Reply to Re: Crazy Old Tim Plays All the Rest of the D-Mods
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===2012===
Just eight D-Mods came out in 2012, a record low at the time. Half of them are entries into the Dink Smallwood Throwback Contest, as the ol' contest kept D-Mod production on life support for another year.
Despite the low number of releases, 2012 saw some major D-Mods come out. It's the first year to have two new D-Mods that are currently classified as "epics" since 2002! The contest brought back some well-known authors, and "Enter the Iceland" is a substantial quest. Really, the decline in D-Mod production to this point is mostly due to the fact that people stopped putting out a bunch of very short (and sometimes not very good) D-Mods. That's the sort of thing that kept the numbers up in previous years.
334: Trials of a Boy: Enter the Iceland Author: DinkDude95 Release Date: January 4, 2012
"I guess I'd better find this Moa chick and tell her I need a strum."
REPUTATION NOTE: This D-Mod is one of the select group with a score of 9.0 or better (9.0) on The Dink Network.
By this point, people had stopped reviewing D-Mods almost entirely. This one only has a review because Leprochaun took it upon himself to try and write a review for every D-Mod that didn't have at least one. Still, the scores matter. They have a huge influence on how many people download these things. That's... kinda nuts, isn't it?
This is the second D-Mod to have the word "Iceland" in the title. There are zero D-Mods that involve Iceland.
DinkDude had been working on this one on and off since 2009. It's a pretty big D-Mod - it took me over two hours to finish. Still, it cuts off at the end before you really feel you've reached the end of the story. It seems that DinkDude wanted to wrap it up and move on to other things. The ending tells you to expect a part II of "Trials of a Boy," but the readme more honestly tells you not to.
In this D-Mod you play as "Dink Smallwood," but not the usual one. This guy has a completely different backstory. At the age of thirteen, he lives with both of his parents. Having come of age, he's expected to undergo three trials as a rite of passage. The first trial involves traveling to a place called the Iceland to meet the winged goddess Moa and convince her to strum her harp. It's clear that this D-Mod was never intended to cover the second or third trials, but it does seem like it should cover the entirety of the first. You never meet Moa. No harps are strummed. For all that, it still feels like a pretty epic adventure. Dink goes through so much that I have a really hard time believing that this is less than a THIRD of something that EVERY boy is supposed to go through in his culture. Dink's age does cast a different light on his usual "rude boy" dialogue, though. He's obviously trying to seem a lot more mature and world-wise than he is. It's adorable.
No prizes for guessing which door the first trial is behind.
I was really impressed by "Enter the Iceland." I think it doesn't get the attention it deserves. Unfortunately, it is held back by several frustrating bugs that could easily have been addressed by an update that never came, so done was DinkDude with D-Mod development. The bugs included multiple freeze bugs and a totally insane problem where using a bomb does nothing unless you have at least one other bomb in reserve. There's also a sidequest that has a big setup and then fizzles out completely, accomplishing nothing, as the author gave up on it. Still, there's so much here as it is. The map is large and packed with stuff. Loads of potions give you all the reason you need to spend time exploring. At one corner of the map, a gauntlet of enemies leads to the herb boots. There is a crazy selection of swords to buy, and plenty of enemies to give you the gold to buy them with. Here, look at a couple of them:
Despite all the magical swords available, my favorite is the simple rapier. The new graphics (a rarity) look great, as does the efficient thrust Dink makes with the sword instead of the usual clumsy swing. This weapon has a quick strike, although not as quick as the herb boots punch.
The sword of protection increases your defense and reduces damage from the scorpions specifically. It's worth grinding to get it. A trail of sparkles follows Dink's feet with this weapon equipped, representing a protective magical aura.
A new magic spell is included. "Mass Fireball" makes an explosion around Dink, damaging nearby enemies and more importantly burning down the snowy trees that the regular fireball can't. You can reach several secrets this way, and it's actually required to reach the final area. It's not required to reach the biggest secret, which is teased in a conversation with an NPC, where it seems like it's just a joke. Can you find the road to Camelot?
Dink makes Smokey cry.
There's some heavy world-building here as Dink comes to a town populated by both fairies and humans. There's plenty of people to meet, and some of them have a ton of dialogue. You can learn all about the history of the settlement and the nature of fairies in this game's world. Apparently the town of Enderville actually occupies an empty point somewhere out in space, and the fairies have magically created it as a place where they can live together with humans. The human mayor mentions an ambition to create a race with the strengths of both humans and fairies, but this doesn't match up with the disgust most characters seem to display toward those few humans who are actually perverted enough to get it on with a fairy. There's a slight ominous note in the fairies' behavior that makes you wonder about the consequences of their long-term goals, but mostly I just found the cheeky little things quite funny. "Ooh, a human!" "Let's have fun with it!" "Make it dance!" I laughed at the first fairies you encounter, who have a grand old time needling Dink for his name and for describing himself as a "smiter of pillbugs."
I can smite other things! Wait, I wasn't finished!
Dink's goal of finding Moa is pushed into the background for pretty much the entire length of this D-Mod. Instead, your major goal for most of it is to free a woman named Marina, whom you find trapped in the Iceland. Apparently some rogue fairies, exiled by the others for their anti-human attitudes, set a trap and intend to eat her. Marina herself is an interesting change of pace as a female character you have to rescue in a D-Mod. She's got an awfully foul mouth and is sarcastic in her dealings with Dink even though she needs his help. You get the sense that she's at least as capable as you are, just caught off-guard by the trap.
This isn't the chick I'm looking for. No wings.
Visually, "Enter the Iceland" has a distinctive appeal. Existing graphics by SimonK and others are combined with new graphics by the author, including several new sets of transitional tiles, to create an icy, magical world. Care is taken with color schemes; a variety of colored walls are well-matched with backgrounds to create attractive screens that grabbed my attention.
The ice caverns look mighty cold all right.
Of course a fairy's house would look like this.
I love this blacksmith interior. Just love it.
Also new for this D-Mod are several original MIDIs composed by the author. They're great tunes (I used one of them extensively in "Malachi the Jerk") and they work well here.
The ending really is abrupt. There's no boss and no real resolution. The last obstacle is actually a riddle. I really would have liked to see Dink meet Moa, but if I were going to end it early, I would actually have done it a little earlier, around the time Dink frees Marina. At least that marked the accomplishment of what ended up being the biggest goal in the D-Mod.
Really, though: play this one if you haven't gotten around to it. It needs more love.
335: Karel ende Elegast Author: Shevek Release Date: January 8, 2012
"It's more like a movie than a game."
Shevek was my other beta tester for "Malachi the Jerk." He was a big help and even sent me a version of the arena script with some of its than-many bugs fixed.
Karel ende Elegast is a medieval Dutch epic poem I had no knowledge of until I looked it up before playing this D-Mod. Karel is King Charlemagne, and Elegast ("Elf Spirit") is his friend who is nonetheless banished due to a stain on his reputation, leading him to become a noble thief. This D-Mod retells the story in brief, replacing Elegast with Dink Smallwood and Charlemagne with King Daniel. Shevek says it's more of a movie than a game, but it felt more like a play to me.
The ordering button (I remember it from the PC Gamer demo!) is back here for a gag about different meanings of the word "ordering" and a statement of the author's enthusiasm for free software. Unfortunately, this bit seems to loop endlessly once you've clicked the button.
So Dink, having been banished, becomes a thief. But since he doesn't want to be evil, he steals only from people who are both rich and judged by him to be evil. In the forest, he meets another thief named Adelbrecht (actually King Daniel in disguise), who kicks his butt until Dink invites him to collaborate on a heist. Adelbrecht suggests stealing from the King, but Dink is too loyal and says they should steal from the King's brother in law Eggeric instead. While robbing Eggeric's place, Dink learns that he plans to assassinate the King. Dink is soon unbanished and has a duel against Eggeric. Before the fight, you may pray to God for a big boost in stats; I wasn't able to win without doing so, which is probably intentional. The story is presented in a simple and lighthearted way. People say "Dude!" a lot.
Elegast-Dink has the ability to speak to animals by putting a flower behind his teeth.
There's no music in this D-Mod, and even some of the sound effects are missing, like the sound for clicking buttons on the title screen and the sound of Dink swinging his axe through the air. Some music would have helped me get into the story. The maps are a bit on the simple side, but look fine. The D-Mod was made as a test of Shevek's in-development D-Mod editor PyDink, which does have the potential to blow DinkEdit and WinDinkEdit out of the water from what I've seen of it.
You can stop in the middle of the story and resume from an automatic save using the continue button on the title screen. If you try to continue after finishing the D-Mod, the characters remind you that the story is over. There's also a bit of dialogue for trying to continue without having started first, but you won't see it without deleting the save file the D-Mod was accidentally released with.
"Karel ende Elegast" is a bit on the buggy side. I'm pretty sure the "Ordering" gag on the title screen isn't supposed to loop endlessly. Dink clips into walls a bit here and there. The story is supposed to advance just as you run out of health in the first fight, but it's possible to die instead. If you try to resume after dying using the "Retry" option, you'll be frozen and have to quit. There was also a truly bizarre bug the likes of which I've never seen before where the escape menu gets drawn to the background on a certain screen.
STILL finding new bugs that have never appeared in another D-Mod! It really is impressive. One wonders how many new bugs are still out there waiting to be discovered.
There is a bit of charm to it, though. Dink has comments to make on all of the objects in Eggeric's house. There's an amusing bit where Daniel says "SMALLWOOD HAS RETURNED!" every single time Dink enters the room, even if he just left. I'm surprised he didn't give away his disguise by saying it while he was supposed to be Adelbrecht.
Just eight D-Mods came out in 2012, a record low at the time. Half of them are entries into the Dink Smallwood Throwback Contest, as the ol' contest kept D-Mod production on life support for another year.
Despite the low number of releases, 2012 saw some major D-Mods come out. It's the first year to have two new D-Mods that are currently classified as "epics" since 2002! The contest brought back some well-known authors, and "Enter the Iceland" is a substantial quest. Really, the decline in D-Mod production to this point is mostly due to the fact that people stopped putting out a bunch of very short (and sometimes not very good) D-Mods. That's the sort of thing that kept the numbers up in previous years.
334: Trials of a Boy: Enter the Iceland Author: DinkDude95 Release Date: January 4, 2012
"I guess I'd better find this Moa chick and tell her I need a strum."
REPUTATION NOTE: This D-Mod is one of the select group with a score of 9.0 or better (9.0) on The Dink Network.
By this point, people had stopped reviewing D-Mods almost entirely. This one only has a review because Leprochaun took it upon himself to try and write a review for every D-Mod that didn't have at least one. Still, the scores matter. They have a huge influence on how many people download these things. That's... kinda nuts, isn't it?
This is the second D-Mod to have the word "Iceland" in the title. There are zero D-Mods that involve Iceland.
DinkDude had been working on this one on and off since 2009. It's a pretty big D-Mod - it took me over two hours to finish. Still, it cuts off at the end before you really feel you've reached the end of the story. It seems that DinkDude wanted to wrap it up and move on to other things. The ending tells you to expect a part II of "Trials of a Boy," but the readme more honestly tells you not to.
In this D-Mod you play as "Dink Smallwood," but not the usual one. This guy has a completely different backstory. At the age of thirteen, he lives with both of his parents. Having come of age, he's expected to undergo three trials as a rite of passage. The first trial involves traveling to a place called the Iceland to meet the winged goddess Moa and convince her to strum her harp. It's clear that this D-Mod was never intended to cover the second or third trials, but it does seem like it should cover the entirety of the first. You never meet Moa. No harps are strummed. For all that, it still feels like a pretty epic adventure. Dink goes through so much that I have a really hard time believing that this is less than a THIRD of something that EVERY boy is supposed to go through in his culture. Dink's age does cast a different light on his usual "rude boy" dialogue, though. He's obviously trying to seem a lot more mature and world-wise than he is. It's adorable.
No prizes for guessing which door the first trial is behind.
I was really impressed by "Enter the Iceland." I think it doesn't get the attention it deserves. Unfortunately, it is held back by several frustrating bugs that could easily have been addressed by an update that never came, so done was DinkDude with D-Mod development. The bugs included multiple freeze bugs and a totally insane problem where using a bomb does nothing unless you have at least one other bomb in reserve. There's also a sidequest that has a big setup and then fizzles out completely, accomplishing nothing, as the author gave up on it. Still, there's so much here as it is. The map is large and packed with stuff. Loads of potions give you all the reason you need to spend time exploring. At one corner of the map, a gauntlet of enemies leads to the herb boots. There is a crazy selection of swords to buy, and plenty of enemies to give you the gold to buy them with. Here, look at a couple of them:
Despite all the magical swords available, my favorite is the simple rapier. The new graphics (a rarity) look great, as does the efficient thrust Dink makes with the sword instead of the usual clumsy swing. This weapon has a quick strike, although not as quick as the herb boots punch.
The sword of protection increases your defense and reduces damage from the scorpions specifically. It's worth grinding to get it. A trail of sparkles follows Dink's feet with this weapon equipped, representing a protective magical aura.
A new magic spell is included. "Mass Fireball" makes an explosion around Dink, damaging nearby enemies and more importantly burning down the snowy trees that the regular fireball can't. You can reach several secrets this way, and it's actually required to reach the final area. It's not required to reach the biggest secret, which is teased in a conversation with an NPC, where it seems like it's just a joke. Can you find the road to Camelot?
Dink makes Smokey cry.
There's some heavy world-building here as Dink comes to a town populated by both fairies and humans. There's plenty of people to meet, and some of them have a ton of dialogue. You can learn all about the history of the settlement and the nature of fairies in this game's world. Apparently the town of Enderville actually occupies an empty point somewhere out in space, and the fairies have magically created it as a place where they can live together with humans. The human mayor mentions an ambition to create a race with the strengths of both humans and fairies, but this doesn't match up with the disgust most characters seem to display toward those few humans who are actually perverted enough to get it on with a fairy. There's a slight ominous note in the fairies' behavior that makes you wonder about the consequences of their long-term goals, but mostly I just found the cheeky little things quite funny. "Ooh, a human!" "Let's have fun with it!" "Make it dance!" I laughed at the first fairies you encounter, who have a grand old time needling Dink for his name and for describing himself as a "smiter of pillbugs."
I can smite other things! Wait, I wasn't finished!
Dink's goal of finding Moa is pushed into the background for pretty much the entire length of this D-Mod. Instead, your major goal for most of it is to free a woman named Marina, whom you find trapped in the Iceland. Apparently some rogue fairies, exiled by the others for their anti-human attitudes, set a trap and intend to eat her. Marina herself is an interesting change of pace as a female character you have to rescue in a D-Mod. She's got an awfully foul mouth and is sarcastic in her dealings with Dink even though she needs his help. You get the sense that she's at least as capable as you are, just caught off-guard by the trap.
This isn't the chick I'm looking for. No wings.
Visually, "Enter the Iceland" has a distinctive appeal. Existing graphics by SimonK and others are combined with new graphics by the author, including several new sets of transitional tiles, to create an icy, magical world. Care is taken with color schemes; a variety of colored walls are well-matched with backgrounds to create attractive screens that grabbed my attention.
The ice caverns look mighty cold all right.
Of course a fairy's house would look like this.
I love this blacksmith interior. Just love it.
Also new for this D-Mod are several original MIDIs composed by the author. They're great tunes (I used one of them extensively in "Malachi the Jerk") and they work well here.
The ending really is abrupt. There's no boss and no real resolution. The last obstacle is actually a riddle. I really would have liked to see Dink meet Moa, but if I were going to end it early, I would actually have done it a little earlier, around the time Dink frees Marina. At least that marked the accomplishment of what ended up being the biggest goal in the D-Mod.
Really, though: play this one if you haven't gotten around to it. It needs more love.
335: Karel ende Elegast Author: Shevek Release Date: January 8, 2012
"It's more like a movie than a game."
Shevek was my other beta tester for "Malachi the Jerk." He was a big help and even sent me a version of the arena script with some of its than-many bugs fixed.
Karel ende Elegast is a medieval Dutch epic poem I had no knowledge of until I looked it up before playing this D-Mod. Karel is King Charlemagne, and Elegast ("Elf Spirit") is his friend who is nonetheless banished due to a stain on his reputation, leading him to become a noble thief. This D-Mod retells the story in brief, replacing Elegast with Dink Smallwood and Charlemagne with King Daniel. Shevek says it's more of a movie than a game, but it felt more like a play to me.
The ordering button (I remember it from the PC Gamer demo!) is back here for a gag about different meanings of the word "ordering" and a statement of the author's enthusiasm for free software. Unfortunately, this bit seems to loop endlessly once you've clicked the button.
So Dink, having been banished, becomes a thief. But since he doesn't want to be evil, he steals only from people who are both rich and judged by him to be evil. In the forest, he meets another thief named Adelbrecht (actually King Daniel in disguise), who kicks his butt until Dink invites him to collaborate on a heist. Adelbrecht suggests stealing from the King, but Dink is too loyal and says they should steal from the King's brother in law Eggeric instead. While robbing Eggeric's place, Dink learns that he plans to assassinate the King. Dink is soon unbanished and has a duel against Eggeric. Before the fight, you may pray to God for a big boost in stats; I wasn't able to win without doing so, which is probably intentional. The story is presented in a simple and lighthearted way. People say "Dude!" a lot.
Elegast-Dink has the ability to speak to animals by putting a flower behind his teeth.
There's no music in this D-Mod, and even some of the sound effects are missing, like the sound for clicking buttons on the title screen and the sound of Dink swinging his axe through the air. Some music would have helped me get into the story. The maps are a bit on the simple side, but look fine. The D-Mod was made as a test of Shevek's in-development D-Mod editor PyDink, which does have the potential to blow DinkEdit and WinDinkEdit out of the water from what I've seen of it.
You can stop in the middle of the story and resume from an automatic save using the continue button on the title screen. If you try to continue after finishing the D-Mod, the characters remind you that the story is over. There's also a bit of dialogue for trying to continue without having started first, but you won't see it without deleting the save file the D-Mod was accidentally released with.
"Karel ende Elegast" is a bit on the buggy side. I'm pretty sure the "Ordering" gag on the title screen isn't supposed to loop endlessly. Dink clips into walls a bit here and there. The story is supposed to advance just as you run out of health in the first fight, but it's possible to die instead. If you try to resume after dying using the "Retry" option, you'll be frozen and have to quit. There was also a truly bizarre bug the likes of which I've never seen before where the escape menu gets drawn to the background on a certain screen.
STILL finding new bugs that have never appeared in another D-Mod! It really is impressive. One wonders how many new bugs are still out there waiting to be discovered.
There is a bit of charm to it, though. Dink has comments to make on all of the objects in Eggeric's house. There's an amusing bit where Daniel says "SMALLWOOD HAS RETURNED!" every single time Dink enters the room, even if he just left. I'm surprised he didn't give away his disguise by saying it while he was supposed to be Adelbrecht.
