me, I know this disease quite well, it makes you wonder always if you are writing or just filling. Terrible. 3GOLDEN PEARLS I was reaching the end of Sledge Hammer without having discovered any real pearl. My hopes were definitively dying when finally I discovered, near the end, an article with an interesting title 2"The lamest letter ever"1, written by 2Nexus 61. Well, it's a glorious scene golden pearl, where the author seems to have much fun publishing a "lame" letter of a guy who complained with an Amiga paper mag about the use of unknown to him words like "vectorgraphics, Silents' logo, Celebrandil's objects, gigacool" in its demo rubric (edited by the same Nexus 6). Nexus 6 seems to find extremely lame to ignore the meaning of similar words, so obvious for every scener, and rather funny that a reader of an Amiga magazine writes a letter complaining about their use. Nexus 6 probably still doesn't understand why he is awarded with a golden pearl for his cool article. Sad innit? 3ZINKFLOID'S (UYANIK) DIRECT THOUGHTS Cool mag from the hungarian puszta but with an actual quality decline but anyway still amazing with those cool "I wanna win the monthly prize" games, simply like it! Far too underrated... Did you know that Fester is a just 120cm killer dwarf? We not.... 3THE ULTIMATE QUOTES FROM THE BLITTER - Chip-tunes are the essence of life! - Why spoiling disk space by including 10 articles? Please include a tetris-clone instead... - Sledgehammer? Are there only wood-workers working for it? Very strange... 3LORD HELMET'S TRUE OPINION After my opinion a great mag which lacks the little extra to be the top mag. Always great intros, good articles, good music. What they miss is the articles that have the RAW style. 2 disk = negative! 3MOP'S COMMENT It's not true that demo groups make a disk magazine just because they want to gain that glory they might have failed to achieve with their demo activities. But does Absolute's offering to the disk magazine scene withold such a theory. Malicious speculators have often amused us with their candid comments about this magazine from Hungary. Some say it is a slideshow. Some admit that it has too much similarities with a chip tune collection. Some pronosticated that the scene quiz was the best part of the magazine. Some even told us that 2Adt1's house has been infested by bugs. But is this true? Who are these ones who are telling us how a magazine must look? Is it enough to release a disk full of Ascii texts, with a simple PPmore viewer, to call such an offering, a disk magazine, or must we turn a disk magazine into a multimedia festival? Whatever the answer, Fester and his henchmen have surely managed to impress the scene with their achievement. The latest issues even have a certain innovative journalistic value, which the scene always welcomes. Forget about the graphics. Forget the intro, chip collection and news part. You'll then, be going towards the wrong direction. This is Sledge Hammer, the ultimate multimedia manifestation that started it all. 3NIMROD'S DEFINITION Certainly not spread good enough. (Read: The poor sod can't remember having seen it.) 3POSDNUOS' CHARTS CONCERNS The mag with the most irritating code. And that's a really bad thing if you're not an experienced reader, that is as you'll should be to avoid to quit the mag in a relatively short time. The thing which I disliked the most is that I must always take care of how I move my eyes when I'm reading. It seems as after every little movement of my eyes and in general of my head, the change-page process is obvious. The only possible solution seems that to remain immobile during the reading-time. Undoubtely SH is a good mag, but for PATIENT people!