Reply to Re: Crazy old Tim plays all the DMODs
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Thanks for the nice comments, everyone. I'm glad you enjoy my little writeups. I don't really dig the idea of submitting all these as reviews on TDN (I'd have to give The Search for Milli Vanilli a 10/10 for that one to make any sense), but maybe this whole document could be saved on the site in some more browseable form when I'm done with it.
I was going through the release notes for Dink Smallwood and found, to my disappointment, that Seth had made several tweaks to make the game easier by version 1.07. I don't mean to second-guess his ideas on game balance, and the game still felt like a reasonable challenge, but it's not really the same game I played so long ago. Here I thought it was easy because I'd gotten so great at it!
--Mike Snyder's DMODs--
Mike "Wyndo" Snyder was the first person other than Seth Robinson to make a DMOD. In fact, I think he might be the author of the first three DMODs that weren't about searching for faded lip-syncing pop stars. Furthermore, all six of his DMODs came out in 1998, so it makes sense to consider them all together. I'd like to say first that I have a lot of respect for Mike and the projects he was able to complete despite already being very busy. I, by contrast, have got nothing but time and *this* is probably the most productive thing I've done recently.
003: The Scar of David Author: Mike Snyder Release Date: March 22, 1998!
This is the first independent DMOD by such a long length of time that I really can't account for it. I could be wrong, but I can't find any evidence of another DMOD released until June, and I can't find evidence of a DMOD released by somebody other than Snyder until July. Crazy, right? I wonder if he got an early copy of Dink. Anyway, big credit to the guy for being able to pick up DinkC so quickly despite its official documentation being, well, let's say extremely limited.
This DMOD is a weird sort of thing, though. It doesn't make much sense and is almost totally unsatisfying, but hey, it's really more of a proof of concept than anything else, and it succeeds at that with flying colors. Anyway, it's sure better than my first four DMODs.
You meet this guy named David who seeks revenge on a pizza chef. You offer to go rough him up. You meet said pizza chef (In the best thing in the entire DMOD, he speaks in a painfully rendered terrible stereotypical Italian accent) and have to (quite counterintuitively) hit him and then leave, as he's got thousands of hitpoints (I confirmed this by cheating; nothing special happens if you manage to beat him). You must then lie to David and claim you kicked the guy's ass, whereupon you'll get a plot item, go fight some pillbugs, and then talk to somebody to end the DMOD. I'm sorry if that sounds like a walkthrough, but I really don't know what else to say about this bizarre little module. Here's a spoiler about the nature of the "scar."
That ending is as satisfying to experience as it looks. It's actually kind of amusing that the whole premise turns out to have been a sham. Here's a game that mocks you for winning.
Actually, there are two other things worth mentioning. David mentions a "Zolan War," establishing a plotline that runs through all of Mike's DMODs; it kind of blows my mind that he was already planning this. There is also a secret of sorts in this DMOD. During the ending, if you managed to control your urges enough to not kill the duck on the main screen, he tells you to "punch the dead head three times and then talk to him." Well, it's too late, but you restart and go do this to a skull in the bar, and he gives you something you can use to access a secret screen.
Oh boy, right? Now we'll see the real ending. Going this far out of our way has got to pay off.
Actually, what you find is a knight who says, "You found the secret, whoop de doo." "Now what?" queries Dink. "*shrug*"
...I'm not going to lie. This was the first DMOD I ever played, and at this point I began to wonder if I'd been ripped off for my $20.
Actually, if you beat the game again there's some different text congratulating you. Dink says he can't wait until more adventures are made for him; with this, the ribbon is cut on Dink development for the masses. It's a start that promises much more. You could do a lot worse.
004: Dink's Doppleganger Author: Mike Snyder Release Date: June 6, 1998
Yes, "doppelganger" is misspelled. Mike indicated on his website that he'd learned this fact during development, but I guess he didn't end up bothering to fix it, probably for reasons I'll cover below.
This is very impressive for a second effort from somebody who had to pretty much invent the wheel. It's a big mod - Snyder's biggest, I think - that took me well over an hour to finish. It's got some original graphics (like these flying saucers), some MIDI files that Snyder composed himself, a real story told with cutscenes and quite a bit of text, solid map design without hardness errors, and was definitely quite fun at times. In its scope, it wouldn't be matched for some time. Despite this, Dink's Doppleganger as released is just one-third of what Mike Snyder had planned.
As he told on his website (which is, impressively, still up), Mike had planned D's D, as he liked to abbreviate it, as an epic that would be sold for a nominal fee (He actually sold a couple of preorders, which he had to refund). However, he gave up on it due to an argument with his fiancee, who ended up leaving him because he spent so much time on DMODs. At the time, he blamed himself. I wasn't there, of course, but it seems to me that she didn't respect his hobby or his creative drive. I mean, I used to chat with Mike sometimes while playing his browser-based game Lunatix Online, and he seemed like a cool guy. At any rate, Mike is currently married with kids, so he's well past this, but Dink's Doppleganger remains a somewhat awkward and troubling reminder of the tensions between different sides of a man's life that can tear them both apart.
Speaking of opposing sides, the plot of this DMOD concerns a parallel universe where people occupy the opposite side of the moral axis (between good and evil) from the one they do in Dink's universe; Dink being a hero, his counterpart is a villain. You know, like in Star Trek. An evil wizard named Hembar makes the two Dinks switch places in order to prevent Dink from interfering with his evil plans. In the other universe, Dink encounters Hembar's good counterpart and a bunch of peace-loving aliens called Zolans (the implications of which for Dink Prime's universe should be obvious).
This DMOD focuses much more on puzzles than the Action-RPG gameplay that dominated the original Dink Smallwood. Snyder scaled the enemies' HP and Experience points way back - Slimes give 2, Goblins give 3, Slayers give 5 exp. I was still level 3 by the end of it. You start the game (after a fairly lengthy intro cutscene in which an acquaintance of Dink proves himself to be a jerk by plainly announcing his intentions to get a girl drunk so she'll sleep with him, among other events) in a fence maze filled with enemies who are for the most part too powerful for you to fight yet. Once you get out, however, you'll find a +10 sword you can use to generally kill everything in this DMOD in one or at most two hits.
At first, the puzzles are reasonable enough, but I ended up becoming quite frustrated with this DMOD in the end due to "how the frig was I supposed to figure that out" puzzles that impeded my enjoyment and drove me to repeatedly reference a walkthrough. I mean, I'm sure I could have got them eventually, but there's no reason I should have to flounder for half an hour before finally stumbling upon the one completely unimportant-looking pot that I was supposed to check for a hint, for example. There were several puzzles of this variety, and they drag down what's otherwise a good DMOD.
At one point there's a picture of a woman in a certain room. The man there talks about having lost the love of his life. The picture is clearly of Snyder's fiancee (I know this for sure because she appeared as a villain in a Lunatix Online In-Game Module (IGM) that Snyder made. You'll be unsurprised to learn that I coded a few IGMs myself and sucked hard at that too).
One thing I found unique and amusing about this DMOD was the way you're made to take a quiz after reading a series of bitmaps about the good Hembar's backstory to make sure you paid attention. He went to the effort of writing the story, so dang it, you're going to read it! The best part is that, if you get all of the questions wrong, Hembar calls you an idiot and kills you. I always found this to be surprising and pretty hilarious.
After you solve quite a few puzzles and end up transported back to Dink's universe, the game suddenly stops happening. Things that clearly ought to have scripts attached to them do not. Then you encounter a sign. Viewing it displays this...
And that's the end. Beyond that there's quite a bit of map to explore, hinting at what might have been, but there's nothing to find out there but one shiny gold coin, a token for your efforts. It's a strange and disorienting feeling - you're in the middle of a story and it's yanked out from under you. I guess Mike Snyder must have felt something similar.
005: The Quest for Arithia Part 1: The Ninth Lock Author: Mike Snyder Release Date: June 14, 1998
The Quest for Arithia trilogy is set several months before Dink's Doppleganger; Mike's timeline says so, and all the events in the DMODs support this pretty well.
This is a much simpler mod. Dink and a friend set out to find a girl named Arithia, who's in trouble because she possesses the Rozarus, which Hembar could use to control time. I'm sure not all of that is actually revealed in this installment, but hey, that's the plot.
All you really do here is kill a bunch of goblins (like in Doppleganger, they give greatly reduced experience) in order to disengage a bunch of giant locks. Once you do, you can find Arithia's father, who doesn't have a lot of answers for you. It's a simple brawler, but it's fun enough and sets up the trilogy.
006: The Quest for Arithia Part 2: The Rozarus Author: Mike Snyder Release Date: July 5, 1998
The Rozarus is a longer and more involved installment, and it's my favorite of the three parts. Dink and his pal visit a sort of bar/cafe, where the pitiless Goblin who runs the place won't let you leave without paying 810 coins for a couple of meals. There's some pretty amusing stuff in here, including an old woman (?) who demands you bring her pepper, promising you 800 gold in return. When you get back to her, though, she turns you away, saying she already found some pepper. Poor Dink! If you press her, she asks if you're deaf. Ouch. Of course, you find 800 coins on your way to the pepper anyway, so it doesn't really matter.
I feel that the beginning of this DMOD has an unfair level of difficulty. Since you only get 800 gold from the pepper quest, you're forced to go to the basemeent to make up the missing 10 by fighting boncas you're totally unprepared to fight. All you've got at this point is your fist, and the fast, 20 HP boncas can take you out usually in one hit and always in two. To make matters worse, there is no save point in the pub, so you have to start from the intro every time you die. You've got to fight a bonca without making any mistakes until you've hit it about ten times, and if you're lucky (not always!) it will drop at least 10 gold. Oh, and don't think you're smart by making the boncas hit each other - in this game, that causes them to GAIN HP. I'm not sure there was any good reason to change this mechanic from the original game.
At this point you can leave, buy the meals (they're health restoratives) and go out and get a much-needed large health capacity boost and SAVE. Now you have to fight your way through the basement of boncas, which is tough but no longer ridiculous. After this, you get out into a large area where you can find a shop that sells "potions" (instant stat boosts), which is your replacement for leveling up since, once again, experience earned is scaled back to almost nothing. There are some more powerups to find and then a VERY tough cave full of slayers, which is a very confusing maze. I was nearly pulling my hair out, but this felt like a good challenge to me instead of an unfair one, and I managed to finish without cheating or even using a walkthrough.
At the end of the DMOD, you reach the place where Hembar and Arithia are, only to get caught by a guard. This is a problem...
007: The Quest for Arithia Part 3: Elemental Peace Author: Mike Snyder Release Date: August 2, 1998
...except not really, because the guard is a total moron who falls for a "look behind you!" type move, and you're free to explore.
Although this DMOD has quite a few things going for it, I don't like it nearly as much as Rozarus. First, the positives: the snowy world is well mapped out and looks good, your main task is to bribe a couple of guards, which I love - you've got to appreciate guys who are willing to conduct simple, straightforward business - and there's an interesting concept introduced in the Time Council, a trio of knights who know all about the past, present, and future respectively.
Despite those high points, this DMOD is plauged by fixable design problems that forced me to use a guide and made the game unfun for me, though I did gut my way through it and finish without cheating at any point (Incidentally, this DMOD contains the first anti-cheating script, which caught me by surprise back in the day when I tried to cheat by moving an important item in DinkEdit). First, the map is almost completely empty. I hate walking around screens with nothing of importance on them, accomplishing nothing. Sure, the original game had some screens with nothing on them, but I never felt like I was wandering aimlessly like this. This problem was present to some degree in both Doppleganger and Rozarus, but it while it wasn't bad enough in those DMODs to really detract from the experience, it's much worse here. Actually, Mike even made fun of this tendency back in Dink's Doppleganger.
That alone wouldn't totally ruin the DMOD, but the main problem is that it seems, at first, to present an impossible situation. After you spend your time exploring the fairly big, empty map, you find that these things exist:
1) A guard who wants a bribe of gold to access a passage.
2) The time council, who tell you to come back later.
3) A guard who refuses to let you into a castle under any circumstances.
4) A hidden path over water (it's not too hard to find) that leads to 500 gold, but this isn't enough to bribe the first guard.
and, damningly...
5) A path that leads to a screenlocked screen with three fast, 20 HP, no-friendly-fire boncas.
Now, I ask you: wouldn't you assume that 5 is the way to proceed? Doesn't that seem like a big heaping steaming pile of total BS, considering that you're back to the fist and 10 health again? Well, I gutted it out and eventually beat the three boncas without making a single mistake. This led to another screenlocked screen with five of them. There's another one past it with SEVEN. And God help you, if you managed to beat them all in a perfect run, you still would have no clue what to do afterwards. Oh, and you'll notice I didn't mention a save point.
Here is what you have to do: As the castle wall in the southeast slopes down, you have to hug it to reach a screen where you (not Dink) can see over the wall to a very interesting character who helps you despite clearly being evil. The problem is that no one would do this. The mind's eye sees the little corner you can shove yourself into to reach this screen as a solid wall, I guarantee it. I mean, really: You see a castle wall going to the very lower left corner. You go left a screen, you go down, you see a castle wall going up into the upper right corner. Solid wall, right? Ugh.
Anyway, this opens up an area with a health expansion, a healing fountain, and a save point. This makes the boncas something you can handle, since after each screen you can return to heal and save. There's more, including a guard who enjoys receiving flowers, a very funny bit with a talking duck (Dink: "Eh, a talking duck is nothing special. I even mated with a duck once." Duck: "You keep your hands off me, you sick freak.") elemental-themed rooms and a fairly satisfying resolution, but by that point I was too frustrated to enjoy it much.
I know I just eviscerated that DMOD, but I don't think it isn't worth playing. There's quite a bit to it, and to be clear, it's better than anything I ever made. However, it really goes to show how a couple of simple things can make a fun DMOD into a frustrating one. For example, why do you allow the player to access the boncas when they're not ready to fight them? This makes them think it's what they're supposed to do. DMOD authors and indeed game designers in general should take this particular lesson to heart and listen to testers.
008: Dinkanoid Author: Mike Snyder Release Date: August 30, 1998
Between the release of the previous DMOD and this one, my "skills" had hit the Dink community with a dull thud and I was stinking up the community with my immaturity like certain people I won't name seem to be doing now. Ah, well.
Anyway, this was amazing. Mike left DMOD production with a bang by recreating the arcade classic Arkanoid in the Dink engine, complete with powerups. We all had so little idea at the time just how extensible the engine was, just how much DinkC was capable of, and Mike blew it wide open so early in the game. You really could do just about anything. Sadly, at the time I left there had still been little of this kind of programming around.
At the time, there was a contest with small cash prizes to be awarded to those with the highest scores. I played my hardest and didn't cheat; however, some people did, and the contest was abruptly canceled. Oh well.
The real tragedy is that there's no way to play this anymore. The speed is machine dependent, so even on this crummy old laptop it goes too fast to play. At the time Mike said it played at the same speed "From 133 Mhz all the way to 433," heh. I don't think you could fix this without using virtualization, one of those programs that intentionally uses up your CPU cycles, or redesigning the game.
I was going through the release notes for Dink Smallwood and found, to my disappointment, that Seth had made several tweaks to make the game easier by version 1.07. I don't mean to second-guess his ideas on game balance, and the game still felt like a reasonable challenge, but it's not really the same game I played so long ago. Here I thought it was easy because I'd gotten so great at it!
--Mike Snyder's DMODs--
Mike "Wyndo" Snyder was the first person other than Seth Robinson to make a DMOD. In fact, I think he might be the author of the first three DMODs that weren't about searching for faded lip-syncing pop stars. Furthermore, all six of his DMODs came out in 1998, so it makes sense to consider them all together. I'd like to say first that I have a lot of respect for Mike and the projects he was able to complete despite already being very busy. I, by contrast, have got nothing but time and *this* is probably the most productive thing I've done recently.
003: The Scar of David Author: Mike Snyder Release Date: March 22, 1998!
This is the first independent DMOD by such a long length of time that I really can't account for it. I could be wrong, but I can't find any evidence of another DMOD released until June, and I can't find evidence of a DMOD released by somebody other than Snyder until July. Crazy, right? I wonder if he got an early copy of Dink. Anyway, big credit to the guy for being able to pick up DinkC so quickly despite its official documentation being, well, let's say extremely limited.
This DMOD is a weird sort of thing, though. It doesn't make much sense and is almost totally unsatisfying, but hey, it's really more of a proof of concept than anything else, and it succeeds at that with flying colors. Anyway, it's sure better than my first four DMODs.
You meet this guy named David who seeks revenge on a pizza chef. You offer to go rough him up. You meet said pizza chef (In the best thing in the entire DMOD, he speaks in a painfully rendered terrible stereotypical Italian accent) and have to (quite counterintuitively) hit him and then leave, as he's got thousands of hitpoints (I confirmed this by cheating; nothing special happens if you manage to beat him). You must then lie to David and claim you kicked the guy's ass, whereupon you'll get a plot item, go fight some pillbugs, and then talk to somebody to end the DMOD. I'm sorry if that sounds like a walkthrough, but I really don't know what else to say about this bizarre little module. Here's a spoiler about the nature of the "scar."
That ending is as satisfying to experience as it looks. It's actually kind of amusing that the whole premise turns out to have been a sham. Here's a game that mocks you for winning.
Actually, there are two other things worth mentioning. David mentions a "Zolan War," establishing a plotline that runs through all of Mike's DMODs; it kind of blows my mind that he was already planning this. There is also a secret of sorts in this DMOD. During the ending, if you managed to control your urges enough to not kill the duck on the main screen, he tells you to "punch the dead head three times and then talk to him." Well, it's too late, but you restart and go do this to a skull in the bar, and he gives you something you can use to access a secret screen.
Oh boy, right? Now we'll see the real ending. Going this far out of our way has got to pay off.
Actually, what you find is a knight who says, "You found the secret, whoop de doo." "Now what?" queries Dink. "*shrug*"
...I'm not going to lie. This was the first DMOD I ever played, and at this point I began to wonder if I'd been ripped off for my $20.
Actually, if you beat the game again there's some different text congratulating you. Dink says he can't wait until more adventures are made for him; with this, the ribbon is cut on Dink development for the masses. It's a start that promises much more. You could do a lot worse.
004: Dink's Doppleganger Author: Mike Snyder Release Date: June 6, 1998
Yes, "doppelganger" is misspelled. Mike indicated on his website that he'd learned this fact during development, but I guess he didn't end up bothering to fix it, probably for reasons I'll cover below.
This is very impressive for a second effort from somebody who had to pretty much invent the wheel. It's a big mod - Snyder's biggest, I think - that took me well over an hour to finish. It's got some original graphics (like these flying saucers), some MIDI files that Snyder composed himself, a real story told with cutscenes and quite a bit of text, solid map design without hardness errors, and was definitely quite fun at times. In its scope, it wouldn't be matched for some time. Despite this, Dink's Doppleganger as released is just one-third of what Mike Snyder had planned.
As he told on his website (which is, impressively, still up), Mike had planned D's D, as he liked to abbreviate it, as an epic that would be sold for a nominal fee (He actually sold a couple of preorders, which he had to refund). However, he gave up on it due to an argument with his fiancee, who ended up leaving him because he spent so much time on DMODs. At the time, he blamed himself. I wasn't there, of course, but it seems to me that she didn't respect his hobby or his creative drive. I mean, I used to chat with Mike sometimes while playing his browser-based game Lunatix Online, and he seemed like a cool guy. At any rate, Mike is currently married with kids, so he's well past this, but Dink's Doppleganger remains a somewhat awkward and troubling reminder of the tensions between different sides of a man's life that can tear them both apart.
Speaking of opposing sides, the plot of this DMOD concerns a parallel universe where people occupy the opposite side of the moral axis (between good and evil) from the one they do in Dink's universe; Dink being a hero, his counterpart is a villain. You know, like in Star Trek. An evil wizard named Hembar makes the two Dinks switch places in order to prevent Dink from interfering with his evil plans. In the other universe, Dink encounters Hembar's good counterpart and a bunch of peace-loving aliens called Zolans (the implications of which for Dink Prime's universe should be obvious).
This DMOD focuses much more on puzzles than the Action-RPG gameplay that dominated the original Dink Smallwood. Snyder scaled the enemies' HP and Experience points way back - Slimes give 2, Goblins give 3, Slayers give 5 exp. I was still level 3 by the end of it. You start the game (after a fairly lengthy intro cutscene in which an acquaintance of Dink proves himself to be a jerk by plainly announcing his intentions to get a girl drunk so she'll sleep with him, among other events) in a fence maze filled with enemies who are for the most part too powerful for you to fight yet. Once you get out, however, you'll find a +10 sword you can use to generally kill everything in this DMOD in one or at most two hits.
At first, the puzzles are reasonable enough, but I ended up becoming quite frustrated with this DMOD in the end due to "how the frig was I supposed to figure that out" puzzles that impeded my enjoyment and drove me to repeatedly reference a walkthrough. I mean, I'm sure I could have got them eventually, but there's no reason I should have to flounder for half an hour before finally stumbling upon the one completely unimportant-looking pot that I was supposed to check for a hint, for example. There were several puzzles of this variety, and they drag down what's otherwise a good DMOD.
At one point there's a picture of a woman in a certain room. The man there talks about having lost the love of his life. The picture is clearly of Snyder's fiancee (I know this for sure because she appeared as a villain in a Lunatix Online In-Game Module (IGM) that Snyder made. You'll be unsurprised to learn that I coded a few IGMs myself and sucked hard at that too).
One thing I found unique and amusing about this DMOD was the way you're made to take a quiz after reading a series of bitmaps about the good Hembar's backstory to make sure you paid attention. He went to the effort of writing the story, so dang it, you're going to read it! The best part is that, if you get all of the questions wrong, Hembar calls you an idiot and kills you. I always found this to be surprising and pretty hilarious.
After you solve quite a few puzzles and end up transported back to Dink's universe, the game suddenly stops happening. Things that clearly ought to have scripts attached to them do not. Then you encounter a sign. Viewing it displays this...
And that's the end. Beyond that there's quite a bit of map to explore, hinting at what might have been, but there's nothing to find out there but one shiny gold coin, a token for your efforts. It's a strange and disorienting feeling - you're in the middle of a story and it's yanked out from under you. I guess Mike Snyder must have felt something similar.
005: The Quest for Arithia Part 1: The Ninth Lock Author: Mike Snyder Release Date: June 14, 1998
The Quest for Arithia trilogy is set several months before Dink's Doppleganger; Mike's timeline says so, and all the events in the DMODs support this pretty well.
This is a much simpler mod. Dink and a friend set out to find a girl named Arithia, who's in trouble because she possesses the Rozarus, which Hembar could use to control time. I'm sure not all of that is actually revealed in this installment, but hey, that's the plot.
All you really do here is kill a bunch of goblins (like in Doppleganger, they give greatly reduced experience) in order to disengage a bunch of giant locks. Once you do, you can find Arithia's father, who doesn't have a lot of answers for you. It's a simple brawler, but it's fun enough and sets up the trilogy.
006: The Quest for Arithia Part 2: The Rozarus Author: Mike Snyder Release Date: July 5, 1998
The Rozarus is a longer and more involved installment, and it's my favorite of the three parts. Dink and his pal visit a sort of bar/cafe, where the pitiless Goblin who runs the place won't let you leave without paying 810 coins for a couple of meals. There's some pretty amusing stuff in here, including an old woman (?) who demands you bring her pepper, promising you 800 gold in return. When you get back to her, though, she turns you away, saying she already found some pepper. Poor Dink! If you press her, she asks if you're deaf. Ouch. Of course, you find 800 coins on your way to the pepper anyway, so it doesn't really matter.
I feel that the beginning of this DMOD has an unfair level of difficulty. Since you only get 800 gold from the pepper quest, you're forced to go to the basemeent to make up the missing 10 by fighting boncas you're totally unprepared to fight. All you've got at this point is your fist, and the fast, 20 HP boncas can take you out usually in one hit and always in two. To make matters worse, there is no save point in the pub, so you have to start from the intro every time you die. You've got to fight a bonca without making any mistakes until you've hit it about ten times, and if you're lucky (not always!) it will drop at least 10 gold. Oh, and don't think you're smart by making the boncas hit each other - in this game, that causes them to GAIN HP. I'm not sure there was any good reason to change this mechanic from the original game.
At this point you can leave, buy the meals (they're health restoratives) and go out and get a much-needed large health capacity boost and SAVE. Now you have to fight your way through the basement of boncas, which is tough but no longer ridiculous. After this, you get out into a large area where you can find a shop that sells "potions" (instant stat boosts), which is your replacement for leveling up since, once again, experience earned is scaled back to almost nothing. There are some more powerups to find and then a VERY tough cave full of slayers, which is a very confusing maze. I was nearly pulling my hair out, but this felt like a good challenge to me instead of an unfair one, and I managed to finish without cheating or even using a walkthrough.
At the end of the DMOD, you reach the place where Hembar and Arithia are, only to get caught by a guard. This is a problem...
007: The Quest for Arithia Part 3: Elemental Peace Author: Mike Snyder Release Date: August 2, 1998
...except not really, because the guard is a total moron who falls for a "look behind you!" type move, and you're free to explore.
Although this DMOD has quite a few things going for it, I don't like it nearly as much as Rozarus. First, the positives: the snowy world is well mapped out and looks good, your main task is to bribe a couple of guards, which I love - you've got to appreciate guys who are willing to conduct simple, straightforward business - and there's an interesting concept introduced in the Time Council, a trio of knights who know all about the past, present, and future respectively.
Despite those high points, this DMOD is plauged by fixable design problems that forced me to use a guide and made the game unfun for me, though I did gut my way through it and finish without cheating at any point (Incidentally, this DMOD contains the first anti-cheating script, which caught me by surprise back in the day when I tried to cheat by moving an important item in DinkEdit). First, the map is almost completely empty. I hate walking around screens with nothing of importance on them, accomplishing nothing. Sure, the original game had some screens with nothing on them, but I never felt like I was wandering aimlessly like this. This problem was present to some degree in both Doppleganger and Rozarus, but it while it wasn't bad enough in those DMODs to really detract from the experience, it's much worse here. Actually, Mike even made fun of this tendency back in Dink's Doppleganger.
That alone wouldn't totally ruin the DMOD, but the main problem is that it seems, at first, to present an impossible situation. After you spend your time exploring the fairly big, empty map, you find that these things exist:
1) A guard who wants a bribe of gold to access a passage.
2) The time council, who tell you to come back later.
3) A guard who refuses to let you into a castle under any circumstances.
4) A hidden path over water (it's not too hard to find) that leads to 500 gold, but this isn't enough to bribe the first guard.
and, damningly...
5) A path that leads to a screenlocked screen with three fast, 20 HP, no-friendly-fire boncas.
Now, I ask you: wouldn't you assume that 5 is the way to proceed? Doesn't that seem like a big heaping steaming pile of total BS, considering that you're back to the fist and 10 health again? Well, I gutted it out and eventually beat the three boncas without making a single mistake. This led to another screenlocked screen with five of them. There's another one past it with SEVEN. And God help you, if you managed to beat them all in a perfect run, you still would have no clue what to do afterwards. Oh, and you'll notice I didn't mention a save point.
Here is what you have to do: As the castle wall in the southeast slopes down, you have to hug it to reach a screen where you (not Dink) can see over the wall to a very interesting character who helps you despite clearly being evil. The problem is that no one would do this. The mind's eye sees the little corner you can shove yourself into to reach this screen as a solid wall, I guarantee it. I mean, really: You see a castle wall going to the very lower left corner. You go left a screen, you go down, you see a castle wall going up into the upper right corner. Solid wall, right? Ugh.
Anyway, this opens up an area with a health expansion, a healing fountain, and a save point. This makes the boncas something you can handle, since after each screen you can return to heal and save. There's more, including a guard who enjoys receiving flowers, a very funny bit with a talking duck (Dink: "Eh, a talking duck is nothing special. I even mated with a duck once." Duck: "You keep your hands off me, you sick freak.") elemental-themed rooms and a fairly satisfying resolution, but by that point I was too frustrated to enjoy it much.
I know I just eviscerated that DMOD, but I don't think it isn't worth playing. There's quite a bit to it, and to be clear, it's better than anything I ever made. However, it really goes to show how a couple of simple things can make a fun DMOD into a frustrating one. For example, why do you allow the player to access the boncas when they're not ready to fight them? This makes them think it's what they're supposed to do. DMOD authors and indeed game designers in general should take this particular lesson to heart and listen to testers.
008: Dinkanoid Author: Mike Snyder Release Date: August 30, 1998
Between the release of the previous DMOD and this one, my "skills" had hit the Dink community with a dull thud and I was stinking up the community with my immaturity like certain people I won't name seem to be doing now. Ah, well.
Anyway, this was amazing. Mike left DMOD production with a bang by recreating the arcade classic Arkanoid in the Dink engine, complete with powerups. We all had so little idea at the time just how extensible the engine was, just how much DinkC was capable of, and Mike blew it wide open so early in the game. You really could do just about anything. Sadly, at the time I left there had still been little of this kind of programming around.
At the time, there was a contest with small cash prizes to be awarded to those with the highest scores. I played my hardest and didn't cheat; however, some people did, and the contest was abruptly canceled. Oh well.
The real tragedy is that there's no way to play this anymore. The speed is machine dependent, so even on this crummy old laptop it goes too fast to play. At the time Mike said it played at the same speed "From 133 Mhz all the way to 433," heh. I don't think you could fix this without using virtualization, one of those programs that intentionally uses up your CPU cycles, or redesigning the game.
