Reply to Re: Crazy Old Tim Plays All the DMODs of 2007
If you don't have an account, just leave the password field blank.
249: Picnic Perils Author: RadFrog Release Date: March 1, 2007
"That don't happen in this DMOD. Our boncas don't have any gold coins."
I had to let this one sit in my mind for a while. It pissed me off when I was playing it to such a degree that I would have been unfairly harsh if I wrote about it right away. Really, it isn't THAT bad. If it were more focused, it'd be an okay romp. Well, it would still have some major problems, but it wouldn't have made me make rude gestures at my computer monitor.
"Picnic Perils" is RadFrog's first attempt at a "real" DMOD, and it has an unaccountably gigantic map. There are over three hundred screens, and not an awful lot in them - Big Empty Map Syndrome is back. It took me over an hour to reach the end, and most of that was spent wandering around being lost or not knowing what to do. It was very frustrating. Most screens look very similar, and there's a big maze and a lot of mazelike paths. The things you actually DO are quite simple, and could easily have taken place much closer together.
The mapping has problems aside from BEMS. Some of the tiling is really bad, especially the water. Bad water tiling bothers me the most because the water animates and looks extra terrible. Dink is always clipping in front of or behind objects, and doors appear to open to reveal another closed door behind them. There are hardness errors that enable you to go places you shouldn't, including several errors that let you walk on water.
I like the swimming duck, but look at that water.
I've never seen this before. The hardness for the trees is normal, and the depth dot is fine by default. How? How does this happen?
Oh yes, a plot and such. Dink is asked by Milder (who is alive for some reason) to go and collect four food items for a big town picnic. This is a big problem for Dink, who is so broke that he pawned his sword a while ago and has been sleeping under a bridge. Even when he finally manages to get his hands on a bit of cash, he has to use most of it to buy his sword out of hock, and he ends up buying all the cheapest foods available.
You're almost never given a clear idea of what to do next, so most of the "action" consists of wandering despondently until you stumble into the next plot event. I wasn't even clear on what the four items Dink needed were until I actually found them because the cutscene where Milder tells you what to get is so poorly directed.
Yes, I said "poorly directed." I can't believe this is an issue in a DMOD, either.
Lots of DMODs have featured a bar where patrons converse in the background, cribbing the idea from the original game. It usually works just fine. In "Picnic Perils," unfortunately, these ambient bar chats are worked into a cutscene in an awful way. There are, including Dink and Milder's conversation, four conversations going on at once, all of them bringing everything to a halt with say_stop. Somebody from conversation A will speak, then somebody from conversation B will say a line, etc. Each of these conversations is completely independent from the others; they're only responding to the last line in their own conversation, which (trust me) you will have forgotten. It is completely impossible for the human mind to comprehend something like this. I couldn't make head or tail of what anybody was saying. It's almost worth downloading "Picnic Perils" just to marvel at how poorly this cutscene is constructed. It's a special, unique kind of bad.
Everybody shut up for a second! Geez!
Actually, nearly all of the dialogue in this mod comes in cutscene form. For some reason, any conversation Dink ever needs to have will happen immediately upon entering a room. When you can move again, the NPCs will, without exception, become completely unresponsive to you. It's bizarre, and it makes the scenes feel like a series of fake sets.
The DMOD does have a redeeming feature: a bunch of really juvenile jokes. For example, Dink has named his sword Farts, which stands for "Fearsome And Reliable Terrible Scimiter" [sic]. This leads to a bunch of amazingly dumb lines like "I just came in to look at Farts." Don't get too excited about the idea of slaying enemies with Farts - you won't use it. You get bowling balls that are equivalent to the throwing axe, a much better weapon, for free. There are also plenty of puns and other japery.
Now I understand why China is trying to ban puns.
Get it? Because there's a SAVE machine?
There are several sets of signs like this in the DMOD. Some of them have Burma Shave slogans, others have the first line or two of a dirty limerick followed by signs that just say "Censored by the KCPD," which stands for King's Commission on Public Decency.
"I found that much funnier than I should have." - My charming wife, immediately after recovering from a fit of laughter
She's going to hit me for that caption, but it's true.
I found this rambling wreck of a discussion thread about this DMOD that makes even less sense than the DMOD itself. That lance is quite a character, but my favorite part is learning that somebody - in 2007 - was burning DMODs to CD-Rs, 30 at a time, in order to play them.
By the way, after all that trouble, the picnic never really happens. It seems to be just Milder pulling one over on Dink again. Dink takes it in stride, though.
I wish people would stop putting lines like this one at the end of DMODs.
Funny extra detail: "Picnic Perils" comes with the readme and update text files from "Cloud Castle 2: Scarab."
250: Adventures with Jani - Part 1 Author: Skull Release Date: March 24, 2007
"He's a bar dancer..."
Hahahahahahaha.
"Adventures with Jani..." Oh man, you guys.
I owe Instalite an apology.
Wow. This... wow.
Wow.
Okay, let's back up. This is the first DMOD by Skull, who has fifteen DMODs on this website, a few of which are still under a different name. Some of the later ones, I understand, are pretty well-regarded.
The moment I saw the screenshots on the download page, I recognized that the intro screen was copied from "A Knight's Tale" by SabreTrout.
"A Knight's Tale"
"Adventures with Jani"
But that's a pretty simple screen, so it's not that big of a deal. Then I read the dmod.diz, which says that the DMOD is "based on AKT1." What this seems to mean is that "Adventures with Jani" was made by editing "A Knight's Tale," leaving it mostly intact. The version I played is an update that attempts to skirt these concerns by skipping from the intro to a few original screens followed by a boss. However, there are saves included that let you access the "A Knight's Tale" map, which is still there. Even much of the dialogue hasn't been changed.
I know Jarvis, and you, "sir," are no Jarvis.
Let's talk about that hero sprite. All previous DMODs with MS Paint graphics - "Bloop the Fish," for example - now look great by comparison. When I opened this DMOD, I laughed so hard that my stomach hurt and tears squeezed out of my eyes. Sure, I had seen the screenshots, but I was unprepared to see them in motion. Not only does Jani not even pass muster as a stick figure, but each frame of animation doesn't even come close to looking like the one before it. He jitters insanely with every step. Lines splay dangerously out in seemingly every direction - are they supposed to be limbs? Hair? When you try to move this poor creature, he resembles nothing so much as a horrid, squished spider from a dimension where the only physical law is unrelenting cruelty. Walking in some directions inexplicably turns Jani into some kind of abstract character accompanied by text. Oh, and he turns into Dink when he pushes things, raising the awful possibility that Dink has been cursed into this form by a sadistic wizard. No, that's too horrible even to think about.
To kill this shambling, piteous wraith would be an act of mercy.
Jani wears sunglasses and carries two guns; that's how you know he's the "Ultimate Warrior." It's like somebody saw The Matrix and treated it as if it were a holy text on what it means to be cool and badass. It would be nice if his guns were capable of shooting anything - even shooting a pistol in each hand like a moron, he might accidentally hit something once in a while. Sadly, the guns have the same range as a Dink Smallwood punch.
The real punchline is that Skull has seen fit to release this guy as a graphics pack. Don't everybody line up to use him in their DMOD at once, now.
In this very short DMOD, Jani is supposed to rescue his dad from a stone giant named Rockie. Rockie moves way too fast and hits hard, so I failed to beat him in three tries. I might have kept trying if it weren't for the fact that every loss meant sitting through the entire intro again, including Jani and Rockie spending over an entire minute grunting at each other and saying things like "COME ON!" You can't skip the text because you aren't frozen.
I had thought that bottom-of-the-barrel DMODs had lost the ability to surprise me, but I didn't see this coming. This probably isn't the worst DMOD ever - at the very least, my "All Out Brawl" is worse - but it definitely presents a new angle on the ill-considered DMOD.
251: Crystal of the Gu Author: Endy Release Date: March 25, 2007
"If you want to see real magic then just watch this."
This is a quickie based around an obscure "brain" for sprite behavior in the Dink engine. Brain 2, which makes a sprite bounce back and forth, wasn't used in the original game. A handful of DMODs have used it, usually as a trap for Dink to avoid. That's how it's used here. You have to navigate through ten screens that have damaging stars bouncing around all over the place.
There's a lot of them about, so you do have to take some care.
There's a tiny little bit of story. As you may have guessed, "The Gu" is a reference to "I, Kara Gu," of which the author is a big fan. The story seems to take place before Arik's DMOD. The wizard Egdirtam (another Martridge anagram, like in "Attack of the Evil Wizard") has stolen a magical crystal from the Gu and is trying to use it. It gets out of his control, and it somehow creates all the bouncing stars that molest Dink.
Suuure.
There are some gold hearts to collect along the way, and you're given herb boots for the last few screens. None of the screens have a complicated path to travel, so it's not hard to make it through. I did it on my first try. Egdirtam is punished by the Holy Mother in the ending, but not as harshly as you'd think from her behavior in "I, Kara Gu."
This one is kind of charming with its cute little story and colorful screens, but the challenge is maybe a little bit too simple. I like the idea, though.
252: Honor of the Cast: Slimes Author: Skull Release Date: March 31, 2007
"Arh... they've got Charlie! I have to follow them..."
Skull released this under the alias "Slime." This seems to have fooled people into thinking it wasn't him for a very brief time. Actually, the mod is attributed to "Slime and Dertin," with Skull as a beta tester. Both Slime and Dertin were just Skull alts. He talks at length about the subject here, if you're wondering what could motivate somebody to pretend to be other people while releasing a DMOD.
Speaking of things that are very brief, this DMOD sure is. This writeup is probably going to be, too.
I finished this DMOD in under a minute. Most of that time was spent watching the short intro. In it, Dink wants to buy a giant house from Charlie, the realtor mentioned in the original game. Unfortunately, Charlie is kidnapped by the Cast. Oh no! Dink must rescue him, or he'll never close that sale!
Dialogue is attributed in this unusual manner. Why didn't he just have the text appear above characters' heads as usual?
The playable portion consists of several very similar screens with a handful of slimes you don't have to fight. There's a big hardness hole in the wall and an inexplicable pattern of hardness on the floor. Some of the slimes get stuck in this hardness and can't move.
The slimes have force fields now! We're doomed!
After a few screens like this and one screen with a big slime you also don't have to fight, you arrive on a screen with a very poor "to be continued" message. There's nothing else. You have to quit manually.
Thought you could talk to the old guy, huh? Nope.
The entire map for "Cloud Castle" is included, but not used. All this does is make the file size unnecessarily huge.
I think this one is even worse than "Adventures with Jani." At least that one had a boss to fight, even if it was too hard. In this one, after the intro there's really nothing at all. If Skull was trying to get a fresh start by pretending to be somebody else, this probably wasn't the best way to go about it.
--
With that, there are now 100 DMODs left to cover. 31 of those are still left in 2007.
Anybody planning to finish their big DMOD before I get to the end in order to make sure it's covered might wanna step it up.
"That don't happen in this DMOD. Our boncas don't have any gold coins."
I had to let this one sit in my mind for a while. It pissed me off when I was playing it to such a degree that I would have been unfairly harsh if I wrote about it right away. Really, it isn't THAT bad. If it were more focused, it'd be an okay romp. Well, it would still have some major problems, but it wouldn't have made me make rude gestures at my computer monitor.
"Picnic Perils" is RadFrog's first attempt at a "real" DMOD, and it has an unaccountably gigantic map. There are over three hundred screens, and not an awful lot in them - Big Empty Map Syndrome is back. It took me over an hour to reach the end, and most of that was spent wandering around being lost or not knowing what to do. It was very frustrating. Most screens look very similar, and there's a big maze and a lot of mazelike paths. The things you actually DO are quite simple, and could easily have taken place much closer together.
The mapping has problems aside from BEMS. Some of the tiling is really bad, especially the water. Bad water tiling bothers me the most because the water animates and looks extra terrible. Dink is always clipping in front of or behind objects, and doors appear to open to reveal another closed door behind them. There are hardness errors that enable you to go places you shouldn't, including several errors that let you walk on water.
I like the swimming duck, but look at that water.
I've never seen this before. The hardness for the trees is normal, and the depth dot is fine by default. How? How does this happen?
Oh yes, a plot and such. Dink is asked by Milder (who is alive for some reason) to go and collect four food items for a big town picnic. This is a big problem for Dink, who is so broke that he pawned his sword a while ago and has been sleeping under a bridge. Even when he finally manages to get his hands on a bit of cash, he has to use most of it to buy his sword out of hock, and he ends up buying all the cheapest foods available.
You're almost never given a clear idea of what to do next, so most of the "action" consists of wandering despondently until you stumble into the next plot event. I wasn't even clear on what the four items Dink needed were until I actually found them because the cutscene where Milder tells you what to get is so poorly directed.
Yes, I said "poorly directed." I can't believe this is an issue in a DMOD, either.
Lots of DMODs have featured a bar where patrons converse in the background, cribbing the idea from the original game. It usually works just fine. In "Picnic Perils," unfortunately, these ambient bar chats are worked into a cutscene in an awful way. There are, including Dink and Milder's conversation, four conversations going on at once, all of them bringing everything to a halt with say_stop. Somebody from conversation A will speak, then somebody from conversation B will say a line, etc. Each of these conversations is completely independent from the others; they're only responding to the last line in their own conversation, which (trust me) you will have forgotten. It is completely impossible for the human mind to comprehend something like this. I couldn't make head or tail of what anybody was saying. It's almost worth downloading "Picnic Perils" just to marvel at how poorly this cutscene is constructed. It's a special, unique kind of bad.
Everybody shut up for a second! Geez!
Actually, nearly all of the dialogue in this mod comes in cutscene form. For some reason, any conversation Dink ever needs to have will happen immediately upon entering a room. When you can move again, the NPCs will, without exception, become completely unresponsive to you. It's bizarre, and it makes the scenes feel like a series of fake sets.
The DMOD does have a redeeming feature: a bunch of really juvenile jokes. For example, Dink has named his sword Farts, which stands for "Fearsome And Reliable Terrible Scimiter" [sic]. This leads to a bunch of amazingly dumb lines like "I just came in to look at Farts." Don't get too excited about the idea of slaying enemies with Farts - you won't use it. You get bowling balls that are equivalent to the throwing axe, a much better weapon, for free. There are also plenty of puns and other japery.
Now I understand why China is trying to ban puns.
Get it? Because there's a SAVE machine?
There are several sets of signs like this in the DMOD. Some of them have Burma Shave slogans, others have the first line or two of a dirty limerick followed by signs that just say "Censored by the KCPD," which stands for King's Commission on Public Decency.
"I found that much funnier than I should have." - My charming wife, immediately after recovering from a fit of laughter
She's going to hit me for that caption, but it's true.
I found this rambling wreck of a discussion thread about this DMOD that makes even less sense than the DMOD itself. That lance is quite a character, but my favorite part is learning that somebody - in 2007 - was burning DMODs to CD-Rs, 30 at a time, in order to play them.
By the way, after all that trouble, the picnic never really happens. It seems to be just Milder pulling one over on Dink again. Dink takes it in stride, though.
I wish people would stop putting lines like this one at the end of DMODs.
Funny extra detail: "Picnic Perils" comes with the readme and update text files from "Cloud Castle 2: Scarab."
250: Adventures with Jani - Part 1 Author: Skull Release Date: March 24, 2007
"He's a bar dancer..."
Hahahahahahaha.
"Adventures with Jani..." Oh man, you guys.
*********This DMOD, "Adventures with Jani,"******** ********Has been awarded the prestigious********* ****DINK FOREVER MEMORIAL AWARD OF BADNESS***** ********On this day December 4, 2014*********
I owe Instalite an apology.
Wow. This... wow.
Wow.
Okay, let's back up. This is the first DMOD by Skull, who has fifteen DMODs on this website, a few of which are still under a different name. Some of the later ones, I understand, are pretty well-regarded.
The moment I saw the screenshots on the download page, I recognized that the intro screen was copied from "A Knight's Tale" by SabreTrout.
"A Knight's Tale"
"Adventures with Jani"
But that's a pretty simple screen, so it's not that big of a deal. Then I read the dmod.diz, which says that the DMOD is "based on AKT1." What this seems to mean is that "Adventures with Jani" was made by editing "A Knight's Tale," leaving it mostly intact. The version I played is an update that attempts to skirt these concerns by skipping from the intro to a few original screens followed by a boss. However, there are saves included that let you access the "A Knight's Tale" map, which is still there. Even much of the dialogue hasn't been changed.
I know Jarvis, and you, "sir," are no Jarvis.
Let's talk about that hero sprite. All previous DMODs with MS Paint graphics - "Bloop the Fish," for example - now look great by comparison. When I opened this DMOD, I laughed so hard that my stomach hurt and tears squeezed out of my eyes. Sure, I had seen the screenshots, but I was unprepared to see them in motion. Not only does Jani not even pass muster as a stick figure, but each frame of animation doesn't even come close to looking like the one before it. He jitters insanely with every step. Lines splay dangerously out in seemingly every direction - are they supposed to be limbs? Hair? When you try to move this poor creature, he resembles nothing so much as a horrid, squished spider from a dimension where the only physical law is unrelenting cruelty. Walking in some directions inexplicably turns Jani into some kind of abstract character accompanied by text. Oh, and he turns into Dink when he pushes things, raising the awful possibility that Dink has been cursed into this form by a sadistic wizard. No, that's too horrible even to think about.
To kill this shambling, piteous wraith would be an act of mercy.
Jani wears sunglasses and carries two guns; that's how you know he's the "Ultimate Warrior." It's like somebody saw The Matrix and treated it as if it were a holy text on what it means to be cool and badass. It would be nice if his guns were capable of shooting anything - even shooting a pistol in each hand like a moron, he might accidentally hit something once in a while. Sadly, the guns have the same range as a Dink Smallwood punch.
The real punchline is that Skull has seen fit to release this guy as a graphics pack. Don't everybody line up to use him in their DMOD at once, now.
In this very short DMOD, Jani is supposed to rescue his dad from a stone giant named Rockie. Rockie moves way too fast and hits hard, so I failed to beat him in three tries. I might have kept trying if it weren't for the fact that every loss meant sitting through the entire intro again, including Jani and Rockie spending over an entire minute grunting at each other and saying things like "COME ON!" You can't skip the text because you aren't frozen.
I had thought that bottom-of-the-barrel DMODs had lost the ability to surprise me, but I didn't see this coming. This probably isn't the worst DMOD ever - at the very least, my "All Out Brawl" is worse - but it definitely presents a new angle on the ill-considered DMOD.
251: Crystal of the Gu Author: Endy Release Date: March 25, 2007
"If you want to see real magic then just watch this."
This is a quickie based around an obscure "brain" for sprite behavior in the Dink engine. Brain 2, which makes a sprite bounce back and forth, wasn't used in the original game. A handful of DMODs have used it, usually as a trap for Dink to avoid. That's how it's used here. You have to navigate through ten screens that have damaging stars bouncing around all over the place.
There's a lot of them about, so you do have to take some care.
There's a tiny little bit of story. As you may have guessed, "The Gu" is a reference to "I, Kara Gu," of which the author is a big fan. The story seems to take place before Arik's DMOD. The wizard Egdirtam (another Martridge anagram, like in "Attack of the Evil Wizard") has stolen a magical crystal from the Gu and is trying to use it. It gets out of his control, and it somehow creates all the bouncing stars that molest Dink.
Suuure.
There are some gold hearts to collect along the way, and you're given herb boots for the last few screens. None of the screens have a complicated path to travel, so it's not hard to make it through. I did it on my first try. Egdirtam is punished by the Holy Mother in the ending, but not as harshly as you'd think from her behavior in "I, Kara Gu."
This one is kind of charming with its cute little story and colorful screens, but the challenge is maybe a little bit too simple. I like the idea, though.
252: Honor of the Cast: Slimes Author: Skull Release Date: March 31, 2007
"Arh... they've got Charlie! I have to follow them..."
Skull released this under the alias "Slime." This seems to have fooled people into thinking it wasn't him for a very brief time. Actually, the mod is attributed to "Slime and Dertin," with Skull as a beta tester. Both Slime and Dertin were just Skull alts. He talks at length about the subject here, if you're wondering what could motivate somebody to pretend to be other people while releasing a DMOD.
Speaking of things that are very brief, this DMOD sure is. This writeup is probably going to be, too.
******This DMOD, "Honor of the Cast: Slimes,"****** ********Has been awarded the prestigious********* ****DINK FOREVER MEMORIAL AWARD OF BADNESS***** ********On this day December 5, 2014*********
I finished this DMOD in under a minute. Most of that time was spent watching the short intro. In it, Dink wants to buy a giant house from Charlie, the realtor mentioned in the original game. Unfortunately, Charlie is kidnapped by the Cast. Oh no! Dink must rescue him, or he'll never close that sale!
Dialogue is attributed in this unusual manner. Why didn't he just have the text appear above characters' heads as usual?
The playable portion consists of several very similar screens with a handful of slimes you don't have to fight. There's a big hardness hole in the wall and an inexplicable pattern of hardness on the floor. Some of the slimes get stuck in this hardness and can't move.
The slimes have force fields now! We're doomed!
After a few screens like this and one screen with a big slime you also don't have to fight, you arrive on a screen with a very poor "to be continued" message. There's nothing else. You have to quit manually.
Thought you could talk to the old guy, huh? Nope.
The entire map for "Cloud Castle" is included, but not used. All this does is make the file size unnecessarily huge.
I think this one is even worse than "Adventures with Jani." At least that one had a boss to fight, even if it was too hard. In this one, after the intro there's really nothing at all. If Skull was trying to get a fresh start by pretending to be somebody else, this probably wasn't the best way to go about it.
--
With that, there are now 100 DMODs left to cover. 31 of those are still left in 2007.
Anybody planning to finish their big DMOD before I get to the end in order to make sure it's covered might wanna step it up.
