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this article comes from hugi issue 13 ú released in december 1998
ÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄ
ÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄ
REPORT: BIZARRE '98 SKIN
ÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄ
BIZARRE '98 REPORT
ÄÄÄ( Skin/Quad )ÄÄÄ
Some weekend in August, Bizarre 98 was
going to happen. No, not another
gangbang party for SM freaks but a demo
party! Bizarre has a long history in The
Netherlands, and again everyone was
anxious to get to Biz98. We (Quad) have
visitd all the Dutch parties and decided
to go early to Etten-Leur (location of
Bizarre since ages).
Last year we had to stand in line for a
long time to get in, so this year we
would be the first in line... bummer! A
lot of people had arrived before us, and
officialy we should stand and wait
outside.
But thanks to Mindex/NO we got in right away
(great organisers, they really care about the
demo-groups :-)). We installed all our stuff
and in a couple of hours all of Quad was
there and we were ready to rock! I personally
went to Biz to have fun and meet a lot of
people, but others of Quad wanted to make at
least one intro and a demo.
The ones involved in the project started
working immediately. We installed our stuff
in the small area of the Bizarre location, as
Quad: G-Day, Darkxceed, Sarix, in this part of the building there was not
Sarix' girlfried, non-Quad: ir that much noise.
The bigger area is always stuffed with people playing MP3's on their 4KWatt
speakers. It's a real shame that some people only come to show off with their
big stereos and MP3 collection. I don't have a problem with those MP3's (I
collect some too) but it is annoying when they are playing them while you are
trying to communicate with another scener or just want to work on your
production. But then again, it's always the same on all the parties, some
noise makers and some real sceners.
I installed the network for the Quad people and tried an IRC connection to
find out if 'famous' sceners were at Biz and who were staying at the home
front. I already found MagicBoy/Superstition but tried to find other users on
the local IRC server (I even fixed an outside world connection). Biz98 was
perfectly organised and Hewlett Packard was always supporting Biz with high
quality network stuff. On the local IRC network people were talking about crap
(= Quake and stuff), which was a reason to find some real sceners in the relax
room at Bizarre. One great reason to visit Bizarre is the relax/food room
where a lot of sceners hang out and talk about the scene, beer and girls. :)
On the second day (Saturday) some compos started,
while we were stressing to get a production finished
and found some free time to watch fellow-sceners'
productions. Not much, but good things come in small
parts... The music compo and the house one had the
usual Dutch competitors, and the gfx compo wasn't very
spectacular. Necronomicon/Quad entered the raytrace
compo with an excellent entry, applause and cheers
from us (make fun!) while his (winning) entry was
shown. After some smalltalk with Infant
(ex-Acme/ex-Quad) and Amnesia/'just blonde' (the Dutch
demo scene couple of the year :-)), I got a hold on
JAL/Nostalgia and Sparcus/Nostalgia. These organisers
of TakeOver really check out all the competitions
(some weeks ago we had met at Wired '98).
Skin, Amnesia, in the background: some Jello member
In the meantime some deadlines went by... and we hadn't finished any of our
productions. :( We suck... well, time to have some more fun then. :) We wanted
to make a demo co-production with Trepaan. These really wicked guys won the
Biz96, Quad won Biz97, so Biz98 should be Trepaan (they are really sick
clowns) and Quad... too bad we didn't do it.
The guys from Trepaan are _really_ wicked, we had
some good laugh with some small talk and anti Bill
Gates jokes. :) As always Jace was coding bit by bit
for another extremely small surprise code production,
Asm-God. :)
Jace/TBL
The first compo apart from the surprise coding compo was the 4k one. The 4k
compos around the world are getting better and better (Mesha was released at
Asm). Purple Dreams 2 really surprised me. It was an excellent entry. The
others were nice, too, but not as good as PD2.
We wanted to enter the 64K compo with one or even 2 intros. Neither of them
got finished, so we were watching some nice competition between Jello and
Maroon. The two had really nice 64k's, but in my opinion Maroon was really the
better one. Jello should/could have done better, oh well, these guys have
already got our respect so why bother. :)
And then I was tired, I wanted to sleep. Sarix was also getting a little bit
Zzzzz... So we fetched our sleeping stuff and went to the sleeping room (near
the cosy relax/food room). As we entered the room we heard someone snoring
_really_ loud, we got out of there and went to a walkthrough 'hall' just in
front of the food/relax hall. We lay down, and hoped to sleep soon... but we
didn't pick a good place for some goodnight rest. People were walking by
constantly and talking to us, known sceners but also the catering was
interested in our crap talk. :) We even explained to a catering girl what
Biz98/demoscene was all about (<g> it's really hard to explain why you get to
a hall with your computer over a weekend - nerds :-) - and sleep badly for a
couple of days and sit in a video-theatre...).
The king of the compos, the demo compo, was about to start. I had already seen
the entries of several groups. As usual Superstition had some excellent code
by Magicboy (former Spirit NS member). This friend from our 'neighbourhood'
really gets it going at parties, a really good 24h/day coder!
Our Belgian friends from Green had also produced
an excellent demo, I really liked this one! It had
some funny parts and some original 3D parts. As
always I was kinda sleepy while sitting in those
nice theatre chairs, but it was nice to watch all
the demos from the (Dutch) scene come by, although
it is more fun while competing oneself in that
compo.
One 'not-demo' was also shown during the
demo-compo: kippen-schieten by the famous Witan!
It was a game in which you had to shoot chickens
out of the air, very hilarious!
The winner of the demo compo is Superstition.
Calimero and ThePeric
After watching 10+ demos it was just to wait for the price ceremony. As usual
it started behind schedule. The true minor part of Biz98 was the _really_ long
wait we had to do, the price ceremony was delayed several times and often they
announced it after waiting for half an hour at the theatre door!
Next time inform the sceners more!
The price ceremony itself was really nicely organised and funny but most of
sceners were irritated and gave Harlequin, the master of the ceremony, a hard
time.
All in all, Biz98 was again a great party with a lot of chitchat with the
Dutch and Belgian sceners. I really enjoyed talking to Neliz/Trepaan, hearing
the bragging of Rogue and Jace :) and of course meeting some sceners I had
never spoken to in real life!
Next year I'll be there again to enjoy the excellent relax room, nice
organisers, cool network and a lot of small talk. The quality of the releases
was quite good, and in the near future it will be even better with a growing
Dutch scene (let's write about that another time :-)).
- Skin/Quad