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Comments from the European Jagfest:
Peter (cf6b.germany.net), posted on November 12, 2000, at 13:56:09:
Wow! The Jagfest was great. It was amazing to see all those cool people together. I had a great time and the atmosphere was superb. It was nice to see people you never seen before or knew just from the net. I have to say that it was the coolest experience since I own a Jag. Thanks to all of you. And finally I could get my hands on Battlesphere and play it at least for a little while. WOW!WOW!WOW! Hey you guys at Scatologic did a great job. I WANT THIS GAME!:-) A friend of mine couldnīt stop playing it. Everyone around him had packed their stuff to leave because it was getting late but he was glued to the screen. He couldnīt let his hands of the Joypad. Iīm sure I would have ended like this if he hadnīt insisted to play after I played it for a little time. Thanks...now I have only one question... :-) Who is going to give me his Battlesphere.... Ohhh so many? I see, I still have to wait a little. So good night, Iīm going to sleep with a smile on my Face.
Smokey (ncgent01.telenet-ops.be), posted on November 13, 2000, at 04:06:28:
I had to wake up at 5 am to catch the train to Winterswijk in Netherlands there the DVD dad came to pick me up. The Jagfest its self was Great there were 16 people (In Michael Turner's words, "We've beaten the Americans" ), all hardcore to the bone... If you see photos of the american fests, you see that it's all very clean and boring. Not so in Europe, the place was littered with jag stuff. I played all the games I tought I never would play: Native, Phaze Zero, Jagman, some strange asteriod game (not by sinistar dev), and I hooked my Jag to another one and we had great fun playing networked Doom, Battlesphere and Aircars :) I also had a lot of fun playing games I don't have and so planning my next purchase like Zero5 (wich I'm certainly gonna buy), Protector, MC3D... The tournaments didn't happen because there was no time left. What was alo really cool, is they had this projector with a jag hangin on it, So you could play games on a cinema screen. That really rocked. I would like to thank the DVD and his Dad for bringing me to the train station, and say hello to everybody :)
JustClaws (cs45.esoc.esa.de), posted on November 13, 2000, at 05:15:14:
Hello! eJagFest (AKA Euro JagFest) was a great success! We won the title "Biggest JagFest in
2000," no doubt!! Matthias Domin and I arrived soon after the event started, and I think we were the
first foreign people to arrive. At first, we were disappointed to find that only 5 people were
there. As we started to setup our machines, new people kept on arriving, so many that
tables, power sockets, and monitors were in short supply. Yes, it was rocking! Rock music was
playing the background, with Jaguar games in action all around the room. There was a bar with soft
drinks to buy (and some Groelsch!!), but no food to speak of (We all fasted for Jag!). Lars had
written an "eJagFest Demo" with a nice parallax display, and built-in Jag CD player.. Soon after
we arrived, a ceiling-mounted projecter was brought into action (good job I thought, to put my extra
long SCART - A/V cables), and so lots of games were played on the 15' projection screen! As if
that wasn't good enough, a few minutes later, the stereo sound from my A/V lead was being
pumped through the wall mounted speakers shaking the room! I brought two Battlesphere cartridges,
and two Aircars, while other people brought two Dooms, so networked games were going on virtually all day.
Battlesphere was played both networked and single-player, although people found it hard to "get
into" at first. I tried to explain and demo it, and I also put up the "Yakkity Yak VLM" cheat on
the projector... but we didn't put up the real VLM as comparison. Other games demo'd were the
Songbird games, with Protector, SkyHammer, and Soccer Kid playing. I think every
Jaguar and Jaguar CD game was played, and it was a great opportunity to see how many Jaguar
fans there are, having so much fun! There were some contests running, and I hear that there were
some prizes, posters, and what not, but unfortunately, I was too busy to get involved... I heard plenty
of Ultra Vortek and Primal Rage in action, along with a constant background of Tempest and
NBA Jam, no doubt some Team-Tap games as well. Publicity for eJagFest was very limited.
The location was good, but for a one-day event, still a long way to travel. People travelled from all
around Germany and Holland, and there were guys from Belgium, and maybe other countries (I'm
English, but living in Germany and I added an English view!). Sorry if I've forgotten your nationality
here too! Even driving at 120+ M/H (cool German autobahns) we had a long drive, and the
journey back was also very tiring, as rain was so heavy we kept expecting to see "Noah's Ark"
floating across the motorway... (No, four hours of high-speed night driving in the pouring rain is
never the most fun end to a day). Several BJL Jaguars were in use, and Matthias and I fielded
questions all day about Jaguar development from interested people, including a group of Falcon
game programmers who were interested in bringing a bit of quality gaming from Falcon to Jaguar
perhaps. Some of us also had Alpines, so Alpine demos were also demonstrated, but BJL was the
devkit of choice (Jugs fatally flawed due to upload speed and lack of Battlesphere carts at the
present time in Europe!!!). Nearly everybody had a Lynx with them, and Matthias Domin was
demonstrating the new Songbird Lynx racer, in both single player and networked play. I was too
busy talking to people and showing demos to get to play much else, Lynx or Jaguar, except
Protector... I saw all the BJL demos running at some point, and people were very interested to
know about some of the "announced" games which have not been released. I had to point out that
these are mainly just intro demos, and very few real games are available today. (e.g. Arkanna,
Assassin, and stuff from BadCoder). Also, Gorf, Jagmania, Native, and some prototypes (I wished
we'd had a small demo of Gorf-Pluz too!). Only Songbird/Scott Walters have some of the games
which were not released.. can you help us next year? People were really pleased to find that the
BJL has several "underground" games built-in, and we hope that next year more demos will be
released. A European team of programmers had been hoping to release a new game for the show,
but other factors meant that this will have to be a follow-up event. Matthias was demonstrating
TOS running on the Jag using the "Jaguar Engine" card, but the IDE LS-120 drive was playing up
after bumps on the journey, but it raised a lot of interest, especially among the Falcon owners who
liked the idea of developing directly on the Jaguar in 'C,' with keyboard and mouse and hard disk.
BiTmAsTeR be praised I say! There was no selling/buying done at the show, no dealer tables, but
there were people involved with the Jaguar market one way or another, and one guy (forget his
name) was talking about NUON Extivas which should be in Europe early next year (Yeah!). There
was a lot of interest, but apparently now Samsung says they are completely SOLD-OUT of them,
so delivery will be a long-time, even in America!! At the end of the day (once several people had
left), we got a group photograph done, using the self-timer on my camera, and we would all have
been in the picture had I not blotted Lars out trying to avoid blotting out several other guys (I had
to dash from the camera to get in shot). I gave a disk of photos to Lars (Starcat) so do expect to
see them on the eJagFest site soon... DVD should know total visitors, but I suspect it will be lower
than the real number, because we saw people we never got to talk to, coming and going all day,
but it was certainly over 20... I had a great time, and tiring as it was, I'd do the drive again, as
talking to so many possible new developers was good, only the future will say if any of them end up
doing good stuff on Jaguar! It certainly made me feel less like the only Jag owner in Europe, playing
games, and the number of younger Jaguar players bodes well for the future! Suggestions for next
year? Badges, and tickets. Nobody knew everybody else at the event, and without badges we
often got talking and only discovered later who somebody was... and I still want a ticket to
remember the event later! A more southern European location, Bavaria maybe... (Maybe we
should hold it just before Oktoberfest, and then we might get Austrian, Italian and French visitors
too... as there are many fans there, also). Let's extend JagFest to include Lynx in a bigger more
official way, along with the Nuon players. So... the gauntlet is now thrown to you American guys-
we won the title "Biggest JagFest in 2000," so let's see who can win the title for the year 2001!
Peter (again :) (cf6b.germany.net), posted on November 13, 2000, at 05:46:22:
Hey Richard, good report. I wanted to write one but your was so detailed and long.. well, you took
some work away from me :) I just wanted to thank my mother for baking, because it was really
the only thing we had to eat at the Fest. I hope everybody liked those "donīt know how to call
them in english" :) So, for the next time, we have to think of some real food.. For the next fest, I also
would like to have something like an, letīs say intro, where everybody is welcomed and gets to
know the others. I tried my best to get to know everybody, but the problem was that sometimes it
was so chaotic or loud or idontknowwhat, that I couldn't remember everyoneīs name. Itīs a pity, but
on the other hand I made contact to other people I never knew, so thatīs cool. The people there
were cool and I wanted to say that I liked it very much how friendly everybody was. No one
complained about giving his Jaggames away even to those unknown people. Wow, like I said, the
atmosphere was great. What I liked personally very much was that the projector was conected to
my Jag, due to problems with Richardīs Jag and the projector. It was a cool feeling to have; one
time in my life, Battlesphere stiking into my Jag and playing it on a huge surface. It was a blast! So
for the next fest all we need is: Real tickets like Richard said, food, Introducing everybody Better,
planning for the competition, the same or more of you cool people. Yeah, it rocked.
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