The Dink Network

I'm called Tim. I've been playing Dink since it came out, when I was a young, dumb kid.

timthreethreethree@gmail.com
Private Message

082: Rise of the Rebels Author: Dali "Cybermonkey" Zheng Release Date: December 15, 2000

There's something wrong with this one as packaged. No title screen displays at the start, and there's no dmod.diz file.

Well, this is another crappy waste of time. I had to go back and remove the Award of Badness from "Milderr!" because I realized that playing Friends Beyond 3 and Stone of Balance back to back had made me forget what the average quality of a DMOD was actually like. The level of sarcasm necessary to hand out an "award of badness" ceases to be fun if you're doing it all the time, so I'll go back to saving it for truly special achievements in terrible DMOD-making.

Even so, this still comes close. "Rise of the Rebels" is a lot less broken than "Milderr," at least, but that DMOD did show the potential for some clever ideas at a couple of points. I'm not sure I've ever seen a mod with less of a point than this one, and yes, that's even including my early stuff.

"Rise of the Rebels" is about Dink being part of some kind of rebellion against a government. You might think that was an awfully sparse summary, but I've told you exactly as much as the DMOD itself ever does at this point. At school (Okay, it IS kind of funny seeing Dink in a classroom), Dink is instantly talked into joining a rebellion against "that government over there on that island" so that they can gain their "independency." Riveting stuff, here.

Nothing ever really happens in this DMOD. Its few attempts to have any sort of personality are lifted from the original game (punching Dink's mom: "I HATE YOU!" "You'll get over it.") or other DMODs ("Oh, that was my favorite barrel" from FB3, "Sadly, Dink couldn't escape the [boss room] and died," from Ed the SCV). Also, the tiling is very bad. Anyway, you go over to the other island. Your co-conspirators die during the screen transition (Dink's comment of "?" expressed my thoughts pretty well). There are some knights you may fight if that's your idea of a good time, but all you really have to do is go kill a king. There's some unintentional comedy to that fight - other mods featured fights against a king sprite, but they never had it move around like a pillbug before. It is REALLY funny looking.

The ending shows Dink displaying exactly the same gravity and excitement over the result that I felt. Why did Dink blow up the government? Because that's what you do with governments, I guess. The experience brought to mind the very early DMODs that weren't made by Mike Snyder, but when I actually think back on those mods, they nearly all had something to make them more interesting than this.

RotR isn't the worst DMOD - there's a certain level of competence to it. It might be the blandest, however. A lot of DMODs that are worse than this one are bad in a sort of interesting way, at least. If I were prioritizing which DMODs you should play first, this would be near the bottom, under things like Dink Forever and above only things that don't work (Gnug's Attack) and things that lack the necessary components to call them a proper DMOD (All out Brawl, that alphabet one I haven't gotten to yet).

083: Norman the Killer Tree (Demo) Author: Jonathon Manning Release Date: December 26, 2000

Jonathon was the author of the hardly-even-a-demo known as The Orion. According to the intro, in this DMOD you play as Dink's father, "Donk Smallwood." Boy, this family has some stupid and terrible names. I didn't help matters with "Zink," either. "Zink?"

This "demo" has more to do than "The Orion," but it actually ends up feeling even less like a proper demo to me. "The Orion," for as little as there was to it, at least felt like a complete, self-contained experience as far as it went. This feels more like the author gave up in the middle of making it.

Still, it gets points for being incredibly silly. The introduction puts us in a time when people were happy, animals were happy... "Dammit, even the grass was happy," before the terror of Norman, the evil killer 3-meter pine tree, was summoned by foolish wizards to this plane of existence. I was repeatedly amused by the wisecracking lines, like a sign saying, "Town Well - We don't know why it glows," or Dink, when told he has to get his magic to 20 to cast a certain spell, proclaiming that he doesn't know how he'd do that "aside from the Ultimate Cheat." I also found the melodrama to be quite deliberately humorous. For example, "Mildretta" tells you about how Norman destroyed her town in an almost blasé conversation until she gets to the line... "and... and... HE KILLED MY SONNNNNN NOOOO!" It cracked me up.

It's a good thing, because holy cow the maps are crappy. The tiling, hardness and sprite placement are all wrong. And this is a bit of an aside, but I've been noticing by poking around in the map editor that a lot of the small DMODs from around this time used a script for invisible sprites instead of setting them to be invisible. Maybe this is because it was hard to see invisible sprites in the original DinkEdit? I can't remember.

After the first village area, you get to a screen where rocks block your path. It seems that hitting them with a fireball is supposed to make them disappear, but it didn't work for me. I was only able to proceed by walking straight through solid cave wall by sneaking through some conveniently missing hardness.

The cave comes out on a huge empty second area that couldn't be more obviously unfinished. The screens to the right edge simply stop with no border at all, and many screens are completely empty. I didn't find much to do here - it is possible, apparently, to trigger a "this is just a demo, Donk" style ending, but I never found it. I did find the only proper enemy in the mod, a slime. That's one more than "The Orion," at least!

There's some amusing material here, but it peters out almost immediately and you're left with a clearly unfinished mess. Donk never so much as glimpses Norman, which is an awful shame. I thought there was a lot of potential in a game about a killer tree.

084: Revenge of the Ducks Author: Jveenhof Release Date: December 29, 2000

When I saw the intro start up with conspiring ducks, I thought this was going to be just like "Kill the Ducks" from Lost in Dink. In this DMOD, however, the player takes the role of a duck named Ronan seeking revenge for his "people" on a human known simply as The Hunter.

There is very little to this one. A significant amount of the time I spent on it consisted of watching a credits roll show me the name "Jan Willem Veenhof" over and over. All you have to do is go north, get the fireball magic, defeat a bonca (those who remember the first appearance of the bonca in the original game will consider this appropriate revenge in and of itself), then go back and kill the Hunter. I think that an opportunity was wasted by not having the Hunter turn out to be Dink. There's a little powerup cache you can find, but it's pointless.

There may not be much here, but the concept of the duck hero, complete with over-dramatic Final Fantasy music and an incredulous dragon statue, entertained me a little for a couple of minutes. It's almost inspiring when Ronan insists, "Even a duck can be a hero!" If you don't mind bad grammar and spelling, you could do worse for a quickie.

085: Legend's Tale Authors: Tallis, Kyle Release Date: December 29, 2000

Uh oh, it's the first DMOD on here by somebody who's actively been posting in these threads! Hi, Kyle.

Like in Friends Beyond 3, you're playing a Dink Smallwood who's descended from the one in the original game. As I've been over, I'm totally cool with that, as it's a nice way to get a fresh start. You're actually "Dink of Smallwood," according to the description. This is the second DMOD to have a town named Smallwood in the future of Dink's world, the first being Birth of an Empire.

A proper demo appears! This demo took me a little under 20 minutes to finish and felt like a pretty good little Dink adventure.

There was obviously a lot of ambition here. There's a lot of text for such a small demo. All the inhabitants of Smallwood (and there's quite a few of them) have their own little backstories to tell you, which impressed me. There's lots of exposition that feels like it's setting up a story for an epic of the "Friends Beyond 3" type. In this demo, however, the only thing Dink has to do is fetch some special flowers for a sick woman.

There's some nice presentation touches in "Legend's Tale;" the authors obviously wanted it to stand out a bit from the average DMOD, which is a good thing. A little introduction is presented by a duck and a pig, who tell you about the new savebot graphic as well as the renamed stats. There's also a "luck" stat, but as the farm animals will tell you, it does nothing in this demo. Honestly, the same can be said of life itself. A feature I really appreciated are the little informational screens you get after completing a quest or defeating a boss. I always dug that kind of thing in RPGs.

This demo does have a couple of problems. There are some minor spelling errors, but mainly I'm talking about the fact that on the left side of the map, there are screens that cut off with no border (producing "invisible walls"). This is a big no-no for DMODs. Lord knows it's what people gave me the most crap about in regards to my early stuff.

The final boss is a girl that turns into a purple bonca, and let's all give this DMOD a hand for being one of the VERY few so far to fix the bug from the original where purple boncas can't hit you because they don't have any special frames set in the INI. How rare is this fix? In fact, the only DMOD I can find before this one that implemented it is Wesley McElwee's Friends Beyond 3. What do Prophecy of the Ancients, Crosslink, Quest for Dorinthia 2 and Stone of Balance have in common? None of them fixed the purple bonca bug. The mind boggles.

*I* fixed the purple bonca bug for Malachi the Jerk. There's something for y'all to look forward to.

...Ahem. Anyway, this feels like the start of something pretty cool. As it is, it's worth devoting 20 minutes to. Maybe give this one a go if you've played all the popular DMODs already.

086: The Emerald Hunt (Demo) Author: Alexander Schroeder Release Date: December 30, 2000

Holy cow, the end of 2000 was crowded with releases.

This was the second demo release of "The Emerald Hunt," which was intended to have many such releases on the way to the final - an odd approach. Of course, we know now that it turned out to be the last.

Okay, I've been joking for a while about how Dink always seems to be collecting the Chaos Emeralds, but come ON. Not only are they actually CALLED emeralds here, they look a lot like... no, I'm pretty sure they ACTUALLY ARE the Chaos Emeralds from Sonic 1. You can't fool me by calling them "Peace Emeralds," Schroeder, I know what's up. Who the Hell would call something that lets you throw fireballs (as the only emerald you can get in this demo does) a "peace emerald" anyway?

The plot involves the emeralds getting stolen by some delightfully colorful wizards called the Six Evil Hodge-Podgers. I love how, after killing the guards, one of them remarks, "Wow, we're evil!" Now that's pride in one's occupation. Their crimes also include savebot destruction. No, really.

A lot of attention has been paid to sound in this DMOD, which is nice. Everything that happens has an (often new) sound effect, and there are some seriously kickin' MIDIs. I was jamming out.

Unfortunately, this demo is sparse, incomplete and has little content. There's a big empty map, but I wisely stuck to the road. A glance around in the editor confirms that the road takes you to anything you could need or want to see. What really annoyed me are the presence of signs with no scripts attached. This is the kind of thing you absolutely want to polish up before releasing a demo. Otherwise it looks like you don't even care.

You go fight one boss (it's a bonca) and recover one emerald. The boss at least has an HP counter, which is nice. I'm not sure I've seen that before. It changes text colors as the HP reaches different levels. Anyway, after that you go to pay a bridge toll, and the collector is Milder. Dink and Milder reminisced about the old days while I muttered, "He's dead, that guy is dead, he's supposed to be dead," at my monitor. The monitor regarded me with cold indifference, like my overpowering, ever-present ennui. Anyway, that's the end of the demo. Skip this one, I'd say.

---

And that wraps things up for the year 2000. What a year it was for Dink! With the game going free in late 1999, the community really went nuts. Just think about it - Quest for Dorinthia, 9 Gems of Life (call me crazy, I still like the original), the Friends Beyond Series, Isle of Croth and Stone of Balance were all released the same year! This one's going to be hard to top.

Edit: I've also submitted an HTML version of the 1999 writeups, for anybody who's interested in those. It's actually quite a bit of work typing the HTML tags over and over.