After last year slaughtering of The Gathering'92 in R.A.W I didn't have so big expectations to this party. But it seemed like the organisers had learnt from most of last year's mistakes and more people met up than I had expected. So for the first time ever a party has been better than I had presumed. Let's have a closer look at the different aspects of the party: INVITATION Dr.Outtasight did a good job with the invitation. But please be more realistic. Sentences like "We have the best pizzas in Norway", "This will be the blueprints for all coming computer conferences", "The party of the decade" etc. etc. could easily be excluded! (misleading advertising.) Otherwise the invitation paper and intro are great designed and did a good job to get people to the party. PEOPLE More foreigners than I believed showed up. In addition to the whole Norwegian Scene, major parts of the Danish and Swedish scene also showed up. Also some german Sanity-guys (Tron, Diddle) and dudes from England (Nuke, Dan, Nightshade and others) were present. So next to the Aars parties, this is the biggest Amiga party ever arranged. PARTYPLACE The party was arranged in a big sportshall. As opposed to the hall used in Aars there were plenty of showers available. A perfect hall for the party! A big drawback was that it was too far to the nearest pub and disco. ACTIVITIES Fotball Compo: Nice organized compo where Talent beat Andromeda in the final. Movies: Spaceballs brought their own "Home-Build" TV-transmitter which showed movies 24 hours a day. (Some very special movies aswell.) Arcade Machines: There were about 10 arcade machines and 2 air hockey tables. Lord Helmet/R.A.W and Wolfman/Magbox had an air hockey game where the looser should quit the magscene. As you are reading this, the result should be pretty obvious, shouldn't it? Hehe... RELEASES Except for the contributions to the competitions there were few releases. Several mags like Magbox, Stolen Data, R.A.W, Resident and Playbyte were expected but none was released. A musicdisk from Scoopex and a slideshow from CryptoBurners and some intros from Dual Crew & Shining, Scoopex and Avalon was all that was released. COMPETITIONS After the horrible show last year with a terrible "screen" and lousy sound and other big problems they had for sure improved this year though the sound still sounded shit. One original thing I really liked was that the organisers spreaded a sheet with all contributors in the competitions. On this sheet you could mark your votes. I found this system much better than the system where you have to remember the numbers of the productions to vote for. The Results Demo Compo: 1. 'Desert Dream' by Kefrens 2. 'Speed' by Sim Productions 3. 'Destination Unknown' by Spaceballs 4. 'Q.E.D' by Talent 5. The Pornos demo The Pornos demo is just another unserious attempt from Blazer and Lizard of Andromeda to be funny?! The Spaceballs demo was a 8 days project from Lone Starr and TMB Design. Other good demos released was Equipose by Complex and Lobotomi by Nation-X. Music Compo: 1. Vinnie / Spaceballs 2. Nuke / Lemon. 3. B.I.T / EON 4. Lizard / Andromeda 5. Mr.Man / Andromeda A very close competition where only 4 votes differed from the first to the fourth place. A big minus to the jury for not selecting GIN, The winner of last year competition, among the 15 best. If you want to read the opinion of Lizard / Andromeda about the music-competition, he has his own article. Graphics Compo: 1. Archmage / Andromeda 2. Cobra / EON 3. Sauron / Static Bytes 4. Cougar / Sanity 5. Fairfax / Andromeda Very high standard in the graphics competition this year. The winner picture was (of course) of some naked girls. My personal favourite is the picture by Sauron. Really stunning! Intro Compo: 1. Lemon. 2. TRSI 3. Andromeda The Lemon. intro by Dan and Nuke was miles ahead of the other intros. Maybe the best 40k intro ever made. The TRSI intro was coded by T-Bone and is in my opinion better than the demo he come 3rd with in Denmark this X-mas. The Andromeda intro is quite ordinary and didn't contain any surprises. All in All I think that this is the best party ever arranged in Norway. The only event that beat this is the Aars party. Read the next page for a comparison between The Gathering'93 and The Party II PS! If you think the writer of this article is "bribed" by the organizers by free entrance, pizza at half price and the fact that two of the organisers are going at the same school as the writer, is up to you to decide!