Delta Force ICC #2 - The Report!

     Here it is. This article has been written specially for the TSB
disk magazine (title as yet unknown to me!). I (Bilbo) am heavily
plagiarising (copying!) Stick's ICC #2 doc (We both agreed that a
cut-down version would be more suitable - plus his doc will appear
in Maggie and a Norweigan magazine!). So, without further ado, here's
the (almost) definitive journalistic documentary of the fabulous ICC #2...


Wednesday  (31/7/91)
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 A short(ish) blast down the M1 in my altogether fabulous Renault 5 Turbo
(Super Cinq) brought us to East Midlands airport. Unfortunately, I blasted
a bit too fast and arrived 3 hours early!! Anyway, after much (expensive)
airport coffee and a million cigarettes (not Stick - cos he don't smoke),
we boarded our totally unfabulous plane (functional is the word here!).
 After about 90 minutes of fun-filled flying, we descended into Stuttgart
Airport. Fortunately New Mode and Slime were there to meet us (cos we
can't speak a f**king word of German!!). New Mode and Slime then drove
us to Chaos Inc's house (where we were sleeping that night). Most of the
car trip was spent with the Delta Force guys laughing at our broad
Yorkshire accents. Can you imagine it - Germans laughing at an English
accent?? Anyway, 21 kilometres down the road, we arrived at Chaos Inc's
house. Yeah, a really nice penthouse apartment - shit I'm moving to
Germany!! Next on the agenda was the VERY important trip to.....
the Pizza shop! The pizzas were fine (and pretty cheap!) but the beer
had lemon in it!! So the first German word I learnt was THUNFISCH -
that's tuna fish. Cos I don't eat meat (well, would you kill the cow or
pig yourself??) that was the only pizza I wanted to eat (more about tuna
pizzas later......).
 The evening was finished off with some more beer back at Chaos's house -
and a long discussion about the next day! New Mode and Slime then went off
to get some sleep - so we decided it was time to sleep ourselves (I might
say we had jetlag - but rustbucket lag would be more precise!).


Thursday  (1/8/91)
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 After breakfast, Chaos showed us some bit and pieces, eg. the REAL Michale
Bittner Rap on the Amiga and all his (considerable) hardware - OOOER! Then
it was over to the sports hall where the party would be held. Of course, we
were roped into setting everything out - tables, chairs, cables etc. etc.
 First there was Sammy Joe from the Lost Boys - an English voice at last
(even though he is German!), and a guy from TNT Crew (sorry, I forgot your
name). After punching Sammy Joe in the head a few times for never returning
my disks, we stood round waiting for the arrivals (and smoked lots of
cigarettes!). Everybody who arrived was accosted by Slime (the Dolph
Lundgren look-alike) for the entry fee and their names were added to the
guest list. By about tea time, around 80 people had arrived. Some of them
were......

 The Lost Boys, The Overlanders (lots of these guys!), ULM, ACF, Offbeat
(now Delta Force), Legacy, NeXT, Tanis of TCB, NPG, TEX and a sprinkling
of Thalion people, Electra, ST-Connexion, TVI, NAOS, BMT, Scum of the Earth,
Firehawks, Richard Karsmakers and lots of other people I probably forgot.

 Seeing as it was tea time and I had only eaten pretzels and drunk Coke
all day, my (not insignificant) stomach said, "Hey, feed me, you bastard!".
So, Stick and me wandered down to the town centre (we were in a small
village, by the way) and found a suitable.....       wait for it.......
PIZZA shop!! Yes, Day 2 and Pizza number 2! We were saved embarrassment by
the fact that a few guys from TEX came in with Questlord (Delta Force).
And good old Questlord did the ordering for us. The thunfisch was as good
as ever! However, on the way back, Questlord got us lost!! And he's
f**cking German!! Once we found our way and returned to the party,
everything was really busy and noisy. Lots of sneak previews of demo
screens - TLB's "Ooh Crikey, What A Scorcher!" looked really excellent and
Tim promised it would be released in 2 weeks (when you read this, you will
know if he was telling the truth!). Also, some guys were working on
Transbeauce 2 Disk #1- another demo I am eagerly awaiting. Good ol' Richard
Karsmakers had initiated the Real-Time Doc - which meant everybody was
typing some SERIOUS shit onto his screen. Mad Max and Chris from ULM had
already started thumping out some cool music. And everybody else was either
whacking away at their ST's or chatting or sleeping or burping or farting
or shouting or eating or drinking - or all of the above at the same time!!
 Time for bed. Cos we got there early, we staked our claim on the balcony
(slightly more comfortable than anywhere else!). And eventually drifted off
to sleep to the sound of about 50 ST's blasting out.


Friday  (2/8/91)
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 We awoke to the same sound of about 50 ST's blasting out!! More pretzels,
more Coke and more cigarettes!At lunch time,we were rescued by Mr.Karsmakers
who accompanied us to the local pub along with Spaz (TLB). Richard is
Dutch but can speak German (and of course English!) very well. So he did
the ordering. And this time......  mushroom omelette! No pizzas here.
 Good grief, isn't the Southern Comfort cheap here in Germany?? I feel
obliged to buy a bottle! A few nips later and I suddenly feel tired!
 That afternoon (after a short nap) the Midi-Maze II competition was
announced. Apparently, the Germans go CRAZY for this game - and I must
admit that it was fun to play. However Stick and I were both eliminated
in the first round!! Well, we've never played the f**cking game before
have we? I'd beat the lot of them at PowerMonger or Populous!!
 The eventual winner was -ME- of TEX - who seemingly ALWAYS wins!! Second
and third places were taken by Daryl and Mad Max (at least I think this is
right!).
 It's tea time again! This time, ST Connexion were kind enough to give us
a lift into town (after we twisted Vantage's arm a few times). We arrived
at another....... PIZZA shop! This time Vantage did the ordering (he also
speaks good German) for us all. I was now getting experienced and could
find THUNFISCH within seconds on any menu! Tuna Pizza number 3 had now
entered my digestive system!!
 Now it was time to hit the Southern Comfort again! This time I managed to
persuade Stick to join me. SHIT that stuff's strong! It was late in the
evening and the bottle was empty. So we hit the Real Time Doc and typed in
some SERIOUS BULLSHIT - check out the next ST NEWS to see this crap!! (If
Richard and Stefan Posthuma DARE print it!!!)
 It's the first time I've seen Stick drunk. He was insulting all the French
and German guys and talking in an embarrassing German accent. I think Flix
(Delta Force) was very pissed off cos he was trying to get to sleep under
a table next to Stick. New Mode and Slime just laughed at Stick until he
eventually wandered off to bed. As he disappeared up the stairs, I heard
lots of shouting as Stick found some French guys asleep on his sleeping
bag. I hope they have forgiven his insults!!
 This night, I decided to stay up all night! The Southern Comfort made me
stay awake. There were about 4 or 5 people up all night doing various
St-related things. By now, the toilets were stinking!!
 At about 6:00am, some more Dutch guys arrived. They were... CIA and ENS
(Galtan 6) and Scum and Lowlife from SewerSoft. These guys were really
funny and didn't understand why everybody was asleep!! The guy from ENS
played me some of his new music, Lowlife showed me some GFX and CIA showed
me his latest production - STabloid! It's gonna be a kind of disk maggie -
the difference being it will have medium and low res on the same scan
line!!
 Also it's got lotsa nice features. To be released - SOON!!


Saturday  (3/8/91)
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 Stick woke up fairly early - and in remarkably good shape! New Mode and
Slime crawled out from under the table after a (good?) night's sleep. They
then, along with some other guys, started talking about how drunk Stick
was the night before. He still swears he remembers everything!!
 Anyway, things were getting a bit sticky and sweaty about the old body
parts. So, after a brief game of table tennis, we cadged a lift with some
of the Overlanders to the local swimming pool. Shit, the local German
swimming pools are loads better than (almost) any I've seen in England.
 A nice outdoor swim and a few water slides later, we were feeling MUCH
better.
 However, almost 36 hours without sleep was catching up with me! Better
catch some ZZZZZZZ's!!
 When I woke up a couple of hours later, some people were beginning to
leave.
 But we did get a chance to see a demo of Rings of Medusa II! It looks
really good with some Dungeon Master type sequences but loads of extra
grafix and gameplay. It will be released under the Eclipse label - so
watch out for it!
 Tea time again! This time we're on our own! Were should we go?? Have you
guessed....... the PIZZA shop! One THUNFISCH pizza (not forgetting the
krabben and knoblauch) later and we were back at the 'CAMP'. Pizza number
4!!
 We had to rush back cos Delta Force wanted us to take part in the judging
of the demo competition. There were screens from... SOTE, Legacy, Ovr, ACF,
TVI, Electra, TLB, Respectables and some other which (once again) I forgot.

 After seeing all the screens, we adjourned outside for the judging. The
judges were people who had not submitted a screen - so all was fair. We
were some of the only non-coders on the jury, so our marks were all fairly
high. However, Tanis (being spoilt by TCB's work) was scathing to say the
least! The final positions were....

  1 - The Overlanders - Every possible combination of the fashionable
chrome/split rasters type technique.
  2 - Legacy - Rotating 3D vector cube with a starfield on one face.
  3 - The Respectables - Bubble starfield & a exploding scrolls.

     My personal favourite was TLB's screen. This was an acid-style screen-
switching demo with a cool tracker and lots of crazy hypno-effects. Anyway,
the Overlanders were presented with a trophy by Delta Force - and looked
very pleased with themselves!



Sunday  (4/8/91)
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     The LAST DAY!! More people were saying farewell and returning home.
When I eventually crawled out of my pit, I saw New Mode and Oxygene (I
think!) busy hacking away at the keyboard - just as I left them the night
before!! It seems they had been working all night on the reset screen for
PYM. The night before, New Mode had got a 3000 star star-field with the
Delta Force logo made of stars whizzing towards the screen. This morning,
the screen had about 8000 stars and a 15KHz tracker playing with the same
logo blasting out!! VERY IMPRESSIVE (I just hope the demo has been released
by the time you are reading this - or I will have to remove certain body
parts from New Mode!!). More people had left by now and me and Stick were
slowly packing our bags, deflating airbeds and rolling sleeping bags.
However, as I was helping to clear the mess left by everybody, Stick came
up to me and told me he couldn't find his passport!! OH SHIT! We'll have
to stay in Germany with these bastards!! (A JOKE!!).
  Manikin was most amused by this, but lots of people offered advice (eg.
kill yourself, swim home, get a job in Germany etc.).
 Anyway, to cut a long story short, Slime drove us to Stuttgart Airport.
 And Stick managed to bullshit his way through customs. PHEW! Our goodbyes
were said - and we were on our way home!
 We were back in England! It may be dirty, busy, violent and shitty - but
at least it's HOME! My car was still intact in the airport car park - so
it was a short hop, skip and jump back to God's County - Yorkshire!

 So, to summarise.....

 Many, many thanks go to Delta Force for holding another successful
International Coding Conference. I'm sure everybody had a really great
time (I know we did!!). We met lots of great people and also lots of BIG
names on the ST demo scene. All the people we met were really nice guys
and very friendly (even to us British people!). We saw lots of demos (and
even games) 'under development' and some sneak previews. So a good time was
had by all - PLEASE can we come next year???

 OK, that's the article. Check Maggie for the full unabridged version (by
Stick). I hope this has been of some interest to you (cos it's taken me
ages to type it all - I'm nearly as lazy as Delta Force!!). And now some
final personal thanks 'n' greets to some people.....

  New Mode - Thanks for the invite. You worked hard to get it all together
   and we appreciate it. You are a lazy bastard (your words, not mine) but
   a very cool coder and a funny guy (but you smoke too many (of my)
   cigarettes!).

  Slime - Crazy, violent German! But you were good fun! Keep painting and
   driving your 2CV. Sorry for using Degas - please forgive me.

  Chaos Inc. - Thanks for letting us stop at your house - it would have
   been a subway otherwise!

  Questlord - Another Fantasy fan (YEAH!). I will send you more books.
   Thanks for your translations for us!

  Sammy Joe - Another nice guy! You also stole loads of my cigarettes (but
   I nicked a few in return!). Thanks for the use of your ST. Sorry I
   couldn't wake up that night (Only you know what I mean! Remember?)

  Richard Karsmakers - Thanks for letting me and Stick type in all that
   shit when we were drunk (but dare you use it?).

 That's all - I haven't got space to mention eveybody. One final word of
thanks to Stick - for letting me use his article and organising all the
air tickets and shit like that.

     Bye for now,
                    BILBO   (Ripped Off - Simply The Worst!)

P.S. Good luck to TSB with the Mag!