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From Dec. 27, 2001 to Dec. 29, 2001 once again the legendary (well, at least for power failures and lame organizing) "The Party" took place in Aars, Denmark. To draw a conclusion: This one was definately the last TP I visited.  In the beginning, everything started very relaxed: Weasel/G*P organized a bus trip to the partyplace again, so the journey was completely uncomplaining. Once again the totally mad guys from Swizerland, Robocop/ATL and Racer spent the night before the trip at my place. We had lots of fun, enjoying Swiss delicacies, boozing and a C64, PC or VCR running in the background all the time. So we went to the bus with a terrible hangover the next morning, just to find out we had the very same bus drivers who made some bad experiences with me the last years. 8-) Anyway, the bus trip was cool. The weather was fine, DeeKay/Crest showed off with his new iBook, and when we reached the city of Hamburg, I was so drunk I slept for the rest of the journey, as usually. When we arrived in Aars, I thought we accidentally got to Siberia. Confoundedly cold and really a lot of snow. The hall was already crowded with people, but I really wasn't Of course, the whole schedule of the party was delayed, again, but not as much as the years before. Also, the usual power failure (only on the stage this time) just took about 45 minutes. Many compos had been canceled, anyway, so they had enough time for some "great" Counterstrike and Quake competitions. The event was sponsored by Asus (pronounced: Asses), which was pointed out every five minutes. For example, there was an "Asus Flash Competition", in which you had the great opportunity to create advertisement flicks for them free of charge. As I said before, the first price in the C64 Demo competition was 15.00 Euros. And, of course, a copy of "Anarchy Online" (which you got for any shit, by the way), which seems to sell so bad they have to give it away for free. For comparison only: The first price in the Asses Flash compo was 500.00 Euros and a whole lot of hardware (mainboard, GeForce3 and 24X CD writer), the winning animation could be clicked together within 2 hours, even if you only have rudimentary skills in Flash. Hadn't even ActionScript in it.  Most of the compo entries were pretty poor, except for 2 really nice entries in the PC Demo (Stop! They just called it Demo competition, as there were no seperate compos for PC and Amiga! Saved precious time for Counterstrike this way, exactly like holding just a single music compo, in which our good old SID had to perform next to PCs...) competition, and watching the winning demo of the Wild compo shows you what happens if someone, who has no skills in modelling and animation uses a nurbs modeller. As I said before, there almost were no sceners who would have noticed, only about 1/4 of hall 1 wasn't occupied by people not playing Quake or leechin pr0n (ehrm... *g*). Because of the compos being so lame and nicely scheduled - C64 Demo compo at 4am - we had lots of time playing on the C64 (doing something productive would have meant to cast pearls before swine). The network didn't really work (guess it was optimized for playing deathmatches), and many people obviously feared another bust, so there was only pr0n to leech. There was not much else to do, as the 18- to 20-years-old security guys (equipped with cable ties as handcuffs and Maglite(tm) flashlights as persuaders) prevented any fun (e.g. consuming alcohol). Guess they'd have gotten ahead in the Gestapo. At least there was *one* highlight at TP: The live performance by "Press Play on Tape", even Weasel/G*P danced like a howling dervish. The band improved quite nicely and released a great album, "Loading Ready Run", which has was sold right after the concert, I don't think I have to draw conclusions here. Three scene parties each year (Comparade, Mekka&Symposium and X) are enough, so I don't have to waste my precious time travelling 1,000 miles to visit a LAN party. I'm just sorry for Heavyhead, whose attempts to hold a "real" scene party were without success among the organizers. He didn't say *a single word* about this year's TP, by the way. The trip back home was quite uncomplicated, too, although we lost Zounds/Matrix at a gas station... But we got him back in one piece! 8-) A final word: I had more fun playing "Scramble" on my Vectrex together with the Swiss guys after returning to Munich than at the whole TP... RELATED LINKS
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