Italy is a nice country to live in. Beautiful lands and seas, snowy mountains and green valleys. Many wonderful girls and a lot of cool guys live in my country and don't forget that we were the original inventors of Pizza and still we are the best pizzas makers.

For sure is a nice place to live or where you can spend your holydays. Huum... but I think that this isn't the right way to do a report for a computer magaZine, so let's start the real report... For many reasons it isn't very nice to be an Italian computer freak. First of all there are hundreds of lamers around there.. for most of the Italian guys the only reason for buying a computer is to play games for hours and hours ! Someone thinks to be a real computer wizard when in fact he isn't able even to turn off the low-pass-filter by a simple assembly instruction.

Many guys changes some stupid ASCII codes with Smart-disk and sell software to other stupid kids. And this is the situation for about the 90% of the computer owners, they only want to gain money and gain as much as possible! Before I started to write this report I read the Italy report of E$G/IBB on Tech-Times 2 and I think he said some rights things but I'm disappointed with him about the slow post.

It isn't everytime true that the post is slow. Many times I get packages from foreigns countries only 3/4 days after they were mailed or when I send some disks to other countries they reach the destination very fast (Isn't it, Majestic ? ). So we can't blame the post so much. I also have to say that there are some nice staff at the post offices ( at least in my city!).

About BBSes, many of them are opening here in Italy, some of them are really good like the Paranoimia/ICS one and some others are good too but the sysops are really lamers. An example is the Robocop BBS, you can find hot stuff here but the sysops are lame since they call themself Quartex Italy. There are many other BBSes with public domain software but in any BBS you can only find foreign cracks from the well known groups.

I think that the main reason of the fact that there are not many Italian good groups is that when one get the original of a game maybe many weeks have passed from the releasing of the cracked version, so it's unuseful to crack it! But some good groups are here! I am sure that all Zine's readers know the living legend (for Italians): Italian Bad Boys.

Surely they are the most famous Italian group (but they have also foreign members) and I think that their success is due to their well-done organization but mostly to the fact that they really like computers (Amiga !!) just to have fun with them and not to gain money and money again! So they are a living example for all Italian beginners who want to start a group.

Of course, there are also some other groups that are worth to be mentioned, they are F4CG, ICS and the old times friends of 2703 Group (now died,sigh!). But if the list of the good ones is really short, the list of the lamers is very looong, here there are some of the lamest: Maksoft (he's the lamest bastard I know in the scene...fuck him !! ), Tmark1 (now Fica, what in Italian means Pussy !!), Robocop, Dominators and so on..

In the last year also some software houses were born in Italy !! Surely they are doing a good work and they already got some international fame with productions like: Italy 90 Soccer, Crimetown Dephts, F1 Manager, Bowls... The two best ones are Simulmondo (Hi Frankie!) and Emotion Soft (They are now working for Mirrorsoft).

About laws and soft police there is not much to say, they are still inactive but something is happening... maybe some laws will be approved by the Parliament but in any case all the action will be against those lamers who sell copied software under the eyes of the police !! So the scene is not so bad here in Italy and many good groups may be founded, so I want to send a message to all italian readers: Stand Up and Fight !!

Paranoid/Phaze 101

This article originally appeared in the Amiga diskmagazine "Zine #2" by Brainstorm 1989.

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