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August 27th 2013, 04:55 AM
custom_coco.gif
cocomonkey
Bard He/Him United States
Please Cindy, say the whole name each time. 
Yes, the three extra DMODs in the 1998 section are my DMODs from 1999 and 2000, to get them out of the way. Incidentally, I had some website whip up a chart showing the number of DMODs released over time because graphs are fun.

--Everything after August, continued--

Hey, remember how I said above that I couldn't figure out the gold bugs in Dinkcraft? I did. It doesn't check to see if you have enough gold, so when you have zero and it tries to remove 400, you end up with -400, which dink.exe interprets as +400. This is why the gold piles subtract from your gold after this - by increasing your gold, they're just bringing you closer to 0. The Dink engine also acts like this with the primary stats, which is why you could reduce your attack until it increased in Legend of Smallwood. In both cases, doing this repeatedly made the game crash, so you should never, ever make the game do this sort of thing on purpose.

029: The Quest for Cheese Author: Jamie Boettger Release date: October 25, 1998

You know what kills me? The Quest for Cheese is the DMOD that I ought to have made.

At the time it came out, QFC was extremely well-received, and it is currently the oldest DMOD in the rarefied "Exceptional" (9.0+) category on The Dink Network. It earns this acclaim on the strength of just a few things: humor, a satisfying amount of content, and an understanding of basic game design hooks. That's it.

We've discussed my serious limitations when it comes to game design, but QFC falls within them. Nothing fancy is ever done with scripting here, the maps are basic, boxy, kind of sparse and unnatural, and possess quite a few hardness errors. You can walk to places you aren't supposed to. Furthermore, there are screens with "invisible walls," which was the biggest complaint I heard about my early DMODs. There are no original graphics except a very MSPaint title screen. Hell, there's an area where there are no backgrounds at all - just a blank white backdrop. And there's certainly no great story here - Jamie even said that it wasn't his intention to make one. Even with all my shortcomings, if I had been cleverer and taken my time, a DMOD like this could have been my ceiling; I'm sure of it. There's an alternate universe where I was the one who showed up, made one DMOD that people loved despite its lack of technical prowess, and dropped the proverbial mic forever. Hey, I can dream.

So what makes QFC work? It's the way that everything is taken without an ounce of seriousness, yet at the same time, a world that feels real and complete is presented. It's the sheer number of things you get to do. It's the oddball humor that just keeps on coming, making this the first DMOD (and I've only ever played one more as far as I can remember) to equal the original's unique comedy style. And my goodness, is it ever the pixy poop.

Let's put this cheese wheel in reverse and start at the beginning. King Daniel needs cheese and there's none in the kitchen. Dink has to go fetch him some, which ends up being a rather involved task that's pretty certain to take you well over an hour. QFC consists of a number of distinct and imaginative areas, including the rather moist land of the fairies, a bar filled with a dazzling array of characters from talking inanimate objects and a bonca on break to Death himself, who has a gauntlet for you (though admission ain't free), a "ninja training dojo" and the dastardly farm that holds the fabled cheese itself.

This mod never misses an opportunity to sling a joke at you, and although not all of it holds up as well as I'd remembered (Dink shouting 'random' things like "I floss my teeth with beef jerky." doesn't do it for me anymore, although I still crack a grin at the deadpan responses this sort of behavior gets), there are way more hits than misses. Here are just a few:

Dink: King Daniel, I will courageously pursue this quest of cheese you ask of me.
I will leave no stone unturned, and no duck unpunched.
King: Yeah whatever, just get it.

Death: I shall reward you with the magic of fire.
Dink: Didn't I get that in the original Dink Smallwood?
Death: Yes.
Dink: So..shouldn't I have already known it?
Death: No. You forgot.
Dink: Ah.


And my favorite...

Dink: Ya know, ducks are really getting overused in dmod's.
Duck: Hey lay off me man, it's not my fault that the author of this game is too lazy to make new graphics.
Dink: Haha. Yes that author sure is lazy. That is humorous.


That is the best. The BEST. This mod makes fun of itself, the usual game tropes, and even the usual mod jokes! It's like when Homestar Runner decided to simultaneously make fun of themselves and their often-uncomprehending audience. It works on multiple levels at once.

Practically everything has a script attached to it, which is something I'm a huge fan of, and everything has some kind of response for being punched, a trait with which I am so enamored that it's honestly kind of nauseating. Not enough DMODs do this stuff.

There are quite a few neat mechanics in this mod, although none of them involve particularly complicated scripting. One guy will keep track of how many pillbugs you've killed and pay you per bug every time you come back to him. There's a device that trades coins for experience points. There are a number of bog-standard fetch/trade sequence quests, but the objects you trade are often quite interesting. Death's gauntlet includes a memory game. You get a "new" magic that is just Hellfire with a duck instead of a fireball, which never gets old.

The real clincher for QFC's status as a great DMOD, though, is the fact that there are two quests here, and the one in the title isn't the real one. When you finally retrieve the cheese, the King will simply chide you for taking a simple request so seriously and give you less than a hundred each of gold and experience points. The real quest is to find all of the hidden pixie poops. There are twenty of them and they're well-hidden, but in case you have trouble a hint can be found somewhere for each one.

You know, we gamers are so easy to manipulate that it's actually kind of funny. My friend and I like to call the things a game spreads around for you to collect "gubbins," which is a real English word meaning objects of little importance. They're the gems in Spyro, the stars in Mario 64, the gems in Crash Bandicoot. Maybe you have to get some of them, maybe you don't, but that carrot on that stick is right there in front of you and you're fooling yourself if you think you can resist it. I mean, you have to get 100%, right? How can you say you've completed the game otherwise? You might have seen an ending sequence, but the gubbins are still there, shaming you for not getting them. It's a kind of hypnosis, a dirty little secret that the likes of Activision-Blizzard, Square-Enix and Zynga have discovered can be used to make people do pretty much anything they want. I think it's hardwired into our monkey brains, that little shiver of satisfaction when we pick up something we desired and had to work for. We did good, we got our pellet and it motivates us to keep spinning that hamster wheel. Achievement unlocked. It's surprising that it took even this long for somebody to weave this dark magic into a DMOD.

Incidentally, one thing gubbins tend to have in common is that they are shiny. This makes them easy to spot and desirable to collect. The pixy poops are no exception, but they are also literally poop. Do I even need to comment on how this speaks to the gamer's addiction to collecting crap? Jamie, do you have any idea how hard your DMOD is kicking my mind's butt right now? Why didn't you stay and make us a whole series? No -- you don't have to answer, you handsome beast. I already know that you're way too cool for us, and that you decided to stop for a moment in between banging a staggeringly beautiful woman who is also a brilliant scientist and correctly calling a coin flip "edge" seven times in a row to entertain us nerds before ditching us to resume your life of awesomeness. And though for that glittering moment we knew true bliss, we are left with the everlasting pain of withdrawl. "Come back, Jamie," we softly weep, "come back and make our lives worth living again," but you're already long gone, and we're left to endure our plain existence, pretending we can't remember what that cruel glimpse of heaven was like.

...Okay, so the mod isn't actually THAT great. But it is good fun, and getting the poops is worth it. I found 19 of 20 before checking a guide, but even the one I missed has a hint that spells out its location somewhere in the mod. Your reward is an enormously fun area where you get to kill everything, including characters who may have annoyed you, the band Hanson and their fans, and even inanimate objects. Play this one, guys.

030: Dink Smallwood Goes Trick-Or-Treating Author: Dan Walma Release date: October 31, 1998

Here's a fun halloween minigame that redink1 managed to whip out in a day, and a productive day it must have been. Some time before the original game, Dink goes Trick-or-Treating. You first have to pick out a pumpkin (this only affects the size of the jack-o-lantern graphic). Then, a two-minute timer starts and you must go put on a costume (you can change Dink's graphics to a wide variety of other characters, including a bonca, which is pretty neat) and visit houses to get candy. Getting a good score depends upon figuring out which houses like which costumes - some will even be scared of or hate certain costumes and give you nothing. You should also note that while a house won't give you candy twice while wearing the same costume, they WILL give you candy again if you return wearing a different one. This required quite a bit of variable juggling!

Some of the comments you get are funny, especially if you try trick-or-treating as Dink - each house will give just one candy and comment on your "scary costume" with its "nasty mask." Dink is ugly, ha ha! Stupid ugly pig farmer.

When time is up, you'll get one of five comments depending on how many pieces of candy you collected. The best comment is awarded for getting over 200 candy, but this is nigh-impossible if it's possible at all. The best I ever did is 143.

This is definitively the first non-combat DMOD, as you can't punch anything at any point (even Dinkanoid could be called a sort of combat). Pressing control displays a comment on your current costume, even if you're Dink. This was thinking way out of the box at the time, and there's even some replay value. This was a nice Halloween treat for the Dink community.

Sorry to do this again, but POTA is bigger than the original game and will take me a while, so it gets its own post. See you then.