Our flavour

pre-scriptum: before we close this : let us state here that we wrote this during daylight b/c it seemed like an excellent time to check out the meteoriks chairman and his minions picks so its possible by the time anyone reads this post some stuff has been cleared out. Despite that it stands ... we feel that a website thats half slop-werkz with missing or broken or misdirecting links, not even taking the effort to put up videos where they're missing and EVEN HAVING A PICK WITH A VIDEO THATS PRIVATE FOR A SCENE DEMO (??!?) is simply disrespectful if you are going to sit there and vote , bicker and judge on other peoples work and art to decide who gets the prestige for the next year and more chances at free beer and getting laid .. it IS ... we feel so and if that means the bishop wont grant us a pardon for our sins and we go to hell and never have a demo picked, THATS FINE ... WE STILL THINK SO
we'll let you know if we ever submit something, okay?

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We dont think Meteoriks is a democracy but we'll make our personal pick here as we just HAVE to check it out since theres stuff inthere we havent seen yet.

If this is alien to you, please keep in mind that all these are programs ( 'apps' as some say ) executed in real time , none of these are pre-rendered, drawn or montaged video or animation

So we go :

New talent :

the video for inside a laser is private ... that doesnt really spell "access to the people" (it also doesnt spell : Meteoriks checks their shit before putting it online) ... so thats gonna hard to pick

and frankly : a scene-demo with limited access might as well be a scenedemo with copyright and forbidness to spread ... "no comment"

So we're not going into debate on why seven days stands out in its minimalism while Xai is "abit monotone" compared to our pick here and why when you click "video" for revised reality you end up at demozoo. Looking at shadertoy you get the code with it , which makes it look super-impressive ofcourse but we actually strongly recommend that if links are broken or mis-leading there should be an explanation as to why that is (we see "laser" has 1 vote on pouet and no comments either - for a meteoriks nominee, that almost seems

shady ? (pun intended)

orley, for a show hosted in moneyland ... ... well no comment we certainly couldnt hack any of these without severe reading and learning tek-nieks, maybe laser is but since no video we'll pretend we cant see it (it really SHOULD, precious - especially for the most prestigious award of the year and also not have a link that says video next to the one that says demozoo, but then takes you to demozoo - - - i hope they didnt pay you sponsor money for that website but bem, no comment)

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Outstanding concept:

waiting for vp to rise to 100% before we go vocore, its a dead saturday and its really cold again, the weather flips daily- cant be very healthy

Seven days already got the "peurs du noir-art"-award by JoG in the first one consolation round

the winner :

for some reason seven days doesnt seem to have a standalone video either ... someone really took the sponsor money and ran off to the cornerstore nacht-apotheker huh ?

and so the pc crashed twice since we started commenting, maybe they're watching, lol but you know ... we dont do oscars so whatever the fuck it is if meteoriks is oscars then we'll be will smith punching that fucker for being out of line where you dont dare b/c you SO want it, is that okay ?

okay then.

Poligon (to us) is amazing but doesnt count here since its stop-motion animation, not executed code - hm mmm hmmmm, well we certainly dont wanna break it down. If you put this up for a vimeo choice of the year award to us it would be a topper but to us here its out of place.

Amazing one and all entries, we certainly couldnt do that better or probably even get close (not sure if meteoriks has entries or if the chairman picks it and its about politics and exposure , whatever it is, it seems to be a most wanted award and its something to look out for every year since you get a lot of ultracool shiney in your face - things that make you go OOO!)

Best Executable Graphics:

Again : these are programs so if theres a blender render in it we will have to leave it out.

and ... again (lol?) : all the video links lead to demozoo, someone must have been in a REAL hurry to whip something out of wordpress and go snorting.

Since we're too lazy to boot windows, download install and run everything (pardon us, WE dont get sponsor money to do a website about it) we'll assume its all legit coding and

pick

Dreamtime Return

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Best oldskool production

This is a real tuff nut ... we'll assume the chairman at meteoriks prefers tektek but how do you choose between "whats the best demo over different platforms" ?

No clue - all four platforms there have their own thing so

We'd pick skybox

but lets go with

and since the C64 deserves its own category (haha ...)

Best lastscenestandingmachinethatneverdied production

probably even if pumpkins were in it skybox might still have caught us with the out of the boxness ...

by now the pc has crashed 3 times (no that doesnt happen normally) so we'll assume someone has more time rigging the elections than they have spending money on the website to make links do what they say. (its not about this or that but personally if someone paid us swiss money to do it we'd be ashamed to put it out like that ... but maybe its dutch-american business style like block one selling a quick billion overnight and still havent done shit)

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OH (aha LOL)

"best midskool"

if you were in it it might have shown theres some kind of childish debate ongoing which seems to make most noise coming out of 16 bit and respectively amiga-mouths on how it deserves its own category ... we shall assume this is accomodation (otherwise these would be with oldskool before it mattered)

might as well spend the afternoon watching telly then ... the vocore wont run away - life wont get better, prices wont go down, and crotters money wont be re-distributed to fix the economy anyway (i wonder how the heart medicine supply will be by next year b/c if it isnt the five governments here will probably have less to worry about their pension fund they spent ... OOOOOOOOOOOOOOO#offtopic)

Boaw , yea, but you can keep your meteoriks award (you cant even do a fucking website so who dafuk is voting there?) - besides youd have to send us a sceneID anyway or we cant submit and were not really interested in competition because we're weird. JUST GIVE US THE SHINEY.

next

no thats no offense, thats just our way of noticing how this thing is subpar for the buzz it gets - ITS DISRESPECTFUL in other words - we understand we'll never get a job in town, get in line and besides ... if you wanted us to have one you should have come up with that 20 years ago before it broke for good.

Other than that you'll have to wait until we get the clout to do an own event like what was that "the belgian beer brigade" or something for rewire (was that rewire?) up until the mayans destroyed the world.

which wont happen ofcourse since we dont lick balls and everyone takes it the wrong way but its okey to be up OUR ass all the time.

a HA

so

Well we dont know the first thing (personally wed say "jack fucking shit") about the nintendo gamecube so we cant assess how technically impressive it is but the fact that its there must mean something - assuming it doesnt have hardware embedded tweening opcodes or something similar (like a tic has drawellipse , which is fine AGK has that too, but AGK aint real coding b/c you do the loops in javascript , not basic .. you c ?) -
(we dont want to downplay the ability of the meteoriks chairman/dictator (it SAYS SO on the site ... see for yourself :) to have an eye for gud although we also cant shake the feeling a certain level of ego, politics, handshake-day and kissing the bishops ... ring is involved in one way or another (just like it will be with all major events who grew big enough to grow an ego - its "only normal" and its "only human" ... not everyone can be a stranded alien) -

The Atari demo certainly gets down, and not just because of its outspoken woke-resistor factor. We first was like hm, is this on overclocked rare falcon or something but no it isnt

despite that

we'll go with the batman group

not to prove we are not anti-amiga (as we keep saying : if you want to THEN SEND US ONE how else can we find out about its magnificence?) but b/c we are a sucker for direction and storyboards (if possible combined with grand display of level0-sync with the machine) and if one thing : the batman group hasnt failed so far in anything we have seen (we havent seen all demos on the planet btw ... surprisingly but true)

AND

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add

without Atari there would be no jobs ,, ... euh SCENE

award goes to

because Atari deserves its own section (haha)

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and on

Best soundtrack

hmmmmmmm .....

tuff, how do you discern between gameboy and full studio production level high end music when you have to pick that ? WE dont know .. theres also minor factors like what if you like slayer ... luckily we ran ancien belgique flat over all from Xen cuts over roni Size to Hatebreed in Tilburg and six times metallica, (five ?) times chemical brothers, four times monster magnet, dj shadow & chemist, ... an pierle satoko fuji, bootsy collins, yes ... closest thing to james brown alive ... to just name a few ... as we say so lots : we werent born like this, mister sir and people who know how its done broke us into shards and then complain we're not broken but its lazy and when we slug them for being an ass try to sue us, slander us, stalk us, stick us in a hole and claim everything we say aint true b/c it makes them look bad ...

have at it

Sooooo (yea but thats just us getting interrupted, DO YOU REALLY THINK we could have been all that outgoing and done social work studies after the fact if we were like that before it got like this?)

tsch ....

Well, ... other than the discotune its all very newskool demo-sceneish, and most of these picks seem to be able to hold their own in more than one category at least but at then end,

to us, its head & shoulders :

gouts et couleurs, man ... unless you're a music hooligan who beats up people during the weekend for not liking your style these things are 99.9% personal.

here to us clear as day : to quote Vadim "straight hardcore - no singing on it" or we could quote urban dance squad on hiphop & r&b if need be

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Outstanding technical achievement:

Well yea , dont underestimate scrolling fullscreen bitmaps on oldskool gear even if it has an inyourface-palette ...
Dont underestimate color dithering , image scaling and rotation and especially video to ascii conversion in a language that likely doesnt have SetDisplaySize() opcodes with a sub-gameboy rated palette

Again this is kinda hard since if you're a hi-end 4k pc games whos daddy buys the latest rtx5 series next year in preorder you might think "man that atari xl thing looks bleh" but we personally, like with the gamecube dont know the first thing about it and cant assess how technically impressive it is, only through the fact that it got picked to be here and we still trust meteoriks to not be 100% politics (yet heheh - CAN YOU STAND THE TEST OF TIME MUAHAHAH)

We would have gone for

for bonkers-of-the-year award BUT

we'll consider meteoriks to consider doing video to ascii on a pet from the 1800s more tek-savvy than soldering a pi to a pharmacy sign ... WHICH IN A CODING WAY ... it very likely is

so we pick from the picks :

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Best visuals:

type 4096 letters in a text file and see if you can turn that into stahlbeton ... homework for the day. (or 4300something and see if you can turn that into El Gore), we got cables.gl on the stack just like tooll.io and there must be dozens of "for kids who cant afford heroin"-notch type engines available ... we think the stack has a bottomless pit since it broke and thats why it never overflows anymore so we just keep adding even if its gonna be quite impossible within this life without alien stemcelltherapy (and probably without a budget which wont get bigger as cost gets higher down below the belt here)

We're gonna go with

sheer impressiveness, (as are all the others, WAY above our personal level of programming and graphical prowess) but the organic feel of this one is less than standard issue and for some reason (even if its above our level) it just feels like that look is the hardest to achieve in this section from the picks provided (AND if you had shown this to the guys doing starcraft back when "what is google? o something like yahoo, check it out" theyd have had a braingasm in their panties. Even 2023 being today its STILL mighty impressive if thats all code (doesnt mean textures arent rendered by default but if its 4k or so its very likely they are not, which actually makes it EVEN MORE impressive)

and last but not least ?

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best high-end intro -

if we have to give a reason id say ... not just because we heart awesome fluid/liquid physics or it has a non-scenestandard guitar track but because it looks like its "not just procedural effects" ...
if that makes any sense to anyone :) but frankly we prefer to say "CUZ!" gouts et couleurs ... we dont have to make sense after all we are a child of the universe and a luna(-tic) moonchild as well

o it wasnt over yet ...

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Best direction

oooow theres the stop-motion anim again, dont take this wrong, it is absolutely fucking awesome, we just feel its out of place in this litterpick of the pack page event, its more like a OMG did you see the vimeo awards - thing ... dont let that get you down, you are AWESOME!

well thats gonna be Ninjadev

(dont place bets , we dont mean thats gonna be - please dont use a bot to translate this we are erratic broken beings stuck in one)

If thats webgl ... well colour me impressed, but if its direction then color me impressed too - after 40 years of computers im not sure what kind of tektek is amazing other than hacking old machines to do new stuff b/c wether you do stuff on a 4000 or a 5000 or a next gen 50k euro ryzen cpu + matching card .... you know ... it comes down to the gimmick then at the finish line. Just like batman group ninjadev has failed to not amaze yet (which doesnt mean we have seen all the prods in the world or possibly theirs for that matter)

and finally last but not least (the body is complaining ...)

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Best high-end demo -

these are probably things we cant even run in 4k on the best combination of hardware we can muster with whats available here (systems arent solid states, they're fluid btw if you dont buy rigs that void warranty when opened or 10k laptops that last about a year before they start failing ...)

eum
euhm

already seen the box - someones gonna have to try hard or its gonna be that one

mh well that one should come with an epilepsy warning and might have gotten best soundtrack for us if it were in that section but

close call with bayoleya because its almost from software miyazaki material but

"je ne sais quoi" gouts et couleurs

wellllll

its got the lighting, its got particles, its got 4k level texturing shading, sharp syncronization, direction, everything packed in one box (!) AND its got lulz

AND if it were in the soundtrack section the solid groovalicious chemical beat would probably have gotten our vote ...

and ...

so much detail in so little time its by-the-second storyboard from the looks of it

if we ever come up with something THAT level if it lasts even only 30 seconds on execution we're certain to hang over next day

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*phew*

when we decided to only do #ourstuff ... if we'd known that involved this much typing because the words just wont stop like a hooligan raving about his team and how they bonked the e-side into the w-corner last time we might ... well no, this is just gud for us and since no one has in the last 20 years WE are gonna stick with whats gud for us.

The most impressive line-up again, awesome people doing awesome stuff every day BECAUSE THEY WANNA (unless today meteoriks comes with 1 million suis francs ? DOES IT? otherwise we're gonna buy a book on procedural miyazaki generators FAAST)

Certainly makes you wanna sit down, open up a can of google and start typing. and hey

if you secretly like programming and you get that "hey i did that" backpatself moment while no ones in the room to hear the sound of one tree clapping ... dont get discouraged by watching all this : these are like the cream of the crop, rise to the top, but they're certainly not the only ones, there must be tons out there who never get noticed, just like you have with any music or visual arts ... we see stuff released daily that we think "we can certainly do that" and a lof of stuff released yearly , monthly or weekly that we think "man, would it be nice if we could do that" - WHO CARES

if you dont like the programming then its already fukt ... and that is that ... thanks for the selection, chairman Dictator (heh) ...

this is OUR personal flavour, this means nothing - we are no one and we also hate the spotlight ... if you wanna see who wins official you'll have to check the site ....

its

time for 1st cycle, the cryotube in the borgchamber is beeping.

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As stated before : we assume all picks are realtime executed executables, not animations, cgi or node-based setups that have been pre-rendered, if any of them are, we remove that from our choice (its not like you can tell that from a vid ofcourse)

And maybe one more thing : why not a section on "sizecoding under 512 bytes" ? it can be machine irrelevant if you have the right angle actually why not have sizecoding since its demo-coding but BEM ... not our event, not our choice ...

Small ps :

Well we certainly would like to thank the Chairman and his minions for picking all these fine samples of "YES YOU CAN"

do it without chatGPT

every year its a massive source of inspiration, jawdropping aha erlebnis, wow-factors and o i wanna check how that works +10.000 on the stack, nothing short of that, but our opinion on the site stands.

Must be hard living in disneyland with money and all that, sourcing it out to some guy who's been snorting the advance on synthetic coke instead of checking it or (gods forbid) taking 5 minutes on a high end pc to do a video of something that doesnt have one. Next year give US a million and well do it for you then ... you'll have to bear the language tho unless we can hire Kanamori-chi first to do the talking.

My job is rendering these donuts, officer ...

And then even harder in a generation where on the olympics soon you have to give the black guy a gold medal for being black, the yellow guy disqualified for being russian and the give everyone one for participating so you dont leave anyone out ... its easier if you grew up in raw gravelpits environments probably where someone will take the money in the house after giving you a mercy fuck even if it means you have to beg for food for the rest of the month.

AMAZING NONETHELESS ... certainly half a years worth of third party loaderframes for the site and so much things to put on the stack to learn - sadly only one body in this lifetime and here our priority is mental stability and ... not getting through this because we dont see the end of this within this lifetime (and were not quite 80 yet) for anyone living below the belt as we call that. Takeshi Kovacs style so its gonna be scrubbing and making do with two bits of rope, a nail and half a breadboard that fell off a wagon.

soon enough maybe if this keeps accelerating.

So stuff like this is more than escapism, its healing, its soothing it keeps the head SO busy that pavlov gnome doesnt even get through and this years pick of the litter certainly is an art gallery by itself.

THAT SAID ...

look at the time

almost time to get ready for first cycle (well you try living in a borg cube in enemy territory and see how long you last)

time of writing :
rtxcat@Tyrnannoght:~$ date +%s
1677340929
rtxcat@Tyrnannoght:~$ date
Sat Feb 25 05:02:10 PM CET 2023
rtxcat@Tyrnannoght:~$

its us so it wont be edited before posting ... kanamori doesnt work for free

...? wut ?

o

did you see any kind of "this is made by white/black/brown/yellow/green/male/female/other/whomightormightnotrequiretheirownpronouns"

anywhere ?

thats right

nowhere

none of it :)

no pros no antis either xept

"war aint good for no one" in that one overthere

see ? the only coloured things are the pixels and even the white ones matter ...

for yow-ass then ...

those dam' antisocial hippies