evoke'98 report

after several hours of mostly comfortable travel with germany's high-speed train ice and a regional train, i arrived at the small station 'aachen west' at 18:08. unfortunately the guys that wanted to drive me from the station to the partyplace have waited for a wrong train so that i had to call for a taxi. about 20 minutes later i arrived at the partyplace, a big room called 'theatersaal' in one of the many buildings of the aachen university. the room was bigger than the one last year, but there was not enough space to contain all people that were coming to the party. so i have heard that some people left the party after a short time. i had the luck to find some space very near to the big screen just in front of the organizers' tables. the big screen was big enough and the quality was really ok. in front of the doors to the partyroom the german company elsa offered some of their products (remember that elsa bought the hercules company).

on the first day there was not very much action, so me and a few other people decided to go to some cinema to watch the movie 'godzilla'. after some wrong driving we finally found a cinema called 'royal palast'. there weren't that many people inside, but the really bad thing was the sound quality. the volume was just much too low so that godzilla didn't sound like a monster but like a harmless house animal :>. after coming back to the partyplace I continued watching some popular demos and intros on my machine and talking to some guys like darkness/imphobia or the organizer of the hungarian group exceed. exceed was competing with an amazing wild demo called 'freefall' and a nice module for the multichannel-compo. also some people from Austria like franky/riot were present at the party. kb/tom was also there, mostly as a helping hand for the organizers but also with a 4channel module called 'mit dem schlagzeug die treppe runterfallen' ;)

the afternoon of the 2nd day started with some fun action on the stage (evokardy), later some short films, funny animations, and the movie 'starship troopers' was shown on the big screen. during that time i talked with a guy from Be europe. he showed 'BeOS' for the pc platform at the party - very interesting! on the 3rd day he made a public presentation on the big screen.

at evening it was time for the multichannel and vga compo. the winning guitar tune 'candy girl' by a-move & velvet/amable was really very good. unfortunately the 4k-compo was cancelled because there was no entry. also in the 64k-compo there was only one entry, and even this entry looked like it was made in five minutes as a reaction to the difficulties in the democompo. the democompo started after some delays in the night. the dos-demos ran well without bigger problems, but the demos that required win95/98 weren't running at all or crashed after some parts - even after changing the compo-machine. so many thanks to bill gates for affecting the flow of the democompo in that bad way. next time better no windows demos.

the winning demo was 'metropolis' by kolor, followed by 'iceberg' by suburban creations and the very stylish demo 'baker selection' by replay. the last compo was the wild compo with the mentioned demo 'freefall' by exceed and some entries on videotape. surprise: there was even a quite funny entry by october labs ;)

there was a quiet sleeping space on the ground floor of the building near to the toilets. only the noise from the doors was a bit annoying. the toilets were full with graffity, but not from the party visitors. ;) after waking up it was time to copy some party stuff for myself and to burn some cd's for darkness and other people. :) during the price giving I had to prepare my computer for transportation so that I couldn't concentrate that much on the ceremony. the prices consist of cash money and software (BeOS, linux distributions and some packs from micrografx). finally yoda/dpi drove me back to the train station. you can also watch out for the party report from dpi.

all in all evoke'98 was a funny party with a quite good atmosphere. thanks to poti/kaoz and all other organizers.