Sleeping Dog / The Natives
This is a small impression of Assembly 1995. After about 7 parties in the last year I think I can compare it a bit to other parties, including last year's Assembly.
First of all you take a hall half the size it was the year before.
I think it's even smaller than the main hall of the Party 1994 so
really small. You take a lousy video equipment, with a really
small part that is used. Only one screen is used for the moment.
Last year there were 3 screens, this year only one... and it sucks.
There are also 2 videowalls also but they are on the ground and that's
way too low to see anything, they are being used for the announcements,
really bad quality, you can hardly read what's on them.
Next you start playing some lousy old and bad demos/intros from years ago.
In stead of some cool animations like we are used to see at parties.
It also seemed so that they had one videotape with some demos on it,
so most of those productions were played 4-5 times in the same order..
Next you sell everything at 200% of the normal price.
In Belgium we pay about 50 Bfr for a 1.5l bottle
of Coke, here we pay about 105 Bfr. You also have to pay for a shower
(2 Fim) and for the mega zone (10 Fim for 7 mins). Luckily we don't need
to pay for the sleeping hall. The sleeping hall is way to noisy and
too cold also but it is separate as stated in the invitation.
The food was good... we had a Pizza Hut downstairs, and a Carrols upstairs, where everybody was eating nothing but clubmeals. off course you could also go to Helsinki city and have a nice steak. (or real Mc Donnalds)
Saturday morning... still no ip connection. :(( We have all the adresses we need to have but there is no cable so we simply can't connect to it :( This simply sucks. It's still waiting for the first event, I hope they'll be better than the rest of the party. I guess we had the connection during early saturday afternoon. So we started to put all things that were released so far on hornet and ruby.
As I already told the main hall was really small compared to other parties.
But it wasn't even filled, lot's of tables were completely empty, and
everybody had lot's of place to put his equipment. Even after 2 days
there were still places left, so one part of the hall was used
by all Magic card players.
One positive thing was the tribune we had... you could go upstaris and
watch the demos from the tribune as you could do last year.
Except for the fact that ther wasn't as much space as last year...
So far for the environment, let's go on with the compos...
I guess we started with the C64 Compos... Byterapers and Beyond Force showed us some nice demos. The C64 Gfx Compo was a bit strange 'cause one top 3 picture was a clear rip off from a well know pc picture.
The Jury of the music compo took really long... they only listened to the beginning of a module and the middle. You can always argue about if a module should be in the top 15 or not... but it's really strange if someone who delivers a good module and usually scores in the top 3 isn't selected ?
The 4kb intros were almost nothing but 3D ... it seemed that it didn't was importan anymore to have lot's of partys but you had to have one 3D part in. There were some nice entries you should try to see.. Animate, Redhum, and Heaven were the best in my opinion. Also the one with realtime raytracing was very nice.
I was really disappointed in the low quality of the Amiga demos and intros, Amiga demos used to have good design and some new ideas, now the only copied some effects they couldn't do on A500 ... the compo was on A4000 now. So we saw some non designed vector engines without new ideas. Silent proved that they can't code on Amiga either withouth several bugs. Their demo had to be ran again multiple times to get it working, as with optical nerve.
The PC Intro gave us nothing world shocking except then for Stickman's world, a really nice idea but no hard coding, no design, no good gfx though coming second in the Intro compo...
PC Demo Compo... hey Capacalla has a nice 3D engine,... so has Epical , so has everybody ... only Psychic Link uses it a bit more interresting... for me it was worth the first place. it had perfect timing and better design than Nooon, the music also suited the demo better. Then Realtech showes that it is possible to do it al in highres, another Dope clone but 640x480, worth the 3th place for sure.. Then we have Nooon, even far before the demo compo started everybody was sure that they were going to win. Barti sure made a really good demo, a good combination of 3D and other parts. Though the music didn't really fit the demo. I liked No! better, but that's my opinion.
The pricegiving sucked since nobody could understand Pehu's Fenglish.. Lot's of people thought that valhalla had won which didn't seem to be correct afterwards, so we went home with the wrong results... luckily the spreaded information file gave us the correct results afterward.
So it was time to pack our stuff, find our youth hostel back and go out and party... You should definitely read the after party party report somewhere else in this magazine.
Here's a short list of souvenirs you might take back from one of your future parties, this list is mainly based on the things we took back from this years Assembly'95