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173: The Green Voice in My Head - Part 1 - Hangover & Agony Author: Raven Release Date: September 30, 2003
"What's your problem??"
"A little green voice."
"SBV: A drinking habit, if you ask me."
REPUTATION NOTE: This DMOD is part of the select group with a score of 9.0 or better (9.3) on The Dink Network.
Here we go. I've been waiting for this.
I played this DMOD back in 2006 and wrote a positive review. Although I recommended the DMOD highly, I did take a moment to mention the problems I'd encountered - there were several ways for the player to make it impossible to proceed, not all of which were obvious. Happily, Raven updated the mod in 2011 and fixed all of the problems I had encountered. He states in the patch notes that "[t]he main idea of the rewrite was to assure that player can not get stuck in the game without realizing this." Judging from the notes, he really went all out with this, not just removing dead ends, but in some cases adding new ways for Dink to get out of them. One of my favorite DMODs is now even better!
"Hangover and agony." This game delivers on its promises immediately.
This DMOD is based around the unique idea that Dink has a separate personality sharing his body. It isn't a green voice in his head, exactly - other people can hear it speak through his mouth, albeit in a different voice than his own. The voice, which is known as the Smashing Barrels Voice or "Mr. SBV," cannot directly make Dink do anything, but it can speak when he doesn't want it to. Mr. SBV seems to be the source of Dink's strange compulsion to attack inanimate objects, particularly barrels (obviously). What's really interesting about this is that Mr. SBV is not a rather clichéd "evil voice." A lot of Dink's problems are his own fault. The game starts with Dink in a town he doesn't recognize, having gotten so drunk the night before that he doesn't remember a thing. It's made clear that the drinking binge was all Dink's idea. Some of the trouble Dink is in is due to Mr. SBV's urging that he smash barrels, but most of it is entirely his own doing. Sometimes, the green voice even tries to talk Dink out of doing unwise or evil things, but he rarely listens. At other times, the voice is honest with people Dink is trying to lie to, and this usually works out in Dink's favor. The bickering between Dink and his green voice is brilliant, and a constant companion throughout the DMOD.
Dink surveys Mr. SBV's handiwork. The latter may have more influence when the former is drunk.
He's not called the Smashing Barrels Voice for nothing. Dink buried his claw sword while drunk and can't remember where. Mr. SBV remembers, but won't tell Dink until he smashes 30 barrels. The claw sword is necessary to progress, and finding/reaching the 30 barrels in the first segment is an interesting challenge. You can keep smashing barrels throughout the rest of the DMOD, of course, and if you manage to smash all 196 of them, you'll get a special bonus at the end. You get to choose the bonus, but the cool one is a hellfire spell that does damage based on the amount of barrels you've smashed. You can't put it to much use here, sadly, but it was planned to be present in the sequel.
Raven manages to make some attractive and interesting screens without a lot of fancy graphics work. This one just uses the original graphics and Mike Snyder's famous tileset.
Dink's main goal is to get himself out of the mess he got into while on the sauce. He seems to have signed up for a tournament where combatants fight to the death. His first opponent is set to be a very powerful evil wizard, and Dink knows he hasn't got a chance. In order to survive the fight, Dink must not only make himself much more powerful, he must also drug the wizard's food with a magical poison that saps the majority of his magic power.
This is what happens if Dink tries to enter the tournament too early.
Unfortunately, in his attempts to extricate himself from this mess, Dink ends up in an even bigger one. He ends up mixed up in the machinations of an evil god called Moks'Hel. The god was defeated thousands of years ago by a good god called the Raven, but Raven died in the conflict, and Moks'Hel is making his comeback. Too weak to act directly, he has his agents gathering the pieces of the Raven's powerful weapon. Dink ends up helping the bad guys do this before he really realizes what is going on. It's a fairly common video game plot, but Raven does a good job of making the threat seem huge and serious while maintaining a high level of comedy at the same time.
Speaking of that, "Hangover & Agony" just oozes wit and charm at such a rate that you wonder if you should follow it around with a mop. Its sense of humor targets my funnybone with devastating precision. I think - and I don't say this lightly - that I find it even more amusing than the original game. There are so many clever ideas here. Since Dink can't remember what has happened, you have to purchase the intro to the game from an enterprising guy who has a stock of DMOD intros sitting around in boxes. Another character talks about methods of money gathering in an RPG world - such as finding piles of "adventurer's gold" and starting a fight between slayers - in rhyming folk sayings, as if these are ways of the world that everybody is used to. I don't mean to imply that it's all fourth-wall humor, though. Some other gags I particularly liked were a woman who tells you to kill the slimes in her basement and then locks you in there with her collection of brave knights, an area being named "the Forest of Very Mad Slayers" and a character who just loses it laughing when he learns of Dink's stupidity.
;_; You're a meanie.
The world map. This game does a lot with a relatively small number of screens.
The game is divided up into two sections: the town of Armend and the desert land of Niv. There's a different feel to the gameplay in each section. Early on, the focus is on figuring out how to progress incrementally, which usually means finding more money. Money is scarce in the early game because those naughty NPCs have been breaking the rules and taking the piles of adventurer's gold for themselves, and you absolutely need every single coin you can find. In the second part of the game, you still need all the gold you can find, but not because it's in short supply - rather, because you need a LOT of it. No, more than you're thinking. Seriously, more than that. More. Keep going.
No, really, a lot.
When a certain character asked for 300,000 gold, I was sure it was a gag. I thought back to the original Pokémon games, where you were told that bikes cost a million Pokédollars, which was one more than you can actually have (the bike ends up being free with a certain item). I thought this would be the same, because I had forgotten that the gold counter expands if you manage to collect a hundred thousand gold. I mean, in 172 DMODs plus the original game, I had never once accumulated that much, although I'd gotten close once or twice. Can you blame me for thinking that 99,999 was the maximum?
To get so much cash, you'll have to find a LOT of huge piles of treasure lying around. It's not too hard to get 250,000 gold this way, but you're still going to have to make up the difference by slaughtering hordes of enemies. It's a bit grindy. I didn't mind, but I know that some people might.
Here's one of the many treasure piles in the game. It isn't one of the bigger ones.
The ending sets up quite the epic story for a sequel. A lot of these planned sequels never even start development, but Raven did a lot of work on "The Green Voice in My Head - Part II - The Siege" in 2011. He hasn't been seen around here since early 2012, so it's probably foolish to hope that the followup will ever be finished. Ordinarily, in this kind of case, I go ahead and assume that it's never happening. In this case, however, I am going to tell logic to stick it where the sun doesn't shine and hold out hope. I'm not giving up on this one. I can't.
The climactic tournament scene.
Incidentally, the ending is also very funny. I cried laughing at the villain who plays air guitar when he gets nervous.
Flip back and forth between these two images quickly to see the air guitar'in for yourself!
Y'know, I'm kind of ambivalent about gushing over this DMOD the way I've done. It's possible to ruin things for people in this way.
"This pie is amazing. It's so good that you're going to have to redefine your entire concept of pie."
"It's okay, but it's not changing my life."
(Paraphrased from Too Much Coffee Man )
I mean, it might not grab everybody in the way it does me personally. I had a blast, but having to struggle step by step to figure out how to advance isn't for everybody, and neither is grinding. It's not like the mod is without flaws, although I find them to be in short supply since the 2011 update that did away with nearly all of the problems I originally had with it. Still, there are some hardness and depth que errors. And humor, of course, is a subjective thing.
For my money, though, this should be considered one of the top DMODs. I'd put it up against anything else I've played.
---
And with that, I am halfway done. There are 173 more DMODs for me to cover as of this writing. There will hopefully be a few more by the time I catch up to the present, but I feel safe in assuming that I'll never be less than halfway done again.
2003 is the sixth year I've covered. There are still 11 more years to cover, obviously, but only sixty-nine DMODs have come out since the end of 2007. Only six have come out since the end of 2012, and that's if you count my recent "Achievement Unlocked Edition" as a DMOD (I do, but I can't blame you if you don't).
It's taken me nearly thirteen months to get this far. I hope that I can finish by 2016, but you never know how things shake out.
"What's your problem??"
"A little green voice."
"SBV: A drinking habit, if you ask me."
REPUTATION NOTE: This DMOD is part of the select group with a score of 9.0 or better (9.3) on The Dink Network.
Here we go. I've been waiting for this.
I played this DMOD back in 2006 and wrote a positive review. Although I recommended the DMOD highly, I did take a moment to mention the problems I'd encountered - there were several ways for the player to make it impossible to proceed, not all of which were obvious. Happily, Raven updated the mod in 2011 and fixed all of the problems I had encountered. He states in the patch notes that "[t]he main idea of the rewrite was to assure that player can not get stuck in the game without realizing this." Judging from the notes, he really went all out with this, not just removing dead ends, but in some cases adding new ways for Dink to get out of them. One of my favorite DMODs is now even better!
"Hangover and agony." This game delivers on its promises immediately.
This DMOD is based around the unique idea that Dink has a separate personality sharing his body. It isn't a green voice in his head, exactly - other people can hear it speak through his mouth, albeit in a different voice than his own. The voice, which is known as the Smashing Barrels Voice or "Mr. SBV," cannot directly make Dink do anything, but it can speak when he doesn't want it to. Mr. SBV seems to be the source of Dink's strange compulsion to attack inanimate objects, particularly barrels (obviously). What's really interesting about this is that Mr. SBV is not a rather clichéd "evil voice." A lot of Dink's problems are his own fault. The game starts with Dink in a town he doesn't recognize, having gotten so drunk the night before that he doesn't remember a thing. It's made clear that the drinking binge was all Dink's idea. Some of the trouble Dink is in is due to Mr. SBV's urging that he smash barrels, but most of it is entirely his own doing. Sometimes, the green voice even tries to talk Dink out of doing unwise or evil things, but he rarely listens. At other times, the voice is honest with people Dink is trying to lie to, and this usually works out in Dink's favor. The bickering between Dink and his green voice is brilliant, and a constant companion throughout the DMOD.
Dink surveys Mr. SBV's handiwork. The latter may have more influence when the former is drunk.
He's not called the Smashing Barrels Voice for nothing. Dink buried his claw sword while drunk and can't remember where. Mr. SBV remembers, but won't tell Dink until he smashes 30 barrels. The claw sword is necessary to progress, and finding/reaching the 30 barrels in the first segment is an interesting challenge. You can keep smashing barrels throughout the rest of the DMOD, of course, and if you manage to smash all 196 of them, you'll get a special bonus at the end. You get to choose the bonus, but the cool one is a hellfire spell that does damage based on the amount of barrels you've smashed. You can't put it to much use here, sadly, but it was planned to be present in the sequel.
Raven manages to make some attractive and interesting screens without a lot of fancy graphics work. This one just uses the original graphics and Mike Snyder's famous tileset.
Dink's main goal is to get himself out of the mess he got into while on the sauce. He seems to have signed up for a tournament where combatants fight to the death. His first opponent is set to be a very powerful evil wizard, and Dink knows he hasn't got a chance. In order to survive the fight, Dink must not only make himself much more powerful, he must also drug the wizard's food with a magical poison that saps the majority of his magic power.
This is what happens if Dink tries to enter the tournament too early.
Unfortunately, in his attempts to extricate himself from this mess, Dink ends up in an even bigger one. He ends up mixed up in the machinations of an evil god called Moks'Hel. The god was defeated thousands of years ago by a good god called the Raven, but Raven died in the conflict, and Moks'Hel is making his comeback. Too weak to act directly, he has his agents gathering the pieces of the Raven's powerful weapon. Dink ends up helping the bad guys do this before he really realizes what is going on. It's a fairly common video game plot, but Raven does a good job of making the threat seem huge and serious while maintaining a high level of comedy at the same time.
Speaking of that, "Hangover & Agony" just oozes wit and charm at such a rate that you wonder if you should follow it around with a mop. Its sense of humor targets my funnybone with devastating precision. I think - and I don't say this lightly - that I find it even more amusing than the original game. There are so many clever ideas here. Since Dink can't remember what has happened, you have to purchase the intro to the game from an enterprising guy who has a stock of DMOD intros sitting around in boxes. Another character talks about methods of money gathering in an RPG world - such as finding piles of "adventurer's gold" and starting a fight between slayers - in rhyming folk sayings, as if these are ways of the world that everybody is used to. I don't mean to imply that it's all fourth-wall humor, though. Some other gags I particularly liked were a woman who tells you to kill the slimes in her basement and then locks you in there with her collection of brave knights, an area being named "the Forest of Very Mad Slayers" and a character who just loses it laughing when he learns of Dink's stupidity.
;_; You're a meanie.
The world map. This game does a lot with a relatively small number of screens.
The game is divided up into two sections: the town of Armend and the desert land of Niv. There's a different feel to the gameplay in each section. Early on, the focus is on figuring out how to progress incrementally, which usually means finding more money. Money is scarce in the early game because those naughty NPCs have been breaking the rules and taking the piles of adventurer's gold for themselves, and you absolutely need every single coin you can find. In the second part of the game, you still need all the gold you can find, but not because it's in short supply - rather, because you need a LOT of it. No, more than you're thinking. Seriously, more than that. More. Keep going.
No, really, a lot.
When a certain character asked for 300,000 gold, I was sure it was a gag. I thought back to the original Pokémon games, where you were told that bikes cost a million Pokédollars, which was one more than you can actually have (the bike ends up being free with a certain item). I thought this would be the same, because I had forgotten that the gold counter expands if you manage to collect a hundred thousand gold. I mean, in 172 DMODs plus the original game, I had never once accumulated that much, although I'd gotten close once or twice. Can you blame me for thinking that 99,999 was the maximum?
To get so much cash, you'll have to find a LOT of huge piles of treasure lying around. It's not too hard to get 250,000 gold this way, but you're still going to have to make up the difference by slaughtering hordes of enemies. It's a bit grindy. I didn't mind, but I know that some people might.
Here's one of the many treasure piles in the game. It isn't one of the bigger ones.
The ending sets up quite the epic story for a sequel. A lot of these planned sequels never even start development, but Raven did a lot of work on "The Green Voice in My Head - Part II - The Siege" in 2011. He hasn't been seen around here since early 2012, so it's probably foolish to hope that the followup will ever be finished. Ordinarily, in this kind of case, I go ahead and assume that it's never happening. In this case, however, I am going to tell logic to stick it where the sun doesn't shine and hold out hope. I'm not giving up on this one. I can't.
The climactic tournament scene.
Incidentally, the ending is also very funny. I cried laughing at the villain who plays air guitar when he gets nervous.
Flip back and forth between these two images quickly to see the air guitar'in for yourself!
Y'know, I'm kind of ambivalent about gushing over this DMOD the way I've done. It's possible to ruin things for people in this way.
"This pie is amazing. It's so good that you're going to have to redefine your entire concept of pie."
"It's okay, but it's not changing my life."
(Paraphrased from Too Much Coffee Man )
I mean, it might not grab everybody in the way it does me personally. I had a blast, but having to struggle step by step to figure out how to advance isn't for everybody, and neither is grinding. It's not like the mod is without flaws, although I find them to be in short supply since the 2011 update that did away with nearly all of the problems I originally had with it. Still, there are some hardness and depth que errors. And humor, of course, is a subjective thing.
For my money, though, this should be considered one of the top DMODs. I'd put it up against anything else I've played.
---
And with that, I am halfway done. There are 173 more DMODs for me to cover as of this writing. There will hopefully be a few more by the time I catch up to the present, but I feel safe in assuming that I'll never be less than halfway done again.
2003 is the sixth year I've covered. There are still 11 more years to cover, obviously, but only sixty-nine DMODs have come out since the end of 2007. Only six have come out since the end of 2012, and that's if you count my recent "Achievement Unlocked Edition" as a DMOD (I do, but I can't blame you if you don't).
It's taken me nearly thirteen months to get this far. I hope that I can finish by 2016, but you never know how things shake out.
