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--1999 part two: Redink and the bunnie--
036: Dink Smallwood & The End of Time Author: Dan Walma Release Date: April 7, 1999
I don't think Dan ever took up the cause of being steward of the Dink Smallwood community on purpose. His website started out small and he only expanded it because it was where people started coming and it seemed like the thing to do. This may surprise you, but on August 3, 1999, he actually declared his intention to leave the community, though he rescinded this statement a few months later. After that, he made several largely unsuccessful attempts to pass the torch before finally disappearing, it seems, at the end of 2008 - an impressive run to be sure. I know I've gone on about this before, but none of this would be around at all without him. I always found his news posts to be oddly witty in that "Dink Smallwood" kind of way, as well.
"The End of Time" is the first DMOD of 1999 to really feel properly put together. Everything in it works perfectly as far as I was able to tell, the maps all make sense, seem to form a coherent world and not just a boxy path, and look decent (the placement of the decoration is a bit haphazard, but there's plenty of it), and I encountered no bugs or major problems at all. I feel like this is worth mentioning because that entire last update contained not a single DMOD about which any of these things were true.
EOT deals more with the original game than most of the mods so far. It even starts in the secret area from the original where you buy the flame bow, but you're soon in new territory. The description says that this DMOD is much darker than others, and at first this seems to be true, as you find a village where people who awaited salvation were left waiting too long, a gruesome sight. Before long, however, everything gets very silly, and to be honest this works very much in the DMOD's favor, as it doesn't really pull off being very serious, but it does pull off being pretty funny. Dink falls asleep during exposition, there are the usual fourth wall jokes, you get to beat some total jerks to death, and an insane farmer demands spam. It's not hilarious, but I got some laughs out of it. Lots of things respond to examination, but almost nothing to punching, unfortunately.
On a technical note, this DMOD contains a simple flying spell whose appearance cracks me up. It only works on two screens, but it works without a hitch no matter where you're standing when you cast it, which is good. The incantations reference a few Dinkers of the time. Another cool feature of this DMOD is that several different bird noises are looped as you walk through the forest, creating an ambient effect that really helps immerse you in the game. Of course, one could also find this annoying, but I liked it.
This is a good DMOD, but I feel like it would be a lot better if it were a romp instead of a quest. It took me a little over forty minutes to complete "End of Time," but almost all of that was spent on pointless walking. You see, the path you must follow to get to the end has several stones blocking the way that must be exploded by a bomb. There is a machine back in the village that dispenses bombs, but only one at a time, and only when "you really need them." This means you have to go find the rock, go to the complete opposite end of the map to get a bomb, go all the way back to blow up the rock, and repeat this FOUR TIMES. This is an utterly baffling piece of game design that does nothing but waste the player's time. This would be more bearable if there were much on the map, but we're dealing with Big Empty Map Syndrome again here, though not as bad a case of it as many other mods.
I feel like I ought to explain what it is about BEMS (tm) that gets me down so much. Allow me to present my case: Dink Smallwood is an RPG, right? Seth has said that that was the very genesis of the game - he wanted to make an RPG. In this genre, whether you're playing Zelda or Dragon Quest or Diablo, one thing that's constant is that the player is rewarded for exploration. Odds are excellent that there's something in that dead end that made coming there worth your while, and if you wander off the beaten path, you'll find some secrets that make you glad you did. The original game got this right, but there's honestly nothing like that here or in many of the DMODs so far. In fact, the only DMODs I've played thus far to have really nailed this concept are Prophecy of the Ancients and The Quest for Cheese. These are also the only two rated 9.0 or above thus far, which I think goes to show that I'm not alone in this opinion. Being rewarded for doing extra work is fun, and good game design.
Actually, "End of Time" has a surprisingly large map that's well put together and forms a pretty elegant path, as I noticed while looking at it in WinDinkEdit+2. It's just a shame that most of it is wasted space.
Returning to the subject of backtracking for bombs, I am entranced by the concept of the bomb machine. It literally tells you that it gives out bombs to people who "really need them," then decides whether you need them or not. No one operates this machine - it is autonomous. My mind positively oscillates at the implications of this. Is this bomb machine sentient? How does it know whether you need a bomb or not? Is it omniscient, or just able to tell who needs a bomb just by looking at them? What constitutes "really needing a bomb?" Could this machine be used for evil? Look, I know that it's just a convenient game mechanic, but I can't help thinking about these things. You can't use a machine that dispenses bombs to only those it deems worthy without feeling that at some point something went very wrong with the universe without you noticing.
Sorry, sorry. Anyway, there's little combat until the end, when you have to fight a large number of Goblins. However, the game loads you up on powerups at this point, including fireball and acid rain spells that you can simply pick up, making the fighting pretty easy. Anyway, you can just have them kill each other. The very end, though, gets kind of interesting. There's a puzzle that requires knowledge of the original game, which is a first. The story turns dark again as, in the act of diverting ultimate destruction away from the world, you send it all to the town of Windermere (apparently located in China near the Korean peninsula), which goes kablooey. The game helpfully pans around to show you the destroyed town. Nice job breaking it, hero. The implication that people were still in their homes is strong. Man, this game is dark!
I'll spoil the ending for you because it's pretty infuriating anyway if you play through it yourself just to get there: despite having saved the world, Dink is sent to jail for the destruction of Windermere. Man, that sucks.
Probably the most interesting thing about this DMOD is that 2001's "FIAT" was conceived as a prequel to it, and Dan said he thought he'd probably finish it within a few months. Ha ha ha. If you want to play this one, you'll have more fun if you cheat your way around the busy work by either increasing Dink's speed or setting beacons - it won't actually make the game easier, just faster. I didn't cheat because I'm trying to avoid doing that. I've only done it in two mods so far, one of which requires cheating to finish.
037: Mike the Magician (Alpha/Beta) Author: Kevin "Bunniemaster" Zettler Release Date: April 16, 1999
Oh man, Bunnie and I were bros! I got along okay with some Dinkers back in the day, but Kevin was the only one I ever got chummy with. He was just a chill guy who was easy to get along with, and he is, I think, the only person ever to genuinely *like* my DMODs, an impressive feat. I'm sure if he were here he'd have good things to say about me too, and... oh, what's that?
Uh...
Oh my. That's certainly... overt.
No, but seriously, in case you can't see screenshots for some reason, the object of this DMOD is to "kill tim." This is just a coincidence - Tim doesn't stand for me (at least, I don't think so). In the DMOD, you play as a wizard in a Wizard Dormitory at Wizard school, your roommate is annoying, and you've got to kill him. Your sprite set is the same one from "Legend of Smallwood," maybe with a slightly altered death sequence. Tim is surprisingly strong, so you're going to have to increase your stats in order to beat him.
The layout of this DMOD is quite unusual. There aren't many screens - mostly it's just the dorm hall with some numbered doors. One of the rooms has nothing to interact with, and a few can't be entered, but hey, this is only a "Super Alpha Beta she dog test", after all. If you'd like to win, all you need to do is enter a certain door and you'll be sent to a very strange-looking place where you'll get 20, 20, and 100 added to your stats. This will happen every time you enter a certain screen, so you can have all the stats you want. I bet you can break the game this way. Anyhow, the boost makes killing the annoying Tim quite easy. This produces the message, "wow you won this supoer alpha beta!." and the game hangs. Hooray! You can do this in under a minute.
But hey, why rush? If you explore a little you can find a couple of guys smoking pot and drinking "robatosin" (unsurprisingly, they're not all that intelligible), a guy who's way too into ducks, and an "old hag" with "medicinal herbs" growing in her room. I'm not sure whether this wizard dorm is co-ed or they just thought it didn't matter in her case. Really, the cool thing about this one is that you get two original spells: a trippy-looking magic cloud of death, which works like acid rain with improved power and range (Bunnie would go on to add this to Mike Kanter's Dink Arena) and a self-shrinking spell. The shrinking spell works pefectly well for reducing your sprite's size and returning it to normal, but that's all it seems to do.
I don't think that this is in any way a serious DMOD, it's just a bit of screwing around with practically no point and no plot. For some reason - and feel totally free to call me biased or even unfair - I'm more okay with that here than I was with Dingwell's mod or my own 1998 stuff. There was at least a bit of effort put into this one to make it look kind of interesting - "good" sure as hell isn't a word I'd associate with it, and I really can't recommend downloading it, but it got a smirk out of me. And hey, those original magics are pretty neat.
038: StarDink Author: Dan Walma Release Date: May 26, 1999
A long time ago in a DMOD writeup far, far away...
I seem to recall this one being pretty well-received when it came out, but it is hard for me to remember crap I did on the Internet over 14 years ago. Really, don't take anything I say about the old days as the absolute truth - my head is pretty foggy.
This is a rather thin Star Wars parody with the names changed - "Episode 3.9," "Alder On," "Platooine," "O B." Okay, that last one is kind of clever, but "Hand Multi" for Han Solo is the worst. Unlike "Mike the Magician," this does feel like a proper DMOD, but it's a very short one - it took me ten minutes and that's because I got quite lost. It's really an excuse to showcase the dinksaber, which basically had to happen at some point (and more weapons is always a good thing) and some Star Wars graphics.
Anyway, in StarDink, Dink is ordered by his jerk uncle to check on the pigs, but they're killed by jawas! Oh no! You're forced to defeat three of these buggers with just the fist and some basic stats before you even get the chance to save, and I'll bet a lot of people gave up in frustration here, as the jawas shoot quickly and accurately. However, on my third try I realized that their shots behave like the fireball and they've got no base attack or touch damage, so the best way to kill them is to punch them through or near something hard, like a fence. They give no exp, so never bother fighting them if you're not screenlocked. After fighting those three, Dink can discover the power of the PUSH and get the saber. I didn't die a third time, although I shaved it dang close! At the end, there's a spaceship sequence where you have to survive for a certain amount of time. Here, you should just keep shooting, because although enemies will continue to arrive, they drop full hearts when they die. When time runs out, the mod ends abruptly.
The map makes sense and looks decent if sparse. While there isn't a whole lot to do here, the new jawa enemies are quite neat, especially if you like a challenge. There are quite a few new graphics and sounds, so if you're a Star Wars fan you'll get a bit of a kick out of this one (try "attacking" with the droid equipped). I kind of like StarDink because it stands out from the pack a bit without being a total mess like Bloop the Fish. It's pretty amusing, too. Man, Dink's uncle is a jerk.
039: DinkCraft (Beta 2) Author: Dan Walma Release Date: June 25, 1999
Now this is what I'm talking about in terms of standing out! What an ambitious project this was! It was already kind of impressive that the Warcraft II graphics had been correctly imported in "Lost in Dink," but here, everything actually works, and it is really cool for a change of pace, especially if you've just played 38 DMODs like I have.
This almost feels like a different game. First of all, the title screen looks great, with a custom cursor and everything. You've got plenty of trolls to fight if you want to, although it's never actually required. There's a cool new status bar and even a thematically consistent dialogue choice box. I was grinning just at how good this DMOD looks. One thing that floored me is that enemy corpses quickly begin to fade through various frames of decay and then disappear, kind of like in Warcraft. I mean, this wouldn't be THAT hard to do, but it's a great touch that helps this mod feel even more different from the norm.
Unfortunately, the game itself informs you that it will never be finished, and this does feel much more like a very early testing build than any kind of demo. I'm not sure if it's possible to beat this mod; there is a script telling you you won the demo, but I don't know if you can trigger it. I couldn't, even after resorting to cheating. I couldn't even find a way to solve the first (only?) quest you're given. I'm not sure whether this is my fault or because it isn't implemented. I did find some cool features, though, like a mercenary who'll follow you around and generally do a good job of targeting and attacking your enemies, although I also had him attack me once, and he disappears when you load the game.
Before long the game sort of stops, but the map keeps going. Oh man, does it keep going. The map is absolutely huge and full of different mazelike paths, and I spent entirely too long wandering around it. When I started cheating, I reached an area with different, more powerful enemies and an ice area. You can get a boat, although it's possible to sail it on land. It's clear to see that if this had been finished, it would have involved a huge adventure with many different kinds of quests that would have been a bit different from the usual Dink fare. If it were finished, this would be truly great, but even as it is, I'm impressed with what Dan achieved here. Dink fans should check this out as a curiosity piece, and you can have a bit of fun aimlessly beating up trolls if you want.
040: Dinkablo (Alpha) Author: Kevin "Bunniemaster" Zettler Release Date: August 7, 1999
You know, Bunnie might have thought my earlier mods were crap but liked "End of the World." I think that may have been the case. My memory is so bad.
I'm ambivalent about these public alpha and beta releases. On the one hand, you're making a full release of something that's often hardly playable; on the other, you're making content available that otherwise would never have been seen. It's hard for me to come down on either side, really; I guess it depends upon the specific case.
"Dinkablo" is a project that barely even got started. It doesn't have a title screen, and the screen you start out on features a dude with no script and a fountain and stump with no hardness. Only two of the people in the DMOD have scripts attached to them, and unlike the previous mod, I'm certain there's nothing to accomplish in this one.
As the name suggests, this DMOD was clearly going to be based very closely on Diablo, another Blizzard game. Although this uses the original Dink graphics, the layout of the town is very strongly reminiscent of Diablo's, and like in that game, you enter a dungeon through a church. All the characters in the Diablo town are in their places here, although only two of them talk (with voice clips, yet).
I honestly think that this mod could have been great fun. The layout of the village is excellent, with some of the best screen decoration I've seen so far, and that includes the original game. The interiors get weird, but maybe that would have made more sense in context. My favorite thing that's actually here is a conversation with the obviously insane healer that made me laugh out loud. Bunniemaster did always have an excellently twisted sense of humor.
There are some powerups scattered around town and a couple of dungeon rooms filled with particularly vicious pillbugs, but it stops dead there. "Dinkablo" is a trace of what could have been and nothing more, sadly. There's no gameplay to be had.
--
Well, we're more than halfway through 1999, and I think it's utterly safe to conclude that it isn't the year for DMODs that 1998 was, with three of the last four projects being unfinished stubs (though Dinkcraft was one hell of a stub) and just one mod (End of Time) that really feels like a full and complete experience. The whole Dink community might well have fizzled away had things kept on as they were. Lots of Dinkers were leaving - I left in late July, and even Dan Walma declared his intention to leave the community soon in early August - but we all know better, don't we?
Next time: The final mods of the pre-freeware period.
036: Dink Smallwood & The End of Time Author: Dan Walma Release Date: April 7, 1999
I don't think Dan ever took up the cause of being steward of the Dink Smallwood community on purpose. His website started out small and he only expanded it because it was where people started coming and it seemed like the thing to do. This may surprise you, but on August 3, 1999, he actually declared his intention to leave the community, though he rescinded this statement a few months later. After that, he made several largely unsuccessful attempts to pass the torch before finally disappearing, it seems, at the end of 2008 - an impressive run to be sure. I know I've gone on about this before, but none of this would be around at all without him. I always found his news posts to be oddly witty in that "Dink Smallwood" kind of way, as well.
"The End of Time" is the first DMOD of 1999 to really feel properly put together. Everything in it works perfectly as far as I was able to tell, the maps all make sense, seem to form a coherent world and not just a boxy path, and look decent (the placement of the decoration is a bit haphazard, but there's plenty of it), and I encountered no bugs or major problems at all. I feel like this is worth mentioning because that entire last update contained not a single DMOD about which any of these things were true.
EOT deals more with the original game than most of the mods so far. It even starts in the secret area from the original where you buy the flame bow, but you're soon in new territory. The description says that this DMOD is much darker than others, and at first this seems to be true, as you find a village where people who awaited salvation were left waiting too long, a gruesome sight. Before long, however, everything gets very silly, and to be honest this works very much in the DMOD's favor, as it doesn't really pull off being very serious, but it does pull off being pretty funny. Dink falls asleep during exposition, there are the usual fourth wall jokes, you get to beat some total jerks to death, and an insane farmer demands spam. It's not hilarious, but I got some laughs out of it. Lots of things respond to examination, but almost nothing to punching, unfortunately.
On a technical note, this DMOD contains a simple flying spell whose appearance cracks me up. It only works on two screens, but it works without a hitch no matter where you're standing when you cast it, which is good. The incantations reference a few Dinkers of the time. Another cool feature of this DMOD is that several different bird noises are looped as you walk through the forest, creating an ambient effect that really helps immerse you in the game. Of course, one could also find this annoying, but I liked it.
This is a good DMOD, but I feel like it would be a lot better if it were a romp instead of a quest. It took me a little over forty minutes to complete "End of Time," but almost all of that was spent on pointless walking. You see, the path you must follow to get to the end has several stones blocking the way that must be exploded by a bomb. There is a machine back in the village that dispenses bombs, but only one at a time, and only when "you really need them." This means you have to go find the rock, go to the complete opposite end of the map to get a bomb, go all the way back to blow up the rock, and repeat this FOUR TIMES. This is an utterly baffling piece of game design that does nothing but waste the player's time. This would be more bearable if there were much on the map, but we're dealing with Big Empty Map Syndrome again here, though not as bad a case of it as many other mods.
I feel like I ought to explain what it is about BEMS (tm) that gets me down so much. Allow me to present my case: Dink Smallwood is an RPG, right? Seth has said that that was the very genesis of the game - he wanted to make an RPG. In this genre, whether you're playing Zelda or Dragon Quest or Diablo, one thing that's constant is that the player is rewarded for exploration. Odds are excellent that there's something in that dead end that made coming there worth your while, and if you wander off the beaten path, you'll find some secrets that make you glad you did. The original game got this right, but there's honestly nothing like that here or in many of the DMODs so far. In fact, the only DMODs I've played thus far to have really nailed this concept are Prophecy of the Ancients and The Quest for Cheese. These are also the only two rated 9.0 or above thus far, which I think goes to show that I'm not alone in this opinion. Being rewarded for doing extra work is fun, and good game design.
Actually, "End of Time" has a surprisingly large map that's well put together and forms a pretty elegant path, as I noticed while looking at it in WinDinkEdit+2. It's just a shame that most of it is wasted space.
Returning to the subject of backtracking for bombs, I am entranced by the concept of the bomb machine. It literally tells you that it gives out bombs to people who "really need them," then decides whether you need them or not. No one operates this machine - it is autonomous. My mind positively oscillates at the implications of this. Is this bomb machine sentient? How does it know whether you need a bomb or not? Is it omniscient, or just able to tell who needs a bomb just by looking at them? What constitutes "really needing a bomb?" Could this machine be used for evil? Look, I know that it's just a convenient game mechanic, but I can't help thinking about these things. You can't use a machine that dispenses bombs to only those it deems worthy without feeling that at some point something went very wrong with the universe without you noticing.
Sorry, sorry. Anyway, there's little combat until the end, when you have to fight a large number of Goblins. However, the game loads you up on powerups at this point, including fireball and acid rain spells that you can simply pick up, making the fighting pretty easy. Anyway, you can just have them kill each other. The very end, though, gets kind of interesting. There's a puzzle that requires knowledge of the original game, which is a first. The story turns dark again as, in the act of diverting ultimate destruction away from the world, you send it all to the town of Windermere (apparently located in China near the Korean peninsula), which goes kablooey. The game helpfully pans around to show you the destroyed town. Nice job breaking it, hero. The implication that people were still in their homes is strong. Man, this game is dark!
I'll spoil the ending for you because it's pretty infuriating anyway if you play through it yourself just to get there: despite having saved the world, Dink is sent to jail for the destruction of Windermere. Man, that sucks.
Probably the most interesting thing about this DMOD is that 2001's "FIAT" was conceived as a prequel to it, and Dan said he thought he'd probably finish it within a few months. Ha ha ha. If you want to play this one, you'll have more fun if you cheat your way around the busy work by either increasing Dink's speed or setting beacons - it won't actually make the game easier, just faster. I didn't cheat because I'm trying to avoid doing that. I've only done it in two mods so far, one of which requires cheating to finish.
037: Mike the Magician (Alpha/Beta) Author: Kevin "Bunniemaster" Zettler Release Date: April 16, 1999
Oh man, Bunnie and I were bros! I got along okay with some Dinkers back in the day, but Kevin was the only one I ever got chummy with. He was just a chill guy who was easy to get along with, and he is, I think, the only person ever to genuinely *like* my DMODs, an impressive feat. I'm sure if he were here he'd have good things to say about me too, and... oh, what's that?
Uh...
Oh my. That's certainly... overt.
No, but seriously, in case you can't see screenshots for some reason, the object of this DMOD is to "kill tim." This is just a coincidence - Tim doesn't stand for me (at least, I don't think so). In the DMOD, you play as a wizard in a Wizard Dormitory at Wizard school, your roommate is annoying, and you've got to kill him. Your sprite set is the same one from "Legend of Smallwood," maybe with a slightly altered death sequence. Tim is surprisingly strong, so you're going to have to increase your stats in order to beat him.
The layout of this DMOD is quite unusual. There aren't many screens - mostly it's just the dorm hall with some numbered doors. One of the rooms has nothing to interact with, and a few can't be entered, but hey, this is only a "Super Alpha Beta she dog test", after all. If you'd like to win, all you need to do is enter a certain door and you'll be sent to a very strange-looking place where you'll get 20, 20, and 100 added to your stats. This will happen every time you enter a certain screen, so you can have all the stats you want. I bet you can break the game this way. Anyhow, the boost makes killing the annoying Tim quite easy. This produces the message, "wow you won this supoer alpha beta!." and the game hangs. Hooray! You can do this in under a minute.
But hey, why rush? If you explore a little you can find a couple of guys smoking pot and drinking "robatosin" (unsurprisingly, they're not all that intelligible), a guy who's way too into ducks, and an "old hag" with "medicinal herbs" growing in her room. I'm not sure whether this wizard dorm is co-ed or they just thought it didn't matter in her case. Really, the cool thing about this one is that you get two original spells: a trippy-looking magic cloud of death, which works like acid rain with improved power and range (Bunnie would go on to add this to Mike Kanter's Dink Arena) and a self-shrinking spell. The shrinking spell works pefectly well for reducing your sprite's size and returning it to normal, but that's all it seems to do.
I don't think that this is in any way a serious DMOD, it's just a bit of screwing around with practically no point and no plot. For some reason - and feel totally free to call me biased or even unfair - I'm more okay with that here than I was with Dingwell's mod or my own 1998 stuff. There was at least a bit of effort put into this one to make it look kind of interesting - "good" sure as hell isn't a word I'd associate with it, and I really can't recommend downloading it, but it got a smirk out of me. And hey, those original magics are pretty neat.
038: StarDink Author: Dan Walma Release Date: May 26, 1999
A long time ago in a DMOD writeup far, far away...
I seem to recall this one being pretty well-received when it came out, but it is hard for me to remember crap I did on the Internet over 14 years ago. Really, don't take anything I say about the old days as the absolute truth - my head is pretty foggy.
This is a rather thin Star Wars parody with the names changed - "Episode 3.9," "Alder On," "Platooine," "O B." Okay, that last one is kind of clever, but "Hand Multi" for Han Solo is the worst. Unlike "Mike the Magician," this does feel like a proper DMOD, but it's a very short one - it took me ten minutes and that's because I got quite lost. It's really an excuse to showcase the dinksaber, which basically had to happen at some point (and more weapons is always a good thing) and some Star Wars graphics.
Anyway, in StarDink, Dink is ordered by his jerk uncle to check on the pigs, but they're killed by jawas! Oh no! You're forced to defeat three of these buggers with just the fist and some basic stats before you even get the chance to save, and I'll bet a lot of people gave up in frustration here, as the jawas shoot quickly and accurately. However, on my third try I realized that their shots behave like the fireball and they've got no base attack or touch damage, so the best way to kill them is to punch them through or near something hard, like a fence. They give no exp, so never bother fighting them if you're not screenlocked. After fighting those three, Dink can discover the power of the PUSH and get the saber. I didn't die a third time, although I shaved it dang close! At the end, there's a spaceship sequence where you have to survive for a certain amount of time. Here, you should just keep shooting, because although enemies will continue to arrive, they drop full hearts when they die. When time runs out, the mod ends abruptly.
The map makes sense and looks decent if sparse. While there isn't a whole lot to do here, the new jawa enemies are quite neat, especially if you like a challenge. There are quite a few new graphics and sounds, so if you're a Star Wars fan you'll get a bit of a kick out of this one (try "attacking" with the droid equipped). I kind of like StarDink because it stands out from the pack a bit without being a total mess like Bloop the Fish. It's pretty amusing, too. Man, Dink's uncle is a jerk.
039: DinkCraft (Beta 2) Author: Dan Walma Release Date: June 25, 1999
Now this is what I'm talking about in terms of standing out! What an ambitious project this was! It was already kind of impressive that the Warcraft II graphics had been correctly imported in "Lost in Dink," but here, everything actually works, and it is really cool for a change of pace, especially if you've just played 38 DMODs like I have.
This almost feels like a different game. First of all, the title screen looks great, with a custom cursor and everything. You've got plenty of trolls to fight if you want to, although it's never actually required. There's a cool new status bar and even a thematically consistent dialogue choice box. I was grinning just at how good this DMOD looks. One thing that floored me is that enemy corpses quickly begin to fade through various frames of decay and then disappear, kind of like in Warcraft. I mean, this wouldn't be THAT hard to do, but it's a great touch that helps this mod feel even more different from the norm.
Unfortunately, the game itself informs you that it will never be finished, and this does feel much more like a very early testing build than any kind of demo. I'm not sure if it's possible to beat this mod; there is a script telling you you won the demo, but I don't know if you can trigger it. I couldn't, even after resorting to cheating. I couldn't even find a way to solve the first (only?) quest you're given. I'm not sure whether this is my fault or because it isn't implemented. I did find some cool features, though, like a mercenary who'll follow you around and generally do a good job of targeting and attacking your enemies, although I also had him attack me once, and he disappears when you load the game.
Before long the game sort of stops, but the map keeps going. Oh man, does it keep going. The map is absolutely huge and full of different mazelike paths, and I spent entirely too long wandering around it. When I started cheating, I reached an area with different, more powerful enemies and an ice area. You can get a boat, although it's possible to sail it on land. It's clear to see that if this had been finished, it would have involved a huge adventure with many different kinds of quests that would have been a bit different from the usual Dink fare. If it were finished, this would be truly great, but even as it is, I'm impressed with what Dan achieved here. Dink fans should check this out as a curiosity piece, and you can have a bit of fun aimlessly beating up trolls if you want.
040: Dinkablo (Alpha) Author: Kevin "Bunniemaster" Zettler Release Date: August 7, 1999
You know, Bunnie might have thought my earlier mods were crap but liked "End of the World." I think that may have been the case. My memory is so bad.
I'm ambivalent about these public alpha and beta releases. On the one hand, you're making a full release of something that's often hardly playable; on the other, you're making content available that otherwise would never have been seen. It's hard for me to come down on either side, really; I guess it depends upon the specific case.
"Dinkablo" is a project that barely even got started. It doesn't have a title screen, and the screen you start out on features a dude with no script and a fountain and stump with no hardness. Only two of the people in the DMOD have scripts attached to them, and unlike the previous mod, I'm certain there's nothing to accomplish in this one.
As the name suggests, this DMOD was clearly going to be based very closely on Diablo, another Blizzard game. Although this uses the original Dink graphics, the layout of the town is very strongly reminiscent of Diablo's, and like in that game, you enter a dungeon through a church. All the characters in the Diablo town are in their places here, although only two of them talk (with voice clips, yet).
I honestly think that this mod could have been great fun. The layout of the village is excellent, with some of the best screen decoration I've seen so far, and that includes the original game. The interiors get weird, but maybe that would have made more sense in context. My favorite thing that's actually here is a conversation with the obviously insane healer that made me laugh out loud. Bunniemaster did always have an excellently twisted sense of humor.
There are some powerups scattered around town and a couple of dungeon rooms filled with particularly vicious pillbugs, but it stops dead there. "Dinkablo" is a trace of what could have been and nothing more, sadly. There's no gameplay to be had.
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Well, we're more than halfway through 1999, and I think it's utterly safe to conclude that it isn't the year for DMODs that 1998 was, with three of the last four projects being unfinished stubs (though Dinkcraft was one hell of a stub) and just one mod (End of Time) that really feels like a full and complete experience. The whole Dink community might well have fizzled away had things kept on as they were. Lots of Dinkers were leaving - I left in late July, and even Dan Walma declared his intention to leave the community soon in early August - but we all know better, don't we?
Next time: The final mods of the pre-freeware period.
