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268: Trapped Author: GOKUSSJ6 Release Date: September 1, 2007
"Mwahahaha! You're trapped Mr. Smallwood!You'll never get out from this house!"
Dink, still living with his aunt and her husband (who is still a jerk), is looking to buy a house. Incredibly, he finds an ad for a house in Windermere for just 500 gold! He departs immediately.
A touching farewell.
As soon as Dink enters his new home, however, the guy he bought it from (his name is "Githra") locks him inside. I can't imagine what his motivation for doing this is. Regardless, Dink has to escape, and he has to do it quickly, or he'll starve to death. Dink's health bar ticks down periodically, like in the development DMOD "Survival," but even faster.
"Trapped" is a very short DMOD. There are only six screens, only three of which are used for gameplay, and I finished it in three minutes.
There are several steps to the puzzle, and they're all logical enough. Dink finds an axe, but it's too dull to use. He wants to sharpen it, but he needs to find some metal. He has to fuse pieces of metal together, so he needs to find fuel for a fire, and so on. All you really do is go up to the objects in the house and examine them - the only thing that requires any thought is which order to examine them in, and it's not hard to figure out. Still, the diminishing health bar is a good way to make your situation feel urgent.
Dink's keen skills of observation save the day.
I kind of like this one. The puzzle could have been more involved, and I would have preferred a better explanation for the time limit than "Dink will starve in five minutes," but it has a good concept, and executes it efficiently.
269: Fall of Darkness: Battlefield (Demo) Authors: Skull, Dan Wesley Release Date: September 2, 2007
"That is the easiest place to die"
Whoops again. My 2007 DMOD count is now down to 33. I had counted Skull and Dan Wesley's "Fall of Darkness" twice: once for a trailer released in July, and again for the demo released in September.
So... this DMOD.
Sigh.
How does this keep happening?
Yes, I wrote this one out of order. See the above confusion regarding the trailer vs. the demo.
I can't understand why this DMOD is as terrible as it is. It's bad for the same reason that the "Bill & Kill" series is bad - you're immediately presented with enemies that are pretty much unbeatable (appropriately, the enemies are themselves skulls). Mind you, it isn't as bad as "Bill & Kill" because there's an attempt at substance here, but in a way, that almost makes it worse. I mean, B&K at least has an easy explanation for having broken difficulty - Skull was just trolling people. It's kind of dumb, but at least it's an easily digestible explanation. Here, I'm pretty sure that somebody wanted this one to succeed. Compounding the issue is that Skull has quite a bit of experience making DMODs at this point. If this were somebody's first DMOD, I might not give it the DFMAOB, but as it is, there's no excuse for this at all.
He didn't take criticism on the difficulty issue well at the time. Skull made fun of people for not being able to beat the impossible enemies in his impossible, terrible DMOD. He actually advised somebody to exploit the screenlock hardness problem to walk into the wall in order to beat the enemies. Never mind that their sky-high defense and HP means that you would have to hit the enemies over 150 times each to kill them. Never mind that, once you've done this, there's no easy way to get back out of the wall. "So, should I make them have 1. defense and 1. strength?" he quipped sarcastically. Yikes. I hope I wasn't that bad back in my day. I guess I should be glad the evidence of my old behavior (from the old board run by Medar) no longer exists for me to link to.
(Okay, after my experience with "Bill & Kill," I have to admit that "impossible" might not be the right word. "Unreasonable," let's say.)
Dan Wesley was an online friend of Skull's; he apparently contributed the story. Said story threatens to be intriguing at times, but there isn't enough information to ever really figure out what's going on. You play as Qiu, a member of a race (or order, or something) called the Knews. A character called the "Oldest One" sends you into a cave to retrieve something called the "Diamond of Light," which is apparently crucial to the Knews' survival. Why? We're not told. Who are these Knews, anyway, and what are they like? We're not told. Why should we care? I never found out.
The Knews are represented by Simon Klaebe's alternate hero graphics, which look fantastic. To be fair, they're well-implemented here.
It took me six minutes to finish this demo while cheating like crazy, and a lot happened in that time. Qiu confronts an alternate version of himself with seemingly opposite motivations (where does this other Qiu come from? We never find out). He gets captured - twice, in fact - and breaks out of prison. The other Qiu summons some kind of demon God to give him power, but the God is dissatisfied with him and attacks both Qius. None of the story events are adequately explained. Still, there were a couple of things I liked a little bit. One of the groups that captures Qiu takes him to see a leader called "the Fryer." Surely, I thought, they meant "Friar," but he turns out to be a dragon. That's not a bad pun. I also enjoyed the fact that the goblins were after the Diamond for the silly reason that being near it fixes their speech. The moment when they lose the diamond is amusing.
Heh.
Overall, though, even the story was a mess, and a few redeeming moments aren't enough to override the fact that continuing to release DMODs filled with totally unreasonable enemies was a terrible idea. Skull knew what people thought of this sort of thing by now; he just didn't care.
270: The Rise of the Goblins Authors: Skull, Skull's Dad Release Date: October 7, 2007
"My name is George Sylvester Hubert Sebastian Butterhead, and I come from Koorna..."
Skull worked on this one together with his dad. They called themselves "The Legend Factory." I think this is the last DMOD Skull released under an alternate name, although this time he wasn't trying to pretend to be somebody else. Skull's dad is credited as "Jameil."
Oh no, it's the credits screen from "Bill & Kill!" And it makes the start and quit buttons really hard to see.
Hey, notice what didn't come after that paragraph? It took nine tries, but here at last is a Skull DMOD that I'm not giving the Award of Badness! Hooray!
This DMOD is really packed with cutscenes, especially in the first half. At a certain point there are longer gameplay sections, but for much of the DMOD long cutscenes are only broken up by very short bits of gameplay. I haven't seen a DMOD rely this heavily on cutscenes since "Bishop's Quest;" fortunately, the cutscenes here actually work and are much easier to understand. The grammar, spelling and word choice have some problems, but at least it's comprehensible. I had NO idea what hance was going on about. Some cutscenes in "Rise of the Goblins" won't let you skip text, which can be annoying, but at least they don't freeze up if you press the talk button like "Bishop's Quest."
This is another story in which a charismatic leader brings the goblins to war against the humans. This time, it's all being orchestrated by an immortal being (she calls herself an angel) who bears the child of a goblin warrior in order to bring a new goblin king into the world. They soon overrun the castle of King Christiaan (ha), King Daniel's brother. Dink, of course, has to try to do something about the goblin invasion. I really like the "angel" as a villain. She can assume any form (switching between them with a well-executed explosion effect), and uses this ability effectively to manipulate people. Her contempt for everybody, even those on her own side (to be fair to her, they ARE really stupid) makes her nice and hateable. I would have liked to see the ultimate confrontation against this character, but this is just part one of an intended series. Bummer.
The story isn't bad, but this opening cutscene is kind of hard to read because of the goblin wandering around ranting about how bad their situation is. Sometimes his looping text cuts in front of the text you actually want to read.
The villain (did she have a name? I can't remember) takes the form of an apparently gorgeous woman named July in order to mislead Dink. You're not told it's her until the ending, but I figured it out pretty quickly. Dink, at least in this DMOD, is none too bright and easily swayed by a pretty face. You'd think it'd tip him off when, despite her claims of being Christiaan's daughter, the King informs Dink that he has no daughter. Just a little hint there.
It doesn't help matters that a lot of the humans are really incompetent. The knight usually just known as Butterhead (see the header quote for his full name) is a sniveling coward used for comic relief. There was a joke or two in the DMOD that was pretty funny, such as Dink's reaction when a pig he encounters turns out to be wizard Martridge.
The mysterious wizard/pig connection continues.
There are a couple of missteps in the storytelling. There's an odd scene where all the humans are fleeing a huge goblin army, but one guard insists on staying behind to fight. He makes an impassioned speech about how he has to do this because it's his choice, and "every choise, makes us what we are!" Well, be that as it may, dude, you're still staying behind to die for absolutely no reason.
This DMOD features a guest appearance by SabreTrout's Jarvis the Knight, who naturally saves the day by being a bad ass.
The maps have some problems. Decorative features like trees are often clustered in the middle of the screen, often in places that make no sense. There are a lot of hardness errors, making it easy to go places you're not supposed to. Another bug I ran into was an Inn that leaves you frozen if you choose not to stay there.
What's the point of even having a road if you're going to let trees grow on it?
There are a lot of powerups to find, making most of the combat very easy. The final boss did give me a little bit of trouble because he moves absurdly fast. Anyway, after what I've been through lately, I'll happily take too easy over too hard.
King Christiaan dies in the ending, and Dink, as stupid as ever, continues to insist that he had a daughter and that she should inherit the throne. He sets off to prove it, setting himself on a path that could very well bring ruin to humanity. It's an interesting direction for the plot. It's too bad that Skull's sequel was never finished.
271: Dink's Extremely Short Adventure (Unfinished) Author: Fireball5 Release Date: October 10, 2007
"You stepped inside the castrator booth"
There was already a DMOD called "Dink's Short Adventure" back in 2003. It consisted entirely of an unfinished, broken tutorial. With the added superlative, you'd expect this DMOD to be even shorter than that one (I imagine it starting up, Dink saying, "I am Dink Smallwood and-" and then closing). You'd also expect it to be terrible.
In fact, "Dink's Extremely Short Adventure," while short, definitely isn't extremely so. It could take you twenty minutes or more to really explore it. It is a terrible DMOD, but I'm not giving it the DFMAOB because it has a rather nice new and original status bar. If nothing else, you could take it and use it in your own DMOD.
I rather like the status bar. I think this cave recolor is also new.
I've been doing nothing for over an hour but sitting here trying and failing to think of a way to describe this DMOD. I don't think that text can do it. I really think it would take a video to make you understand this strange... thing. But I'll try.
DESA might be even weirder than "Ex-Peppermint," without trying nearly as hard to be. "Ex-Peppermint" still had a structure that was clearly recognizable as a game. I'm not sure "game" is the right word for DESA. Right now, my brain is working with the phrase "thing that makes you stare at your monitor for a while" in reference to this DMOD.
Well, to start with, it is aggressively, nightmarishly broken. It is broken in just about every way it could be broken, starting with the title screen, where the "Credits" button displays all of the credits at once, so that it's impossible to read any of them.
My emotions are reflected in the emoticon in the third image.
Then you press the "Start" button, and the intro has the same problem. As a new twist, there's a sprite saying the same things, but you can't read the intro there either because it's cut off by the side of the screen. The text, which I read by opening up the script, says that Dink's house in a place called "Land of Peacefulness" has been broken into and that Dink is about to be kidnapped.
I don't know what to say about this. Any of it.
Then the actual game starts, and it is a wreck. Hardness errors are all over the place - not just missing hardness, but also hardness where there shouldn't be any. Many NPCs don't respond. There's an enormous map, but almost nothing in the great majority of the screens. There's a section where a snowy area is followed by screens tiled with grass, cave floor, darklands, and fire, which doesn't animate except for one badly-tiled edge. You start with a fireball spell, but if you attempt to equip it, the game crashes. There's another spell you can find that you can equip, but if you try to use it, the game crashes again. Various things leave you frozen if you interact with them.
So does playing this DMOD.
Worst of all, you can't even make it out of the intro area. The script that is supposed to warp you to the main map is attached to an invisible sprite. As anybody who's worked on a DMOD knows, invisible sprites can't execute scripts. I had to make the sprite into a regular person/creature sprite in the editor in order to get much of anywhere. The script is for a "castration booth," not that the player would have any way of knowing that, or of even knowing it's a thing to interact with.
That's the castration booth. I'm serious. You're given no indication that talking to it is supposed to be how you proceed.
The player is never given any kind of idea about what they should do. All this DMOD ever does is warp you around to a variety of bizarre locations. To even get to the castration booth, you have to walk into the side of a rock. In a "quick walkthrough" on the forum, the author refers to this rock as "stairs." I... I can't even. I'm sorry. Words fail me.
At this point you are probably wondering: "Wait, CASTRATION BOOTH?" Yes, violence to Dink's "Smallwood" is the closest thing I can identify to a theme in this DMOD. In another area, you can talk to a girl who shouts, "It's yankee yankee time," pulls down Dink's pants and (we're told) yanks very hard upon his jimmy. Dink does not enjoy this.
I... you guys are seeing this, right?
There then follows a cutscene which, if it worked correctly (it doesn't, of course), would contain this exchange:
Girl's mother: What's going on over here?
Girl: Nothing
Mom: Oh, there was something!
Girl: I was just, err, pulling this guy's, err, penis
Mom: You know what I said about pulling on men's genitals!
Dink: Phew!
Girl: Yes, mother
Mom: DON'T LEAVE ME OUT!!
Dink: NOOOOOOO!!
Dink and the two women are then transported to a screen filled with spikes and the corpses of monsters. I guess this is... their S&M dungeon, or something? I have no idea.
Moving away from the subject of penile torture (always a good thing to do), I'm just scratching the surface of the weirdness and brokenness of this DMOD. Many screens have no edges, and you can walk straight from them to other, totally unrelated screens. You can even get back to the intro screen in this way and see the intro again. And then there's the portal the game warns you not to go into. It warps you to an inescapable land of lava where the tiles around the edges constantly change back and forth between lava and snow.
Uh... that's a good question.
The only normal enemy you can encounter is a single pillbug. There's a boss to be found, but you can't beat him. Even though he's stuck in his own hardness and can't move, he wipes Dink out in seconds with constant harm spells. I tried to cheat to get around this, but both of the keys I use for cheating are overwritten by the DMOD. C makes Dink comment about cheating, and Z causes him to take a nap. Many keys, it turns out, do something. H has Dink tell you how many hitpoints you've got, G reports gold, E experience... B makes him say, "B for bonca. Grrrr!" P makes Dink do an odd little hop.
Moskau! Moskau! Oh ho ho ho ho!
I, uh... I don't recommend playing "Dink's Extremely Short Adventure."
"Mwahahaha! You're trapped Mr. Smallwood!You'll never get out from this house!"
Dink, still living with his aunt and her husband (who is still a jerk), is looking to buy a house. Incredibly, he finds an ad for a house in Windermere for just 500 gold! He departs immediately.
A touching farewell.
As soon as Dink enters his new home, however, the guy he bought it from (his name is "Githra") locks him inside. I can't imagine what his motivation for doing this is. Regardless, Dink has to escape, and he has to do it quickly, or he'll starve to death. Dink's health bar ticks down periodically, like in the development DMOD "Survival," but even faster.
"Trapped" is a very short DMOD. There are only six screens, only three of which are used for gameplay, and I finished it in three minutes.
There are several steps to the puzzle, and they're all logical enough. Dink finds an axe, but it's too dull to use. He wants to sharpen it, but he needs to find some metal. He has to fuse pieces of metal together, so he needs to find fuel for a fire, and so on. All you really do is go up to the objects in the house and examine them - the only thing that requires any thought is which order to examine them in, and it's not hard to figure out. Still, the diminishing health bar is a good way to make your situation feel urgent.
Dink's keen skills of observation save the day.
I kind of like this one. The puzzle could have been more involved, and I would have preferred a better explanation for the time limit than "Dink will starve in five minutes," but it has a good concept, and executes it efficiently.
269: Fall of Darkness: Battlefield (Demo) Authors: Skull, Dan Wesley Release Date: September 2, 2007
"That is the easiest place to die"
Whoops again. My 2007 DMOD count is now down to 33. I had counted Skull and Dan Wesley's "Fall of Darkness" twice: once for a trailer released in July, and again for the demo released in September.
So... this DMOD.
Sigh.
How does this keep happening?
****This DMOD, "Fall of Darkness: Battlefield"***** ********Has been awarded the prestigious********* ****DINK FOREVER MEMORIAL AWARD OF BADNESS***** ********On this day December 9, 2014*********
Yes, I wrote this one out of order. See the above confusion regarding the trailer vs. the demo.
I can't understand why this DMOD is as terrible as it is. It's bad for the same reason that the "Bill & Kill" series is bad - you're immediately presented with enemies that are pretty much unbeatable (appropriately, the enemies are themselves skulls). Mind you, it isn't as bad as "Bill & Kill" because there's an attempt at substance here, but in a way, that almost makes it worse. I mean, B&K at least has an easy explanation for having broken difficulty - Skull was just trolling people. It's kind of dumb, but at least it's an easily digestible explanation. Here, I'm pretty sure that somebody wanted this one to succeed. Compounding the issue is that Skull has quite a bit of experience making DMODs at this point. If this were somebody's first DMOD, I might not give it the DFMAOB, but as it is, there's no excuse for this at all.
He didn't take criticism on the difficulty issue well at the time. Skull made fun of people for not being able to beat the impossible enemies in his impossible, terrible DMOD. He actually advised somebody to exploit the screenlock hardness problem to walk into the wall in order to beat the enemies. Never mind that their sky-high defense and HP means that you would have to hit the enemies over 150 times each to kill them. Never mind that, once you've done this, there's no easy way to get back out of the wall. "So, should I make them have 1. defense and 1. strength?" he quipped sarcastically. Yikes. I hope I wasn't that bad back in my day. I guess I should be glad the evidence of my old behavior (from the old board run by Medar) no longer exists for me to link to.
(Okay, after my experience with "Bill & Kill," I have to admit that "impossible" might not be the right word. "Unreasonable," let's say.)
Dan Wesley was an online friend of Skull's; he apparently contributed the story. Said story threatens to be intriguing at times, but there isn't enough information to ever really figure out what's going on. You play as Qiu, a member of a race (or order, or something) called the Knews. A character called the "Oldest One" sends you into a cave to retrieve something called the "Diamond of Light," which is apparently crucial to the Knews' survival. Why? We're not told. Who are these Knews, anyway, and what are they like? We're not told. Why should we care? I never found out.
The Knews are represented by Simon Klaebe's alternate hero graphics, which look fantastic. To be fair, they're well-implemented here.
It took me six minutes to finish this demo while cheating like crazy, and a lot happened in that time. Qiu confronts an alternate version of himself with seemingly opposite motivations (where does this other Qiu come from? We never find out). He gets captured - twice, in fact - and breaks out of prison. The other Qiu summons some kind of demon God to give him power, but the God is dissatisfied with him and attacks both Qius. None of the story events are adequately explained. Still, there were a couple of things I liked a little bit. One of the groups that captures Qiu takes him to see a leader called "the Fryer." Surely, I thought, they meant "Friar," but he turns out to be a dragon. That's not a bad pun. I also enjoyed the fact that the goblins were after the Diamond for the silly reason that being near it fixes their speech. The moment when they lose the diamond is amusing.
Heh.
Overall, though, even the story was a mess, and a few redeeming moments aren't enough to override the fact that continuing to release DMODs filled with totally unreasonable enemies was a terrible idea. Skull knew what people thought of this sort of thing by now; he just didn't care.
270: The Rise of the Goblins Authors: Skull, Skull's Dad Release Date: October 7, 2007
"My name is George Sylvester Hubert Sebastian Butterhead, and I come from Koorna..."
Skull worked on this one together with his dad. They called themselves "The Legend Factory." I think this is the last DMOD Skull released under an alternate name, although this time he wasn't trying to pretend to be somebody else. Skull's dad is credited as "Jameil."
Oh no, it's the credits screen from "Bill & Kill!" And it makes the start and quit buttons really hard to see.
Hey, notice what didn't come after that paragraph? It took nine tries, but here at last is a Skull DMOD that I'm not giving the Award of Badness! Hooray!
This DMOD is really packed with cutscenes, especially in the first half. At a certain point there are longer gameplay sections, but for much of the DMOD long cutscenes are only broken up by very short bits of gameplay. I haven't seen a DMOD rely this heavily on cutscenes since "Bishop's Quest;" fortunately, the cutscenes here actually work and are much easier to understand. The grammar, spelling and word choice have some problems, but at least it's comprehensible. I had NO idea what hance was going on about. Some cutscenes in "Rise of the Goblins" won't let you skip text, which can be annoying, but at least they don't freeze up if you press the talk button like "Bishop's Quest."
This is another story in which a charismatic leader brings the goblins to war against the humans. This time, it's all being orchestrated by an immortal being (she calls herself an angel) who bears the child of a goblin warrior in order to bring a new goblin king into the world. They soon overrun the castle of King Christiaan (ha), King Daniel's brother. Dink, of course, has to try to do something about the goblin invasion. I really like the "angel" as a villain. She can assume any form (switching between them with a well-executed explosion effect), and uses this ability effectively to manipulate people. Her contempt for everybody, even those on her own side (to be fair to her, they ARE really stupid) makes her nice and hateable. I would have liked to see the ultimate confrontation against this character, but this is just part one of an intended series. Bummer.
The story isn't bad, but this opening cutscene is kind of hard to read because of the goblin wandering around ranting about how bad their situation is. Sometimes his looping text cuts in front of the text you actually want to read.
The villain (did she have a name? I can't remember) takes the form of an apparently gorgeous woman named July in order to mislead Dink. You're not told it's her until the ending, but I figured it out pretty quickly. Dink, at least in this DMOD, is none too bright and easily swayed by a pretty face. You'd think it'd tip him off when, despite her claims of being Christiaan's daughter, the King informs Dink that he has no daughter. Just a little hint there.
It doesn't help matters that a lot of the humans are really incompetent. The knight usually just known as Butterhead (see the header quote for his full name) is a sniveling coward used for comic relief. There was a joke or two in the DMOD that was pretty funny, such as Dink's reaction when a pig he encounters turns out to be wizard Martridge.
The mysterious wizard/pig connection continues.
There are a couple of missteps in the storytelling. There's an odd scene where all the humans are fleeing a huge goblin army, but one guard insists on staying behind to fight. He makes an impassioned speech about how he has to do this because it's his choice, and "every choise, makes us what we are!" Well, be that as it may, dude, you're still staying behind to die for absolutely no reason.
This DMOD features a guest appearance by SabreTrout's Jarvis the Knight, who naturally saves the day by being a bad ass.
The maps have some problems. Decorative features like trees are often clustered in the middle of the screen, often in places that make no sense. There are a lot of hardness errors, making it easy to go places you're not supposed to. Another bug I ran into was an Inn that leaves you frozen if you choose not to stay there.
What's the point of even having a road if you're going to let trees grow on it?
There are a lot of powerups to find, making most of the combat very easy. The final boss did give me a little bit of trouble because he moves absurdly fast. Anyway, after what I've been through lately, I'll happily take too easy over too hard.
King Christiaan dies in the ending, and Dink, as stupid as ever, continues to insist that he had a daughter and that she should inherit the throne. He sets off to prove it, setting himself on a path that could very well bring ruin to humanity. It's an interesting direction for the plot. It's too bad that Skull's sequel was never finished.
271: Dink's Extremely Short Adventure (Unfinished) Author: Fireball5 Release Date: October 10, 2007
"You stepped inside the castrator booth"
There was already a DMOD called "Dink's Short Adventure" back in 2003. It consisted entirely of an unfinished, broken tutorial. With the added superlative, you'd expect this DMOD to be even shorter than that one (I imagine it starting up, Dink saying, "I am Dink Smallwood and-" and then closing). You'd also expect it to be terrible.
In fact, "Dink's Extremely Short Adventure," while short, definitely isn't extremely so. It could take you twenty minutes or more to really explore it. It is a terrible DMOD, but I'm not giving it the DFMAOB because it has a rather nice new and original status bar. If nothing else, you could take it and use it in your own DMOD.
I rather like the status bar. I think this cave recolor is also new.
I've been doing nothing for over an hour but sitting here trying and failing to think of a way to describe this DMOD. I don't think that text can do it. I really think it would take a video to make you understand this strange... thing. But I'll try.
DESA might be even weirder than "Ex-Peppermint," without trying nearly as hard to be. "Ex-Peppermint" still had a structure that was clearly recognizable as a game. I'm not sure "game" is the right word for DESA. Right now, my brain is working with the phrase "thing that makes you stare at your monitor for a while" in reference to this DMOD.
Well, to start with, it is aggressively, nightmarishly broken. It is broken in just about every way it could be broken, starting with the title screen, where the "Credits" button displays all of the credits at once, so that it's impossible to read any of them.
My emotions are reflected in the emoticon in the third image.
Then you press the "Start" button, and the intro has the same problem. As a new twist, there's a sprite saying the same things, but you can't read the intro there either because it's cut off by the side of the screen. The text, which I read by opening up the script, says that Dink's house in a place called "Land of Peacefulness" has been broken into and that Dink is about to be kidnapped.
I don't know what to say about this. Any of it.
Then the actual game starts, and it is a wreck. Hardness errors are all over the place - not just missing hardness, but also hardness where there shouldn't be any. Many NPCs don't respond. There's an enormous map, but almost nothing in the great majority of the screens. There's a section where a snowy area is followed by screens tiled with grass, cave floor, darklands, and fire, which doesn't animate except for one badly-tiled edge. You start with a fireball spell, but if you attempt to equip it, the game crashes. There's another spell you can find that you can equip, but if you try to use it, the game crashes again. Various things leave you frozen if you interact with them.
So does playing this DMOD.
Worst of all, you can't even make it out of the intro area. The script that is supposed to warp you to the main map is attached to an invisible sprite. As anybody who's worked on a DMOD knows, invisible sprites can't execute scripts. I had to make the sprite into a regular person/creature sprite in the editor in order to get much of anywhere. The script is for a "castration booth," not that the player would have any way of knowing that, or of even knowing it's a thing to interact with.
That's the castration booth. I'm serious. You're given no indication that talking to it is supposed to be how you proceed.
The player is never given any kind of idea about what they should do. All this DMOD ever does is warp you around to a variety of bizarre locations. To even get to the castration booth, you have to walk into the side of a rock. In a "quick walkthrough" on the forum, the author refers to this rock as "stairs." I... I can't even. I'm sorry. Words fail me.
At this point you are probably wondering: "Wait, CASTRATION BOOTH?" Yes, violence to Dink's "Smallwood" is the closest thing I can identify to a theme in this DMOD. In another area, you can talk to a girl who shouts, "It's yankee yankee time," pulls down Dink's pants and (we're told) yanks very hard upon his jimmy. Dink does not enjoy this.
I... you guys are seeing this, right?
There then follows a cutscene which, if it worked correctly (it doesn't, of course), would contain this exchange:
Girl's mother: What's going on over here?
Girl: Nothing
Mom: Oh, there was something!
Girl: I was just, err, pulling this guy's, err, penis
Mom: You know what I said about pulling on men's genitals!
Dink: Phew!
Girl: Yes, mother
Mom: DON'T LEAVE ME OUT!!
Dink: NOOOOOOO!!
Dink and the two women are then transported to a screen filled with spikes and the corpses of monsters. I guess this is... their S&M dungeon, or something? I have no idea.
Moving away from the subject of penile torture (always a good thing to do), I'm just scratching the surface of the weirdness and brokenness of this DMOD. Many screens have no edges, and you can walk straight from them to other, totally unrelated screens. You can even get back to the intro screen in this way and see the intro again. And then there's the portal the game warns you not to go into. It warps you to an inescapable land of lava where the tiles around the edges constantly change back and forth between lava and snow.
Uh... that's a good question.
The only normal enemy you can encounter is a single pillbug. There's a boss to be found, but you can't beat him. Even though he's stuck in his own hardness and can't move, he wipes Dink out in seconds with constant harm spells. I tried to cheat to get around this, but both of the keys I use for cheating are overwritten by the DMOD. C makes Dink comment about cheating, and Z causes him to take a nap. Many keys, it turns out, do something. H has Dink tell you how many hitpoints you've got, G reports gold, E experience... B makes him say, "B for bonca. Grrrr!" P makes Dink do an odd little hop.
Moskau! Moskau! Oh ho ho ho ho!
I, uh... I don't recommend playing "Dink's Extremely Short Adventure."
