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I'm all moved in to my new place. I've been busy lately and only found time to do this by neglecting things that were probably more important. This project is very important to me because I am A) Crazy and B) Pathetic.
031: Prophecy of the Ancients Authors: Gary & Tony Hertel Release date: December 8, 1998
Robinson Technologies released a fairly unheralded little independent PC game called Dink Smallwood some time in early 1998, though it's difficult to pin down exactly when (I could ask Seth Robinson, but I figure he's a pretty busy guy, and it isn't that important). In the months that followed, over twenty-five addon modules were released. Some of them were fun, others sucked, and a few (Mike Snyder's, mostly) showed a surprising amount of talent and ambition, but even taken all together, they felt to me at the time like a nice extra - a way to get your money's worth out of the title by having some additional content to play with. The idea of making a proper game with the Dink engine had come up (again, Mike Snyder), but I'm not sure how likely it felt to come to fruition. Dink wasn't such a unique phenomenon just yet - lots of games have early mod support, some fun releases, the ANNOUNCEMENT of some very ambitious projects, and then fizzle out after a year or so. Then came Gary Hertel and Prophecy of the Ancients, and you couldn't look at Dink the same way again. The point was driven home for good that RTSoft had done something special in making the ability to modify the game as broad as it was. You could pour your heart into a project of massive proportions, and the very same year that the game was released, somebody actually did.
It would be a mistake to portray PotA as something that blindsided the community, of course. We knew it was coming; Gary talked about it on his website and there was a demo, which I had played. Even so, it's hard to overstate how much of a wake-up slap this mod was to Dink fans upon its release. A well-thought-out epic with innovative new features had been proven feasible, so what was stopping you? In my case, it was talent and patience.
Like Mike Snyder, Gary was an Actual Programmer, and you can tell when you play PotA. A fixture in early Dinkdom, Mr. Hertel was responsible for the tremendously useful Ultimate Cheat (a boon to developers and cheaters alike) and eventually for WinDinkEdit, which I wasn't around for, but I'd have been glad to have anything replace the tedium of moving your cursor around with the arrow keys in the original editor. This was his only DMOD, but Hell, after making this you don't really have to go on, do you?
Prophecy was the first mod to be larger than the actual game. It took me five hours flat to beat Dink Smallwood and 5:20 for POTA. Equally notable is its innovative magic system, which stores up to seven spells (only one of which is from the original) in just two "magic-items." You can change between spells by pressing M and cycling through sprites with the arrow keys, causing them to circle around Dink. Mind you, I played this mod back in the day, but I didn't remember it so well, and when I saw this my jaw dropped. I'm poring over the source right now and I still don't understand how it works. Actual Programmers, guys. I bow my head in deference.
Enough about notability. POTA is good. It is a fun game and if you're playing DMODs at all you have to play it. It was the undisputed gold standard for nearly two years, and remains in the prized 9.0+ category today for good reason. Aside from the fact that you play as Dink and nearly all of the graphics and sound effects are reused, it doesn't feel like an addon. It has a large world with distinct sections that make sense and feel right, something that no DMOD author other than Mike Snyder had managed yet, and unlike Mike's DMODs, there is no Big Empty Map Syndrome to be found. The game is packed with content, and that content is varied, creative, and often quite funny. The new Magic is just genius work. First of all, you can turn into four monsters - a bonca (check out the sweet gfx for that magic rune), which is good for some extra punch early on, a slime, which moves at Herb Boots speed and is useful throughout the mod for moving around, a goblin, a form in which you have to remain for a certain segment, and eventually a stone giant, which is pretty much the "haha I win" button, adding 14 to your attack AND defense. The second rune can be used to cast your standard hellfire, an iceball spell that freezes enemies (the frozen enemy graphics are pretty cool), and a "spark" spell that is only useful in a couple of spots. Oh, and while I'm at it, the music choices are many and excellent. There's a ska MIDI in this DMOD! Yes, please!
Some of the tasks you have to perform are quite clever, and there's a lot of great stufff going on with environmental changes. For example, there's a river that blocks your path, so you push a rock into it and it becomes a path. Is that great game design or what? That's like Metroid or Zelda or something. At any rate, for most of the mod there's something new and interesting to do almost everywhere you go.
I can't go too overboard praising the mod, however, as I did notice some glaring flaws, and what's worse, in the last hour or so I got kind of bored. Most of the flaws could be fixed with a bit of simple polish, like spelling and grammatical errors ("butt" is repeatedly spelled as "but" right at the start of the intro - not a good first impression), signs with no scripts attached, objects with no hardness, tiling that doesn't match up, and doors that don't operate and offer no explanation as to why. I really don't want to give the impression that these errors are all over the place, because they aren't, but they're there enough to be noticeable and it detracts from what otherwise feels like a professional-level experience. More concerning is the difficulty problem. Early on, the bosses are pretty tough, but at a certain point not too far in you start to get seriously overpowered, and the game is not likely to present you much challenge from there. Experience points shower you like the curbside spray of a passing minivan on a wet road, and powerups are so common that it kind of takes the joy that the original game had out of finding them. If you don't believe me, have a look at my ending stats. Furthermore, you get the throwing axe early on, and DMOD authors really need to learn (and hey, maybe they did) that the thing is seriously a game breaker. Once you have that axe, combat with almost anything that doesn't have a very high defense or a magic attack is a complete joke. I think that RTSoft at least partially understood this, since in the original game it's behind an optional quest and costs a significant amount of gold. And then there are the new spells - Iceball is an instant kill for everything it works on, as hitting a frozen monster results in its immediate demise. It works on most of the difficult monsters you encounter. Then, when you get that stone giant morph, the game is just plain over. Even in the extremely unlikely event that you take enough damage to worry about, you're still fine, as you regenerate a health point every seven seconds while in this form!
Furthermore, you can tell that development on this mod began when nobody really knew anything about making DMODs. When Dink examines a sign in the first part of the mod, the text attaches to Dink, which is unusual but not wrong per se. However, when he examines inanimate objects they often seem to talk, which is definitely wrong. These problems, the tiling errors, and other problems like them tend to vanish as you get further into the mod, suggesting the author(s) learned as it progressed.
Those flaws don't prevent PotA from being an essential DMOD, though. Let's walk around it a bit, admire the decor, raid its medicine cabinet, eat some chips on its sofa, steal some of its silverware. I am rapidly losing track of this analogy.
This mod is set in an alternate timeline, which is a great idea, as all the original game's baggage can be thrown straight out. In this timeline Dink is makin' it with Libby and Milder is the pig farmer, resulting in a uproarious role reversal of that familiar scene. Then, Armageddon starts happening. Oh no! This won't be explained until the very end of the game, so all Dink and Milder can do is run for it in the intro sequence, which works very well aside from a moment where they both run straight through a church wall instead of using the door like sensible beings who are made of solid matter. The intro contains some interesting visual moments that don't just feel like a part of the game where you lack control (there's also a "skip intro" button, which was first seen in Dink's Doppelganger and is a feature I admire because it seems like it wouldn't be that easy to code). Actually, the cutscenes throughout the entire mod are impressive and frequently involve a great number of moving sprites, Dink properly walking off screen, and other excellent touches. Anyway, Dink has to back in time to prevent the Prophecy of the Ancients (it involves lots of doom) from coming to pass.
This game is really quite witty (yes, those are all separate links). I mean, I laughed. Big-time jerks get their comeuppance and then some, Dink Smallwood fails to put up with all varieties of typical NPC guff, and goblins are immensely, hilariously, pants-wettingly dumb to the point where they can often simply be talked into killing one another, which is a running gag. Early on, there is a lot of script interaction with objects and a truly impressive amount of different texts for Dink to say when he examines or hits things, but this becomes less true pretty rapidly and the second half of the game is pretty much devoid of this kind of thing, sadly. There's still plenty of humor in the dialogue, though, until the last section.
The last section is where I got bored, and the game seems to peter out a bit. I don't want to overstate this; the maps are still quite good, there are still cool graphics that were made for the final sections, and so forth. It's just that when you compare the last part to what came before, it doesn't feel nearly as good. There are a couple of dungeons that just feel totally aimless to me - although they are still decently-designed, they compare poorly to the rest of the game where there was constantly something new to do. It doesn't help that by this point the game is deliriously easy - even the final boss is pretty much a pushover. By the way, I figured out how to sequence break the "force field" section and skip the Darklands portion entirely. Just equip an elixir from the beginning of the game (they were only 50 gold), walk through the field blocking the next area that sets your life to 0, and use your elixir. Tada, you're fine! Cheeky.
Anyway, when you win you're treated to a long ending sequence where Dink goes around kicking ass while all the villains barely have time to wonder what's going on. It is glorious. Then, there is an actual scrolling credit roll. Wow.
I think the most impressive thing about PotA is that it came out as early as it did. What a tough act to follow.
---
And with that, I have played and written about all of the DMODs of 1998! A roaring start to the Dink scene, and big thanks go out once again to Mike Snyder for making it happen. I bet you didn't think I'd even make it this far, huh? Well, I will be back to cover 1999, in which a "mere" twenty DMODs were released (one of which I have already covered). See you then.
031: Prophecy of the Ancients Authors: Gary & Tony Hertel Release date: December 8, 1998
Robinson Technologies released a fairly unheralded little independent PC game called Dink Smallwood some time in early 1998, though it's difficult to pin down exactly when (I could ask Seth Robinson, but I figure he's a pretty busy guy, and it isn't that important). In the months that followed, over twenty-five addon modules were released. Some of them were fun, others sucked, and a few (Mike Snyder's, mostly) showed a surprising amount of talent and ambition, but even taken all together, they felt to me at the time like a nice extra - a way to get your money's worth out of the title by having some additional content to play with. The idea of making a proper game with the Dink engine had come up (again, Mike Snyder), but I'm not sure how likely it felt to come to fruition. Dink wasn't such a unique phenomenon just yet - lots of games have early mod support, some fun releases, the ANNOUNCEMENT of some very ambitious projects, and then fizzle out after a year or so. Then came Gary Hertel and Prophecy of the Ancients, and you couldn't look at Dink the same way again. The point was driven home for good that RTSoft had done something special in making the ability to modify the game as broad as it was. You could pour your heart into a project of massive proportions, and the very same year that the game was released, somebody actually did.
It would be a mistake to portray PotA as something that blindsided the community, of course. We knew it was coming; Gary talked about it on his website and there was a demo, which I had played. Even so, it's hard to overstate how much of a wake-up slap this mod was to Dink fans upon its release. A well-thought-out epic with innovative new features had been proven feasible, so what was stopping you? In my case, it was talent and patience.
Like Mike Snyder, Gary was an Actual Programmer, and you can tell when you play PotA. A fixture in early Dinkdom, Mr. Hertel was responsible for the tremendously useful Ultimate Cheat (a boon to developers and cheaters alike) and eventually for WinDinkEdit, which I wasn't around for, but I'd have been glad to have anything replace the tedium of moving your cursor around with the arrow keys in the original editor. This was his only DMOD, but Hell, after making this you don't really have to go on, do you?
Prophecy was the first mod to be larger than the actual game. It took me five hours flat to beat Dink Smallwood and 5:20 for POTA. Equally notable is its innovative magic system, which stores up to seven spells (only one of which is from the original) in just two "magic-items." You can change between spells by pressing M and cycling through sprites with the arrow keys, causing them to circle around Dink. Mind you, I played this mod back in the day, but I didn't remember it so well, and when I saw this my jaw dropped. I'm poring over the source right now and I still don't understand how it works. Actual Programmers, guys. I bow my head in deference.
Enough about notability. POTA is good. It is a fun game and if you're playing DMODs at all you have to play it. It was the undisputed gold standard for nearly two years, and remains in the prized 9.0+ category today for good reason. Aside from the fact that you play as Dink and nearly all of the graphics and sound effects are reused, it doesn't feel like an addon. It has a large world with distinct sections that make sense and feel right, something that no DMOD author other than Mike Snyder had managed yet, and unlike Mike's DMODs, there is no Big Empty Map Syndrome to be found. The game is packed with content, and that content is varied, creative, and often quite funny. The new Magic is just genius work. First of all, you can turn into four monsters - a bonca (check out the sweet gfx for that magic rune), which is good for some extra punch early on, a slime, which moves at Herb Boots speed and is useful throughout the mod for moving around, a goblin, a form in which you have to remain for a certain segment, and eventually a stone giant, which is pretty much the "haha I win" button, adding 14 to your attack AND defense. The second rune can be used to cast your standard hellfire, an iceball spell that freezes enemies (the frozen enemy graphics are pretty cool), and a "spark" spell that is only useful in a couple of spots. Oh, and while I'm at it, the music choices are many and excellent. There's a ska MIDI in this DMOD! Yes, please!
Some of the tasks you have to perform are quite clever, and there's a lot of great stufff going on with environmental changes. For example, there's a river that blocks your path, so you push a rock into it and it becomes a path. Is that great game design or what? That's like Metroid or Zelda or something. At any rate, for most of the mod there's something new and interesting to do almost everywhere you go.
I can't go too overboard praising the mod, however, as I did notice some glaring flaws, and what's worse, in the last hour or so I got kind of bored. Most of the flaws could be fixed with a bit of simple polish, like spelling and grammatical errors ("butt" is repeatedly spelled as "but" right at the start of the intro - not a good first impression), signs with no scripts attached, objects with no hardness, tiling that doesn't match up, and doors that don't operate and offer no explanation as to why. I really don't want to give the impression that these errors are all over the place, because they aren't, but they're there enough to be noticeable and it detracts from what otherwise feels like a professional-level experience. More concerning is the difficulty problem. Early on, the bosses are pretty tough, but at a certain point not too far in you start to get seriously overpowered, and the game is not likely to present you much challenge from there. Experience points shower you like the curbside spray of a passing minivan on a wet road, and powerups are so common that it kind of takes the joy that the original game had out of finding them. If you don't believe me, have a look at my ending stats. Furthermore, you get the throwing axe early on, and DMOD authors really need to learn (and hey, maybe they did) that the thing is seriously a game breaker. Once you have that axe, combat with almost anything that doesn't have a very high defense or a magic attack is a complete joke. I think that RTSoft at least partially understood this, since in the original game it's behind an optional quest and costs a significant amount of gold. And then there are the new spells - Iceball is an instant kill for everything it works on, as hitting a frozen monster results in its immediate demise. It works on most of the difficult monsters you encounter. Then, when you get that stone giant morph, the game is just plain over. Even in the extremely unlikely event that you take enough damage to worry about, you're still fine, as you regenerate a health point every seven seconds while in this form!
Furthermore, you can tell that development on this mod began when nobody really knew anything about making DMODs. When Dink examines a sign in the first part of the mod, the text attaches to Dink, which is unusual but not wrong per se. However, when he examines inanimate objects they often seem to talk, which is definitely wrong. These problems, the tiling errors, and other problems like them tend to vanish as you get further into the mod, suggesting the author(s) learned as it progressed.
Those flaws don't prevent PotA from being an essential DMOD, though. Let's walk around it a bit, admire the decor, raid its medicine cabinet, eat some chips on its sofa, steal some of its silverware. I am rapidly losing track of this analogy.
This mod is set in an alternate timeline, which is a great idea, as all the original game's baggage can be thrown straight out. In this timeline Dink is makin' it with Libby and Milder is the pig farmer, resulting in a uproarious role reversal of that familiar scene. Then, Armageddon starts happening. Oh no! This won't be explained until the very end of the game, so all Dink and Milder can do is run for it in the intro sequence, which works very well aside from a moment where they both run straight through a church wall instead of using the door like sensible beings who are made of solid matter. The intro contains some interesting visual moments that don't just feel like a part of the game where you lack control (there's also a "skip intro" button, which was first seen in Dink's Doppelganger and is a feature I admire because it seems like it wouldn't be that easy to code). Actually, the cutscenes throughout the entire mod are impressive and frequently involve a great number of moving sprites, Dink properly walking off screen, and other excellent touches. Anyway, Dink has to back in time to prevent the Prophecy of the Ancients (it involves lots of doom) from coming to pass.
This game is really quite witty (yes, those are all separate links). I mean, I laughed. Big-time jerks get their comeuppance and then some, Dink Smallwood fails to put up with all varieties of typical NPC guff, and goblins are immensely, hilariously, pants-wettingly dumb to the point where they can often simply be talked into killing one another, which is a running gag. Early on, there is a lot of script interaction with objects and a truly impressive amount of different texts for Dink to say when he examines or hits things, but this becomes less true pretty rapidly and the second half of the game is pretty much devoid of this kind of thing, sadly. There's still plenty of humor in the dialogue, though, until the last section.
The last section is where I got bored, and the game seems to peter out a bit. I don't want to overstate this; the maps are still quite good, there are still cool graphics that were made for the final sections, and so forth. It's just that when you compare the last part to what came before, it doesn't feel nearly as good. There are a couple of dungeons that just feel totally aimless to me - although they are still decently-designed, they compare poorly to the rest of the game where there was constantly something new to do. It doesn't help that by this point the game is deliriously easy - even the final boss is pretty much a pushover. By the way, I figured out how to sequence break the "force field" section and skip the Darklands portion entirely. Just equip an elixir from the beginning of the game (they were only 50 gold), walk through the field blocking the next area that sets your life to 0, and use your elixir. Tada, you're fine! Cheeky.
Anyway, when you win you're treated to a long ending sequence where Dink goes around kicking ass while all the villains barely have time to wonder what's going on. It is glorious. Then, there is an actual scrolling credit roll. Wow.
I think the most impressive thing about PotA is that it came out as early as it did. What a tough act to follow.
---
And with that, I have played and written about all of the DMODs of 1998! A roaring start to the Dink scene, and big thanks go out once again to Mike Snyder for making it happen. I bet you didn't think I'd even make it this far, huh? Well, I will be back to cover 1999, in which a "mere" twenty DMODs were released (one of which I have already covered). See you then.
