Vammala Party 2026

Another summer, another Vammala Party.

I made a late moment decision to not take a Commodore 64 with me, so no Rambo. But I did not even have my traditional Linux laptop. This put some constraints to what I could do at the site.

Running some kind of Spectrum emulator online

Instead, I only took a Samsung Galaxy Tab with me, and became more familiar with it. Moving files about was cumbersome, but there were ultimately some dodgy ssh solutions that helped do it. I found surprisingly few text editors for it, a topic I might explore later.

Also, the space freed by not having the C64 allowed me to take some of my accumulated MIDI gear, with no intention to contribute to the music compo at all. I rarely have time to experiment with them, so the opportunity was welcome.

Wonder of wonders, it could all be synced

So, the long weekend was filled with movies, odd compos, food, music and gear.

One minor problem was that nearly everything needed charging, sometimes multiple times: phone, Galaxy Tab, handheld gaming device, the Roland synths.

Table full of gear, just different kind

The weather was not cruel hot, in fact it started raining on Saturday.

This changed some of the competitions, no more floppy disk throwing outside.

Previously I thought that Krita on the Android is not a good idea, but as keyboard shortcuts were now possible, it's actually quite powerful. Using Pipette (P or left control) and a semi-opaque brush of nearly uniform size, I don't even need that many keys.

"Lesser Terminators", Krita drawing, here scaled down and jpg'd

My approach is to use largely the same tools for the entire image, no layers, not special effects. Just a "palimpsest" of drawing over and over again. The outcome probably has very little appeal to anyone who isn't me. It resembles some of the things I've drawn or painted in the past using physical media.

It looks like I've not released a PETSCII since the last year's Vammala Party. This PETSCII was made quickly before even traveling to the party, not my proudest moment but it ended up second after all. 

Jänis PETSCII, Commodore 64

I'm not sure what to say about the increased presence of AI in the compos. I think it's quite fair there are dedicated AI-themed compos (Prompted graphics, and "vibe code prompt") with a very low entry threshold. It's then very clear what the entries are.

But then it's also quite obvious the main demo compo has more entries because it's now possible to use AI in support of coding. So the line between a high effort "vibe code prompt" compo contribution and a low-effort main demo compo contribution was quite blurry.

Acorn Archimedes A3020

As usual, I couldn't resist making some trades. One was a Quickshot joystick, another was an Acorn Archimedes A3020.

Vammala Party 2026 at Demozoo

Vammala Party 2025

The compos are on

The traditional summer event, Vammala Party, took place in Ikaalinen in mid-July. Part demoparty, part gaming event, all chaos.

The heatwave was unforgiving. Visiting Budapest earlier in the summer in 35+ degrees heat had hardened me somewhat, but the nights were still relentless.

This was the first time ever I had a full-size colour CRT at a party, but after going through the essentials (Rambo, Blue Max, Saboteur, Buggy Boy, Stunt Car Racer, Snoopy) it didn't serve much of a purpose, except perhaps adding one more SID wail to the party soundscape. Without a card reader I couldn't even transfer programs from the Linux to the C64.

The obligatory "fire up Rambo" session

A variety of activities can be crammed into an extended weekend. I actually have to think a little of where and how I spend time. As I can't currently concentrate much on coding or playing games at home, I wanted to make sure there's enough such entertainment at the party place.

Also, I've not been able to do much creative coding lately. I heard a rumor the democompo had less entries. As the opportunity now presented itself, I took it. I created a filler entry from nearly nothing using Processing/Java.

For audio, I used Suno-generated AI songs. For this reason I used a pseudonym "Dr. Errorz", surely no-one will ever associate it with me. I cut audio from two separate AI outputs, so some human sensibility was used. It didn't take many hours to do. It didn't finish last, which was positive.

A frame from Mega_Amiga_Boing_Filler

Making the minimal demo wasn't particularly stressing, as I had set the bar extremely low for code quality. Instead, trying to get audio to work and generating the video output turned out to be a chore, as the Movie Maker in Processing 4 didn't work.

The solution involved ffmpeg from the command line and Kdenlive. Instead of delving deeper into ffmpeg, I used Kdenlive for combining the video and audio, because I already knew it would work. Time optimization. Even then, using Kdenlive on a low resolution screen was a little confusing, as the UI didn't fit properly.

MSX Juhannus, for MSX. 256x192

For the graphics compo I had already an MSX bitmap, but I continued working on it on-site. A landscape is a rarity for me, but there's a reason for the choice. It's sort of a commissioned work. But the production it belonged to, did not materialize at this party. We'll see.

I made a PETSCII on location, as is almost the tradition.

I'd say neither gfx were my best work, but they did land me the 2nd and 3rd place in a competition that had perhaps more serious entries than I can ever remember.

Overall there was quite good attendance and good entries for all compos. Is Vammala Party becoming a more serious demoscene event?

Stunt Car PETSCII

I made a hasty entry into the Tuplain (audio-video combination) compo, and surprisingly it got the 2nd place. Both times this has happened, I lost to Marq. Curse you Red Baron!

The camping stove hobby was also present at the party. Well, it's another hardware to play with. At times it felt silly to boil water at the yard as a kitchen was available, but this way I got some peace and variety to the activities.

I used the combination of the Outzone burner and the Trangia coffee pot, although there were other pots too.

Morning coffee

From the fleamarket table I did buy a couple of things, a SiDi FPGA multicore and a real crappy joystick. Oh and Deactivators for ZX Spectrum. I'll get back to these later.

Vammala Party 2025 at Demozoo

Zoo 2024

Pit Stop

A weekend was well spent at the Commodore 64 demoparty Zoo, hosted at Orivesi.

I'll mostly focus on my game release The Last Z-8, and avoid doing a separate post about it.

Ok, at least something about the demoparty. We took the partybus from Helsinki, which turned out to be 1-2 hours late! It was alternatively amusing and not-so-amusing in the cold, grey sleet of Helsinki.

Elite

In the warmth of the bus it was already fun to reflect on, but the gods of Murphy do not look so kindly on such frivolity, so a tire fell of from the bus before it even got out of Helsinki.

Fortunately a replacement bus arrived promptly and eventually, finally, we got to the party place.

Lopussa kiitos seizoo

What can I say? The concept was largely the same as 2022. The lobby greets visitors with Reprocade arcades and an exhibition of pixel art. The main hall and a second hall are filled with tables for computers and the audience.

The program was filled with compos, talks, music acts and other party features.

Pixeled Years

The pixel art exhibition was the Pixeled Years on tour, with one piece from yours truly too.

With the Party Feature, the "computer fair" elements could compete too, for example AK rigged a C64 to work with a high-end car simulator gear courtesy of Simucube, SIDrock had a matrix printer digitized image service, and so on. Also the usual market of C64 extensions, parts, magazines, stickers and games.

Stunt Car Racer

The crowd did feel a little more international than before, perhaps an indication of how party has grown from the 2013 days, becoming a more credible outlet for big name C64 demo releases.

The number of productions was quite staggering. (Demozoo link)

The Main Hall

I'm no longer very surprised by all the graphic talent, but I have to admit Worrior1's Binary Saint is a grand piece of PETSCII and Sarge "did it again" and maybe exceeded himself with SLOBBER. 

According to the slides, Multipaint still had a strong presence among the pixeling tools, but Albert is becoming more and more popular I think.

All the Young PETSCII

As my attention had been on creating a game, I could only patch together one PETSCII at the party place, All the Young PETSCII. Given the circumstances I'm strangely pleased with it. Maybe I managed to come slightly outside of my usual style. It landed on the respectable 8 out of 21 position in the compo.

I went all in and submitted a Nick Montfort-inspired Illegal, a 10 PRINT poem, an attempt at teasing something out from the BASIC ROM area where the error messages are contained. Obviously it's not a thing to win any prizes, but it was interesting to try.

Illegal, a 10 PRINT poem

From the main demo event I can't highlight a particular all-round favorite, it looked like one demo excelled in one area whereas some other might exceed in another. Possibly Artline Designs really deserved the win with their coherent Nightfall package. Stereo by Phonics was memorable in using some more unconventional cuts, and the A-side/B-side concept was brought to full fruition with music taking the center stage. Pretzel Logic's Papel is an example of showcasing huge amount of creative talent, but it was perhaps tad too long at that time and hour. Yes, the democompo ended about 3AM, with Extend's demo failing to properly load.

The Last Z-8

For the game dev compo I made The Last Z-8. (csdb link) This took about one month to create, using reasonable time on evenings and weekends, and a couple of crunch sessions near the end.

My workflows and pipelines are rather well established, and I took a relaxed attitude. For once I did not dedicate a whole lot of effort on laboring some technical point. Just sprites, PETSCII graphics as background, no multiplexing, single raster interrupt, some Goattracker tunes and effects.

I also refrained from creating any specific tools, instead using Spritemate and/or editing sprites directly in the source code for the graphics.

Intro Screen

For The Last Z-8, I mixed and mashed various games, but ultimately what it looks like is a Ghostbusters-remake, which is misleading as it's actually not very similar. 

But especially it has nearly nothing to do with The Last V-8, as I decided on the name rather late in the process.

You are first confronted with the post-apocalyptic city map, from where the other game parts are then accessed.

The City map

The car driving sequence is a Moon Patrol-style minigame paying homage to the Parker Brothers' James Bond game, and some elements may be more reminiscent of Ocean's Miami Vice.

In fact, the game started growing from trying to make some kind of send-up of that Bond game.

In contrast to Ghostbusters, you need to avoid the ghosts even in the parts where you'd be vacuuming them in the original game. Instead of trying to keep the "city energy" level low, you are encouraged to maxx it as soon as possible. There's no money and no business and no shop.

Driving to the location

All in all I tried to combine elements from as many games as possible. At beginning, the ambition was larger and I intended to have more silly minigames, but the end result only has two distinct sequences apart from the repeated map/driving/trapping screens.

The map screen has a very minimal effect on how the game plays. You may lose just a slightly more zonk energy if you choose a less optimal route.

Trapping them ghosties

Though I feel releases should be fire-and-forget, I may still want to return to this and tinker the game balance and other aspects. There's still memory left a-plenty. But no promise, really.

The games could be pre-released to the audiences already before the party. After I saw herra47 from Jani Parviainen (link) and Aquarius from Aleksi Eeben (link), I knew one of these would win and my work would place third at best. Which it did!

A detail: my game had a small Leisuresuit Larry -tribute in place, but seeing that Jani was making an entire Larry-based game, I removed it. But the reason the guy sprite is as tall as it is, is kind of because of that Larry reference!

The video could have been better edited, showing more of the game content (there is more) but I sort of doubted it would help, so I just let it show the first few minutes of the repetitive gameplay.

I also participated in the panel discussion led by Mikko Heinonen of Skrolli and V2 "let's play" videos fame, joining with industry veteran Miha Rinne and all-round clever guy Aleksi Eeben. Perhaps there were no huge surprises to the audience, but at least fun was had by the panelists. The enthusiasm tends to be infectious, and suddenly you can see the productions are important to the authors, unlike the typical Finnish "I just did this blah blah nerd thing and it was really nothing".

More Zoo next year!

Altparty 2024

The ceremony's about to begin

I probably shouldn't make a party report before the party has ended, but hey, it's alt, it's different!

I confess I added Alt Party (11-13 October 2024, Helsinki, Museum of Technology) to the year's party roster because I just couldn't avoid going to a demoparty so near. No hotels, no badly slept nights, no stressing about the contents of my bag.

Not been to Alt Party before, there was considerable "party shyness" on my part. Even if I had some more time on my hands lately, not so sure if I would have dared to contribute to a demoparty I know so little of, and that prides on doing things differently.

Perhaps many others felt like it too, as the number of entries in compos were rather low, not in proportion to the amount of people I saw in the audience.

AI music compo starting

I was impressed by the music compos, because in some parties it becomes something of a chore. But here the low number of entries was beneficial, so the obscure music compo stayed fresh and not tiresome. 

At some point of AI music compo I could have started wondering why I need to listen to this, but then it was already over. I feel we also witnessed some reverse cheating, as at least one of the songs didn't sound like it was only a result of a prompt (and no prompt was given).

Alt Party might be a little flexible in how the compo rules are interpreted, but it may also be they needed take "all in" to have at least a number of works.

Ultimately the demo compos were fine, and the "dynamic demo" is an interesting category, having to prove that your demo has a realtime element in that it plays a little differently each time – it's not an animation or a music video. I expected having to view the demo twice would be boring, but it was in fact quite intriguing. Certainly some succeeded better in making a re-watchable demo than others.

What was dubbed as the "Temple" for this weekend

The milieu of the Museum of Technology, and the exhibition itself is worth visiting. The party organizers had gone through the effort of integrating demo culture in some of the permanent exhibition, and I felt this was a good idea. 

Esko

I'd not been there before so overall the weekend was of high value. The normal exhibition features things like old TVs, radios, computers, industrial control equipment, but also vehicles and tools. This is a very suitable environment for a demoparty.

They put a färjan in a färjan

Skrolli magazine was again present, with a Commodore 128 running Super Mario, Spike on a Vectrex, and some obscure Japanese(?) computer I already forgot. This time did 292 with the "speden spelit" speed challenge, trying a two hand approach. Apparently someone had broken 400+.

For me, the most interesting single piece of hardware on display was the Canon Cat, in working condition and you could type and try the LEAP-based text navigation. A couple of Forth-based entries were present in the 256-byte compos. I forgot who brought the Cat there, but will add that information later.

Canon Cat

Prof. Nick Montfort gave a remote presentation, going through the generative text art angle he has been exploring, mostly in the context of WWW and in the frame of collaboration. Although the "10 PRINT" work is legendary and there was ample contextualization, the presentation might have rubbed a part of the audience wrong way.

At least one person opined it was "shit" (!) and comparable to BASIC hobbyist stuff of early 1980s. The latter evaluation is perhaps not wrong, as Montfort can just as well align himself with the demoscene, Brian Eno or David Ahl's book of Basic Computer Games.

Montfort has done a consistent body of work at the uneasy intersection of demoscene, computer history, art and the study of language. Perhaps Montfort doesn't even need the demoscene, but I feel the demoscene needs people like Montfort.

Nick Montfort

It may be that going to a demoparty so near removes some of the excitement of visiting an "other" place. It became rather easy to just jump in at a convenient point of the schedule, and then leave when it looked like nothing was happening any more.

As often happens with these things, "if only I had known" I could have cobbled together some filler entries. Maybe I will be wiser the next time, if there's another Alt Party.

River Vantaa

Vammala Party 2024

This was the thirtieth Vammala Party, and Thirty years of Vammala Party. It was also the tenth anniversary for me, and the eleventh visit overall. 

The location is the almost standard Kauppila farm, with good accommodation and suitable outdoors options. The weather was mixed, but not limiting in any way.

The event is not purely a demoparty, one could say the demoscene events only occupy one corner of the whole thing. This in some ways makes it more appealing than many demoparties, but it's also apparent the compos don't have many entries.

The Wild compo was strong as usual, there are even certain traditions and styles observed, which have grown (or in-grown) during the years.

I had nothing to contribute beforehand to the compos, except an idea for the Tuplain compo where existing youtube audio is combined with another video. I combined a slowed down C64 Delta footage with Koyaanisqatsi music. When I have little expectations about winning the compo, I submit something I'd personally like to see, or want to show to others.

The reverse also exists, of combining slowed down SID Delta music with a Koyaanisqatsi clip, but I spared the audience from this as the music sounded rather horrible.

The customary on-site Commodore 64 PETSCII was done, and it turned out ok.

Pals, Commodore 64 PETSCII

Then I began working on a Tic-80 fantasy console image. This I supposed would be small enough to do on location. Yet my ambition grew and I saw the idea would not really fit into that resolution. So, I switched over to Atari ST format and kept on pixeling.

I am working on adding a Tic-80 mode to Multipaint, but the more I understand about it the less interesting it seems. With 24-bit RGB colors, the mode is so flexible as to be almost pointless.

Also, using the two layers, 32 colors could be invoked, and with some tricks I believe even more is possible. So I could almost just as well enable a low resolution 24-bit RGB mode. Meh.

But enough of that.

Pixels in Space, Atari ST, 320x200, 16 colors out of 512

The Atari ST outcome is nice, and although I could see a few more evenings would help a little, the hands are a little lazy and the dithering could be more refined. But there's also a certain roughness I like.

Perhaps using the default Tic-80 palette as a starting point helped take the image in this direction, instead of doing the "one color slide and accents" approach. I'm also relatively unaware what peak Atari ST images look like, so I was not too much pressured by precedents.

https://demozoo.org/parties/5037/

Zoo 2022

The largest Finnish Commodore 64 demoscene party, Zoo Party, took place in Orivesi campus 28-30th of October, 2022. Although 2021 saw the mostly-online "World Wide Zoo" event, there really hasn't been a proper Zoo party since 2019.

Given the somewhat lacklustre Assembly 2022, I had mixed expectations. Have sceners been sharpening their weapons and ready to release their pent-up creativity in full pressure? Or do we get to see a small batch of zombified entries?

The Party Bus arrangement made it easy to join from Helsinki to the party location somewhat east of Tampere. A train would have worked well too. It was already known there would be rather many participants, and the bus was quite full. As the evening turned from the depressing grey to night-time darkness, the atmosphere began to build up.

It was nice to see the campus setting had far more space than that hotel at Akaa, and the accommodation was very good.

At this point I have to say the Akaa hotel (2013-2019) had a nice atmosphere and the mezzanine added some "dimension" to the space. Yes, having a sports hall as the main party space just doesn't have that Kaurismäki/David Lynch feel that the tiny hotel had.

But still I'd say overall this location wins and when it comes to sitting in front of your C64 and enjoying the party audiovisuals, the architecture doesn't matter that much. Also, in Akaa the bar in the party hall was something of a mixed blessing.

The responsibility of feeding, when carried by the party organizers, was unclear at times. But as there was an arrangement with the house kitchen, the breakfast and supper were professional. As a welcome bonus, Wide Load additionally provided hot dogs, if you were there at the right time. Now there were no pre-bought beer tokens, and beer did flow freely, up to the rumored 700 liters in total.

Entering the foyer, one was greeted with arcade game selection from Reprocade: Wizard of Wor, Crystal Castles, Tempest and Klax. I was able to try each one quickly during the party. 

The merchandise was there too, notably the obligatory Zoo T-shirts and the new Finnsids II SID album. The exhibition of Game Boy art, displayed on real Game Boys, was an additional curiosity. That's a rather hardcore display format for graphics! The entrance space also hosted the flea market on Saturday, and you could also upgrade your C64 with diverse gear. I bought a replacement PSU and I'll discuss that in another blog post.

As usual, there were a couple of talks. One was Miha Rinne, a long time game industry professional and the author of the graphic novel Journeys in Game Industry (Matkailua Pelialalla). He told of resurrecting a very old C64 game project called Undead, with side-scrolling zombie smashing fun. The completely new version will re-use the concept of that old game with new graphics and sound. Interestingly for me, at least some of the background graphics had been mocked up with Multipaint.

Lasse Öörni AKA Cadaver, of the Goattracker fame, is of course also known for the C64 games such as Metal Warrior and Hessian. He showed interesting details about the tools and cross-development environments he had built for game development.

Both of the presentations seemed to highlight the importance of self-made (or in-house) tools that can be even particular to one game project. In Rinne's case this approach enables the designer to build game content without having to become entangled with the coding. In contrast, Öörni, coding everything on his own, could explore the possibilities of memory- and speed optimized level storage through creating his own map editors.

The musical acts were there too, such as Terracuda (Deetsay/Tero and Barracuda) and 8-bits high. I would enjoy these shows but somehow tend to miss them as there's either something else to do or I'm already asleep. At least 8-bits high are gigging here and there, so you don't have to go to a demoparty to hear them.

Off to the compos.

Zoo Kids was a fun competition for kids, let's say the daughters and sons of middle-aged sceners. The works were submitted remotely (I doubt many would bring their kids to Zoo) And it was nice to see Multipaint used for this purpose too.

For the SID music compo, my seat wasn't probably at the best place so I grew a little weary of the fat kick sounds and had to move farther away. After the party, I enjoyed some of the winning works at the comfort of my home. To me SIDs are best enjoyed in small quantities, and Zoo often has dozens of pieces!

In the graphics compo many reported that Multipaint was part of their tool palette, which was a pleasant surprise. Clearly, over the the years the software has grown steadily in popularity to the point that a number of people came to comment on the software, often with some development ideas.

Cartoonzone

I worked on my compo entry image for quite a while and to me Cartoonzone represents quite well the kind of picture I really want to do currently. It combines Multipaint work with modest sprite multiplexing. Unfortunately it did not do especially well at the compo, I hoped it would land in the top 10.

The more jokey PETSCII, Samantha Fox Strip Poker, actually did reach position 6. Overall the compo had a solid selection of great works, but PETSCII perhaps isn't able to impress me so much as it did back in 2013-2015. Perhaps Peak PETSCII has been reached?

Samantha Fox Strip Poker

Earlier in the autumn, I still had some hopes to contributing to the game compo, but these hopes withered as the deadline loomed. Especially the last few weeks before the party were not conducive to finishing a game project, doing the graphics entry was enough. Although the number of entries was not high, the quality was pretty good. Perhaps not a surprise the more humorous and "demoscene-esque" of the games won (Burger Ninja) rather than the one I felt had a solid game concept (Knight Trap).

And let's not confuse this Game Making compo with the games compos. Lumberjack was surprisingly exciting to follow as the players one-upped in what appeared to be quite an intense and stressful game.

Cosmic Convoy

The disc cover compo doesn't have that many entries, so it wasn't impossible to get into 3rd position. It's a compo I have often wanted to contribute to. But I rarely get into the mood before the party, and when at the party place the time is often spent on other things. This time it was possible and there were some spots where I could advance the drawing while eating and listening to others.

I'm a little confused why Party Feature and Wild Compo need to exist as separate categories, but I guess it's more comfortable to submit to Feature things that would be at the party in any case, such as logo banners. The Wild I guess is still reserved for the video works and alternate computer platforms.

Oh, and by the way why is it ok to play SIDs on top of graphics entries, but not ok to show graphics while SIDs are playing?

The demo compo was so late and we knew there would be a huge number of long-ish demos, so frankly I had a nap during it. But from what I saw the quality and number of the best demos was really high.

So, yes, to answer my question, it looks like Zoo and the C64 sceners were back in full force.

Zoo 2022:  5/5, I'd take part again.

Vammala Party 2021

The yearly Vammala Party has become nearly a ritual. It is fortunate that the party could have been arranged during these times.

Vammala Party is a 2-3 day event, with emphasis on retro games, tech and demos. Apart from other fun activities there are game competitions and also demoscene compos.

This time I really could not bring myself to do any graphics, not even a PETSCII. But I took part in the demo compo and a couple of other events.

re_monument

This is a demo I made for the Vammala Party 2021 event, called re_monument.

Originally I made it with Javascript, but then found it problematic to auto-play music on a browser (due to some restrictions placed by browsers) so I switched over to Processing.

The program repetitively introduces a set of boxes and moves both them and the camera.

The starting point is always 64 boxes in a 4x4x4 matrix. The sizes are randomized, but only so there are either sticks or flat planes.

The boxes then find their way towards the coordinate center of the universe, but without allowing any of the boxes to overlap. 

What then results is a kind of abstract complex shape that occasionally resembles a sculpture and sometimes an interior.

Originally this was it, but to make it into a "demo" I had to limit the time to something that is bearable to watch, add music and preferably synchronize the motion with the music.

Earlier sketch

To give more variety I created a script to control camera rotation speed, dolly in/out and the speed of convergence (which can also be negative).

The script also controls whether the box configuration is reset or not, so one set of boxes can first "explode" and then come back together.

To add some colour I changed the background, but then felt a gradient would look nice. Adding a large sphere object was the laziest way to do it. Processing happily renders it from the inside too, and adds the directional light shading to it.

I did experiment with a skybox textured with stars and other patterns, but felt that for my poor eyes the added motion was too much.

From a demo point of view, even more variety could have been helpful. This might have been done even without adding properly new parts, but I kind of liked the single-mindedness of the original concept and didn't want to go too far away from it.

The demo ended up fourth place. The quality of entries was quite high this year and boring/serious things like this don't usually win. Admittedly it does stretch the single "effect" rather thin.

Oh and the music likely took more effort than the actual code. I used Korg Microkorg, Korg Volca FM, Korg Electribe, Fostex MR-8 multitracker and a secret sequencer.

 

Other activities

I participated in the Xenocider e-sport event. More precisely, it was the Fantasy Land bonus game included with that game. 

The game is a modern homebrew remake of Space Harrier, but recreated with 3D objects on a Sega Dreamcast console.

Not my turn

Each participant played the game twice and the highest score won. And I did win!

In this compo setup, each player was bound to learn from looking at the previous players' efforts. When my turn came I had already memorized a couple of things such as how to deal with the first boss fights.

During play I realized that by destroying as much landscape as possible gives a meagre but constant influx of score, which in turn helps get extra lives. It may be the next players did not get this as fully.

As the Xenocider compo took so long the organizers chose not to arrange the Laguna Racer competition, which was sad as this game was open for practice.

Laguna Racer

I also participated in the "tuplain" competition where a video and audio are combined to produce a humorous or a thoughtful effect (usually people go for the funniness here).

My combination doesn't make sense for the non-Finnish speaking audiences but here's the link anyway:

http://cce.kapsi.fi/tuplain/?audio=_DjmRr9FKxw&video=nAEil3_D03k&astart=96&vs=151&vrate=1.0

I'm thinking it's best if two unfunny elements together produce something hilarious. Here the video (Gloria Estefan's Doctor Beat) is already quite funny by itself, so I would have felt a little bad for winning with it. I did end up second place which is fine.