Breakpoint 2009 wrap-up Part One

Yeah this took me ages… 

Sorry, I am very busy with my real life and cannot commit to post as much as I used to.

But I still guess a lot of the releases on Breakpoint have passed by most people’s noses so here’s a sum up of what I thought was most interesting, on the oldschool/wild categories. Even a month after Breakpoint has ended, you could find a few gems here to enjoy . Hey, it beats reading about a retarded pussy who takes pride in the fact his bicolour hair covers all his face and that he just painted his Gameboy in 32 colours.

So find contained herein a bunch of videos and babble from yours truly!
Part one covers the DEMOS only. part 2 will cover Music and Graphics 

Amiga 4k
This year’s Breakpoint brought a surprise: an unimagined number of Amiga productions entered the many competitions. The Amiga scene is not very active at the moment so this was a welcome and refreshing thing for me at BP09 and I hope more activity is to be seen in one of my favourite platforms.
The 4KB competition on Amiga was pretty amazing to me. Seeing what these people can do with only 4 kilobytes of executable is pretty amazing. This competition has become the new step of “eliteness” on the demoscene, taking the gauntlet from the 64K compo which used to be the top of the pops until recently.

Winner of the compo, and my personal pick, was Luminagia by The Loonies:

[kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/M9SfV9fBt3s" width="425" height="344" allowfullscreen="true" fvars="fs=1" /]

Amiga 64K Demo
Anothe r surprise c ompo with lots of cool entries, this year Amiga has shined among other platforms at Breakpoint! The winner Superkewl by Supergroup was pretty fab,even though I liked a bit more my honorary mention, Umbilicus Mundi by  Software Failure.
My favourite in this category attained a second place. It runs on an Amiga 500 (!) and has brilliant design coupled by a very cool CHIPTUNE (a real one, motherfuckers).
Check out Wasted Years by Moods Plateau:

[kml_flashembed movie="http://www.demoscene.tv/mediaplayer.swf?id=5627_13702_14" width="425" height="350" allowfullscreen="true" /] 

Amiga Demo
A surprising number of entries (9) on this category, the winner of it was my favourite and also probably the best demo of all competitions among all platforms. It’s a great demo, but let me remark, though, the fact that the Amiga categories shined through on this Breakpoint was also due to a very low quality on PC productions. I hope next year this changes :)

A deserved second spot for Lightshaft by Elude, if only for the technicalities, I still thought it was more of the same after their winning demo Solliloquy of last year’s Amiga compo. Cathode by Unique was pretty ok too. 

No match, in my opinion, for the winner, the punk-rocking demo Jesus Christ Motocross by Nature & Traktor:

[kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/g6nRHNDY2Kw" width="425" height="344" allowfullscreen="true" fvars="fs=1" /]
(How can you loose with a singing cellphone and TRON TRAKTORS?) 

C64 Demo
A disappointing category for me since I expected a bigger amount of releases and more quality. Still, the top two demos stood away from the rest and are worth a mention. Unfortunately unfinished, Salute! by Resource showed some promising effects, good design and a very pleasant soundtrack from Linus. 

The winner, and my pick, was Das Gotler by Extend, which shined through with an amazing design and good music from Barracuda.

[kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/CzJrG53HQ1g" width="425" height="344" allowfullscreen="true" fvars="fs=1" /] 

Real Wild Demo
The prize was taken again by LFT‘s sucessor to the CRAFT platform, Turbulence, a self-developed ATMEL based 16-bit platform which he constructed, programmed and created a demo for. To me the novelty wore off and it wasn’t as impressive as Crafts. Typical coder wank-off pr0n which I am not too keen of.

Other mentions: A demo created completely in Micro$$$oft Excell, Excellence (no joke!) and a decent Nintendo DS demo called Defcon Zero by Scarab. There was also a demo for PSP, Disco Return 4 by MarszczMelon, but it doesn;t reach the overall awesomeness of Suicide Barbie by TBL (released in 2007 and still unsurpassed…. Tsk tsk, PSP democoders…). There were two very bad Sega genesis demos too, not worth more than a mention if only for the platform they ran in.

My pick from the competition was the MSX2 demo done by half of the people who also won the Amiga competition… Syntax Infinity by Tulou & Traktor was a pretty solid demo ran on a plaform that usually doesn’t have much going on demoscene-wise. Being a computer of success mostly in Japan and Brazil, both countries lacking much in demoscene departments, it’s no wonder it hasn’t been picked up more by euro demo enthusiasts, so I welcome this addition very muchly.

It’s got good graphics, a nice flow and cool music with a very Crazy Q-ish vibe to it. Mad YM bass!

[kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/_cLAF7nIUjs" width="425" height="344" allowfullscreen="true" fvars="fs=1" /]

All in all, a pretty good demoparty. The web stream was IMMACULATE, I could watch the action ALMOST realtime and at FULL framerate al ltime with a very decent resolution. I don’t know how they pulled it but it was pretty damn solid and I could watch it all almost without problems. There were few network problems with it, mostly at the most congested categories, like PC Demo or the Scene.org Awards. It was for me the best way to spend a weekend! :)

What’s next? There’s a bunch of oldschool demoparties I might cover, but if not, we’ll have LCP in August which is 100% oldschool. Keep those eyes peeled!