The Stadthalle, which probably is the biggest hall in Dueren, was totally overcrowded. And the hall didn't open at 18:00 or 19:00 as stated in the invitation, but after 20:00. And the entrance fee wasn't 10.- DM, but 22.-, because there also was a techno rave there, and the people who wanted to go to the Nexus Party had to pay both. There was a big crowd standing at the entrance when we arrived, and they advanced very slowly, because everybody was examined for drugs and weapons... they almost took my hayfever medicines because they thought it were drugs! Everybody had to leave drinks and food outside the halls (you could have thrown them at other people!), but inside the halls they sold beer in hard and well-flying bottles... i suppose the reason why no own drinks and food were allowed was mainly that they wanted to sell theirs.
Finally inside, i found out that the Nexus area consisted of two rooms sized as bigger living-rooms and one stair between them. That was all! The big hall of the Stadthalle was filled with the rave party. The lower room (overcrowded) was the compo room, here was the "4 x 4 meter bigscreen" (well, actually it was a 2.5 x 2 meter "small"-screen; the room wasn't even more than 2.5 meters in height!). I walked up the stairs to find out the "BIGGGG GRAFITTY-WALL" was about 50 x 80 cm big... but they had several paper sheets! I met some guys of Dust, KeenLikeFrogs, LegendDesign and Xography in front of the second Nexus room, and i asked them if we had a table in there. They said: "Walk in and find out yourself!"... and that's what i did... and i FOUND out! Imagine about 50 people, 20 tables, 10 computers and 5 stereos at full volume together in one small room... that's what it was like!
So what i did most of the evening was simply standing around in front of the hall and talking to people.
The compos should start at 10 pm, but it was way after 11 pm when they actually began. (I didn't see much of the big-screen, because the room was so crammed with people.) And they did it again, the biggest mistake! I have been at the Assembly'94 and at the Party'94, and everywhere they made that mistake - they tried to show the demos/intros without testing them before on the compo machine! So several of them refused to run or crashed in the middle, especially the PC ones.
I don't remember so much of the compos, and i haven't seen all of them; there were several nice Intros (i remember the one from "Strontium90"), and i heard the Amiga-Gfx were again much better than the PC-Gfx in the Graphics-Compo. The winning picture was from Peachy/Masque (remember, he has also won the Party'94 Graphics Compo!), and it was a Spitting-Image-Face of Guenter Freiherr von Gravenreuth, a famous german cracker buster (click here to download "GUENNI.LBM", zipped 150k). And - Guenther was there at the Nexus Party! (I don't know what he said when he saw the pic ;) )
The PC Demo compo was won by a 3-day-demo called "NOPE", a joke on "DOPE". It is probably worth watching for the jokes, but not for the routines (the best effect is a .fli! Just like in some Complex productions... ;) ) (Code was from Gi-Joe/Xgy, Data/FearFactory and PitBull/LegendDesign, graphics and sound were from LD guys). Actually, the demo crashed twice in the compo, but it was obviously still good enough to beat the opponents (well, there were only 3 demos in the compo). Click here to download "NOPE" (zipped 420k).
The music-compo consisted mainly of tekkno-songs (bumpfbumpfbumpf...) and other tekkno-songs (trrrrrr-bumbumbumbumbumbum...) and again other tekkno-songs (bum-b-bum--bumbum-b-bum-...), and it wasn't very interesting to listen to that.
Somewhen after 3 am, we were thrown out of the Party Place ("Everybody is outside in three minutes, anyone who is still here will be thrown out!"). We were really tired and had hoped that we could sleep at the party place, but obviously that was not possible. So we walked back to the train station and took the next train home.
Yaka/Xography