alt.png[In the latest of an occasional series of demoscene-related posts on GameSetWatch before, AteBit's Paul 'EvilPaul' Grenfell looks into Finland's Alternative Party, featuring all kinds of neat demos on weird computer hardware.]

Held between the 23rd and 25th October, The Alternative Party is Finland's "other" big demo party. Following on just a couple of months behind the more mainstream and well-known Assembly, which was also covered in detail on GameSetWatch, "Alt Party" couldn't be more, well, alternative.

Gone is the giant Hartwell ice hockey arena that is the Assembly venue, replaced by the more art-friendly, ex-Nokia owned Cable Factory. Gone too are the thousands of teenage gamers, replaced by cyberpunks and hackers.

The demo competitions at Alt Party are also slightly different. As well as their long running Dynamic Demo competition (a demo that's different every time it runs? What heresy is this!?) this year they also held what seems to be the first ever supercomputer demo competition after managing to secure the use of a Cray CX1!

Unfortunately, not all of this year's demos have made it out to the internet yet. Nonetheless, demoscene powerhouse Pouet.net has information, screenshots, and downloads from many of them, and here are my picks from the ones that have surfaced so far:

Bold by Dvik & Joyrex

Fresh design and great attention to detail in this MSX demo.

Sodium by Rave Network Overscan

A short but sweet Atari ST production. That twister at 55 seconds in looks good enough to eat!

Bad News by kooma
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No video for this one, but then it is a dynamic demo, so you'll need to download and run the Windows executable. It's also one of the most original demo concepts I've seen for a long time - who'd have thought that an RSS reader could be as good as this?

Lateral Surface of Discord by matt current

What we in the trade term "a noise demo".

Fraktaalikaali by Lasi Interactive

One of the Cray supercomputer demos. This one includes, as you might have expected, a deep Mandelbrot zoomer.

Unsigned by Byterapers

A neat little "24" parody starts off this C64 demo.

Man meets machine - Alternative Party 2009 by jumalauta

And finally, here's the invite demo for the party. A Game Boy demo released back in August at Evoke.

As mentioned above, if you like what you see, then be sure to head over to check out the rest of the releases on Pouet.net.