Report: Ambience '99

Written by Avalanche

Somewhere this month, I don't quite remember when, Ambience'99 was held in Venlo, The Netherlands. At first, I should be going with five other guys, but all of them cancelled, so it was just me who was making the trip to the party. Fortunately, a lot of other friends of mine were going to be at Ambience and so I would certainly have a damn good time there.

When I arrived, I had no place to sit, until I bumped into Cloak/Jolly and Shortie/Jolly. So I decided to sit next to them, which turned out to be okay. The place was already quite filled with sceners and people I knew. Almost immediately after I had settled in, I found the rbi guys and helped them unpack their cars.

At first I'll give you a little description of how the party place looked. First of all, it wasn't one big hall. No, it was several small class rooms and one somewhat medium-sized cantine hall (which I sat in). This design of the party place caused everyone to run around all the time to different islands of sceners, but I thought it gave the party a nice atmosphere.

I found even more friends such as Ryo-Ohki and ICS, who are also members of Trinity. And well... everything was nice and friendly. The first really funny thing that happened was me and Bassie/Image opening my 5 litre can of Warsteiner beer. Unfortunately for the surrounding computer cables, there was a lot of pressure on the can, a LOT of beer went spraying around, and me and Bassie were quite covered with beer. But hey, I'm not complaining. So my table served for a while as a caf‚ or something.

Later on, I got another 5 litres of beer at a local supermarket. And well, most of my booze (yes, there was even more, e.g. Martini, wine, and Pina Colada) was consumed by me and my very special friend Poti of Black Maiden. I think that night both me and Poti were very drunk, I remember us even stealing some beer from the organizers. Well, not exactly stealing, since they were standing right next to us, but they didn't stop us from taking some beer. I think a lot of people got quite irritated by me and Poti that night. Probably many dudes also stepped in my puke, which covered the ground at several places. But hey, no booze, no fun! Or as Poti and his suprise gfx would say: "Play more quake!" which means translated: "Drink more beer!"

So what about compos? What went on with them? Well, hold on, I'm going to tell you about them right now. Next to the usual compos, such as intro and demo compos, gfx and multichannel compos, there were also hardcore and, typical for Dutch parties, house music compos.

Let's start with the music compos. The 4chn compo was pretty good, at least I think so, maybe partly because Ryo-Ohki/Trinity got 3rd. And well, overall, I have to say I enjoyed this compo. I didn't bother to check out the hardcore compo, but the house compo was quite good, too, I think (even more so because they played my entry, smile). Finally, the multichannel compo. Hmmz, there were quite a few crap entries I think, at least I didn't like them very much. But I DID like the tune that was placed second (hehe, who else but Ryo-Ohki of Trinity and other groups?).

I was quite asleep during the 64K compo, which was, to say the least, quite a stupid thing to do. But the 4K intro compo I watched and found quite okay. However, the demo compo sucked totally. Not because of the quality of the entries, but because half of the demos crashed the compo PC (and not due to bad coding), including the Trinity demo! Half of the demos didn't get showed, and the organizers didn't want to try to get them to run. I even offered to drag my PC to their setup because our demo run on it. They declined and suggested that I should take your entry to Takeover, the next Dutch party, or some other compo. I don't want to rate the organization too negatively because I have some friends in it and know how hard organizing a party is. But several things could have been better.

Fortunately, at last they DID show the Trinity demo at the prize ceremony, but it was the wrong version! Namely the one without the greets and stuff... ah well. Besides, it was too late for people to vote for it anyway. Amongst the other demos wich got screwed by the organization were that of Smash Design and Sub97. I also heard rumours about a Quad demo having crashed.

In fact after the party, a lot of people complained about the demo compo, said that the entire party sucked and that there were absolutely no good entries. (Some stated this just because they didn't get through the preselection.) But this was not true. There were loads of good entries in all the compos. Regarding the democompo, everyone said the Dutch scene was dying because of inactivity, because the only real demos were all made by Image and Superstition (the latter having reached the 1st and the 2nd place). Of course nobody bothered to consider that the reason for this impression might be that half of the demos crashed and were never shown. Gee. But all in all, I have to tell you that I had a wonderful time. I didn't even spend more than... ehm... four hours in total behind my PC. Which is a record at a party.

Last but not least, I would like to say hi to the following people I could have fun and booze with: Poti, Jay, Bassie, Neophite, Cloak, Shortie, Freak, Screes, Limb, Jace, Blackstar, The Watcher, Greftek, Ryo-Ohki, Ics, Hackwizzard, Mentz, Goeber, Proop, Dupont, Dweazle, Fusion, and Phaeton. Also greetings to the rest of the sceners who were at Ambience '99.

- Avalanche