Not just that, but I was also suddenly informed Trinity had a new
member. Member, even though I'm the organizer of the group. :) Oh well,
cool. What wasn't cool was the long line, but hey, what can you expect?
500 sceners, one little line.
Bizarre '99 Report
Avalanche/Trinity/Cryogen
Well, it was that time of the year again. Holland has only three parties a year at the moment, and Bizarre is the last of the year, so naturally I and all my friends had to go. Well, there's not much to tell about the trip there, I'd bore you to death naturally with talking about how we watched the gas metre. Not that we did that of course. Bizarre promised to be the best dutch party of the year. The '98 edition was one of the most sceney atmospheric parties that entire year, throughout Europe. Traditionally, Bizarre has also been the noisiest, perhaps of all parties. This year was no exception.
Being greeted quite violently by Method upon arriving at the party place is quite an experience. Standing in line with your cowboyhat and sunglasses, then getting almost ran over, falling to the ground by a lunatic scener trying to greet you, is something every scener must have experienced at least once. :)
Not just that, but I was also suddenly informed Trinity had a new
member. Member, even though I'm the organizer of the group. :) Oh well,
cool. What wasn't cool was the long line, but hey, what can you expect?
500 sceners, one little line.
When we finally managed to get in, we took our seats on the balcony, which seemed like a cool place, but later turned out to be the hottest place in the building (literally) - it was well over a 40 degrees celsius most of the time, and some people on the balcony ran around in their underwear, seriously. Of course I wasn't that horny. Throughout the party, everybody was complaining about the extreme heat. Afterwards, it did bring some much needed atmosphere to the entire party. Computer coolers failing makes for nice background noise.
So, as usual, meeting old friends, and making new friends, and of course working on our productions. We (Trinity) had a rather good demo planned together with Kibosh. Unfortunately, it didn't get finished, but we weren't alone. Superstition and Green also cancelled their demos. Causing the entire quality of the demo compo entries falling. Fortunately I did do gfx for a joke entry, which actually got 3rd! And it just featured crappy 2d effects! :)
I guess the biggest problem with this entire party was the competitions, too bad that they screwed it up. After almost 1.5 hours of trying to upload your entry on to the network doesn't make you a happy scener. Then when I finally managed to upload it, everything on the network was declared disqualified, and all entries had to be delivered onto disk, which caused me and Method to spend another 1.5 hours to see if everything arrived ok. I think the organizers became quite pissed on us. Fortunately Sonic managed to calm them down, something about a game called 'soggy biscuits'?
Whilst the demo and intro compos weren't of a high quality, the music and animation compos were of an impressive quality. As some of you might know, it's standard for dutch parties to have both music and house compos. Of course, this year there was also an mp3 compo. Giving way to some very professional music. One guy even sang a song in dutch which could just as easily been in the dutch charts. Animation compo was of a deadly quality. During 1999, Superstition seemed to win every single animation compo in holland, and it looked as though nobody could beat them. Until Bizarre. There was one really good opponent for Superstition, Oryx, with Red Dot. In the end, Superstition still won, but it was close.
The 4k intro compo wasn't a very good experience for us, I think. First, Trinity's 4K was played without sound (even though the music played on the sound system WITHOUT effects, just prior before they showed it), and the co-op 4k between Plek/Trinity and Sentinel/Infuse wasn't shown correctly, it did however rock. A 4K in Windows. (honestly)
A lot of people thought it was the worst party ever, others thought it was an excellent party. But what one individual can judge it? Each party has its own good points and bad points. And yes, the organizers made some mistakes (which, granted, they did solve quite well, allthough a little bit slowly), and the quality of the demo and intro compo's wasn't really great. But all in all, I wouldn't have wanted to miss this party.
Avalanche/Trinity/Cryogen