The Dink Network

Well, here's another installment. I worked long and hard on it. I hope it's genuine enough for ya, Skull

--1999 part 4: The Beginning--

1999 was certainly a lull for DMODs thus far, with End of Time being the only major exception (my enjoyment of the bizarre "Goblin Trouble" notwithstanding). As I've said, you might have thought the whole Dink thing was winding down. In fact, I've no need to speculate; that's pretty much what I thought at the time. I had, at this point, stopped being an active member of the community, probably to the relief of many. A lot of DMODs had been announced, but I didn't think most of them would actually come out, and indeed, most of them didn't.

But then, on October 22, Dink 1.06 was released as a free download. I was completely stunned when I found out. I know that quite a few PC games that used to cost money have become free nowadays, but back then this was very unusual behavior. People tended to hold on to their creations even if they weren't making them much money anymore, and this is certainly understandable.

I want to take notice of this and applaud Seth Robinson for doing this for the fans and PC gamers everywhere. I know they were out of copies of Dink anyway, so the decision made plain sense, but plain sense is surprisingly uncommon.

Incidentally, I think I lost my hard copy of Dink Smallwood when I moved recently. Oh well. It's kind of symbolic; I hardly needed it. The community broke free from it as well.

To me back in 1999, this felt like an ending. It all felt very final somehow. For me, it was: I wasn't really around for the ensuing boom apart from a short return in mid-2000 when I made Zink and Crossroads. Looking back, it's easy to see that things were just getting started. I think my count speaks for itself: 44 DMODs before the freeware release (Prophecy of the Ancients the best by such a margin it's not even funny), 296 afterward. All of the stuff made while Dink was something you had to buy hardly seems to make a dent in that number. I think it's fair to call this point the real beginning.

Once again, it's pretty stunning to look back on this community and all the staying power it's had. It's a rare thing, and it proves that Dink Smallwood was something special. It's interesting, because when it came out, it certainly didn't seem that way - it was an amusing and fun little game with support for modification, certainly worth $15 and $5 shipping, but also rather short, unfinished, and graphically kind of unimpressive (no offense intended to Justin from the Dink team, who did a fine job making all the graphics - it's just that the project had serious limitations). It would have seemed kind of absurd to call it special at the time, but it was. I think it was that bizarre, freewheeling sense of humor it had that got its hooks into people, but it was the many possibilities of DinkC that kept them coming back.

045: Phantasmagoria (Demo) Author: Roger Maynard Release Date: October 24, 1999

Phantasmagoria was a 1995 FMV point and click adventure game by Sierra On-Line and designer Roberta Williams, who is most famous for the King's Quest series. As a kid it scared the hell out of me, but then, I really shouldn't have been playing it as a kid (there's a friggin' rape scene!). I remember liking it, but I don't really want to play it again, as I doubt time has been kind to any FMV game, certainly any live-action one.

This DMOD has nothing to do with that game.

"Phantasmagoria" is also a word that first referred to a type of theatre in mid-to-late 18th century Europe that involved casting shadows with a projector of some kind (the kind used back then was called a "magic lantern"). Deriving from this, it can also refer to a constantly shifting scene or sequence of images, particularly illusory ones or "phantasms."

This DMOD doesn't have anything to do with that either, although that's a cool concept for one.

I can't work out the reason for the title, but it's only the beginning of the misrepresentation going on here. On the Dink Network, this is listed as a "DMOD romp," but it's actually just a demonstration of some leveling mechanics the author came up with. I can't really blame the site, because there's no description and the DMOD fails to explain itself from the start, which any good demonstration ought to do. The only informative thing is the readme. The current one references Lyna's Story, which came out in 2002, so obviously some kind of update was made to this. It's hard to imagine; I'd never played this one before.

I've certainly played (and made) things that qualified less as a DMOD than this does, to be fair. The map design is actually quite good! There's a lovely little grassy area with winding tiered paths, and it all makes sense and is well-decorated. There's one spot where you run into an "invisible wall" consisting of the next screen's hardness, but hey, even Prophecy of the Ancients had a few of those. Overall, there's some good map work here.

There's even a tiny bit of plot to be found; it's about how the DMOD has no plot, and Dink is searching for one. That's a pretty funny concept; it's too bad it goes nowhere because there are only two NPCs to talk to. What little dialogue there is amuses ("Martridge? What in the wide world of sports are you doing here?").

Ultimately, the only real point is to show off the leveling system. Killing enemies gives you "Enemy Points," which you can use at level up or at a machine somewhere on the map to increase your stats (in addition to your ordinary one point at level up). That's great, except the enemies all level up with you, and frankly, it's hard if not impossible for your improvements to keep up with theirs. I've never liked systems where enemies scale with the player's level in an RPG; it removes the point of levels in the first place, which is that difficulty is constantly adjusted according to how much time the player is willing to spend building up their character. If you don't want to have this mechanic, why not just take out levels? It's the same thing, but without the massive feeling of pointlessness. I'm looking at you, Final Fantasy 8. Don't act like I can't see you over there.

As for the Enemy Points system itself, it's not a bad idea. A problem with the original Dink Smallwood and probably most DMODs is that level ups are all but meaningless. Last time I played through the original, I put all my points (all ten of them) into magic, which turned out to be a smart move, but I could have done without. Putting them all into defense or attack would also have been fine. You only get one stat point per level, whereas you get a stat point every single time you find a potion, and three from a megapotion. A bit more meaningful is the +3 lifemax you get when you level up, but again, you get +10 from a gold heart, more than three level ups. This feels kind of broken, so I can't blame Maynard for trying to fix it.

This way doesn't feel sufficient, though - certainly not in this DMOD, where I was never strong enough to fight any of the enemies apart from pillbugs and the weakest boncas. To reach your "objective" you've got to get past two screenlocked dragons (the second of which spawns offscreen, a nasty trick), which you simply cannot do. They've got too much defense, and again, they get stronger when you do. There's a place where you're supposed to be able to buy weapons, but it doesn't work.

Please don't bother spending lots of time grinding to get past those dragons. There's nothing past there but a sign thanking you for playing the "demo."

If I wanted to make levels matter in a Dink game, I'd say there are two ways to go about it: either just make the benefits way better (say, give the player three stat points to distribute per level) or overhaul the whole thing and come up with something like a tiered skill system, which would be an awful lot of work but could be worth it.

046: Dink's Thanksgiving Adventure Author: Paco Release Date: November 26, 1999

This is the second holiday-themed DMOD, after redink1's "Dink Goes Trick or Treating." If you'd like to download this one yourself, take note that it's just called "Thanksgiving" on the site.

Like the Halloween DMOD, this one starts out with Dink's mom sending him to get something (in this case, a turkey, but since there's no such thing in Dink, we get Dink acting like a moron instead). Where that mod was a neat and innovative holiday minigame, however, this is just a very short standard DMOD without much point. All you really do is go northeast, kill a giant duck with a standard duck hardbox, and return home. There are lots of enemies to fight but not much reason to fight them unless you need to grind for levels. The map is small and contains some serious hardness errors, like a cliff you can just walk right through.

This mod does contain some interesting touches that kept it from being instantly forgettable. The most notable is that it allows you to select a difficulty (Easy, Hard or Suicide) before you start, which I believe is a first for a DMOD. The easier settings give you better starting stats and life, and Easy also gives you a sword, making fighting the "goose" very easy indeed. The only thing it'd require to beat "Suicide" is lots of patience, however, as the duck boss has a nice convenient fence you can use to punch it with utter impunity. Speaking of the duck boss, whenever you hit it the word "HIT!" flashes at the bottom of the screen, and thanks to quickly replacing it with a different colored "HIT!", it really does appear to flash. I thought this was a neat little touch - anything that pulls us away from the standard DMOD format and feels different is good. There was also a lot of music for such a short mod, much of it famous music from games; not all of it really fit, though.

"Thanksgiving" isn't offensively bad or anything - there just isn't much to it at all.

047: Alliance Command Author: Dan Walma Release Date: December 5, 1999

Dan's at it again with a third Warcraft II-themed DMOD, and this, to me, is the most impressive one yet. Unlike DinkCraft and the Warcraft section of Lost In Dink, this feels like a complete game, and it's very new and different at that.

Alliance Command was originally intended to contain three games you could select from the title screen, but only one of them, "Kill Those Orcs!," was made. The others were to be called "Orc Invaders" and "609," judging from the BMPs in the graphics folder.

Little trace of what we recognize as Dink Smallwood remains here. "Kill Those Orcs" consists of ten levels made up of nine screens each. When you enter a screen, you have to fight orcs until the timer runs out. The timer is usually 60 seconds, and you have to beat at least four screens to finish most levels, so it's quite a lengthy game.

The presentation here is fantastic. I love the minimap in the upper right, which fills green to indicate screens you've finished; this works correctly even if you go backwards. There are tons of voice clips here; most of them are from WarCraft (I laughed when I recognized the peons' plaintive cry of "We're being attacked!"), but there's one part with newly recorded speech - possibly by Seth Robinson, judging by the credits attributing it to "RTSoft."

Perhaps the coolest part about this game is the magic system. As you can see in the screenshot, there are three icons underneath the minimap. You must press the "M" key to switch which magic you have equipped, as pressing "Enter" merely pauses the game in this DMOD. You start with 0 uses of each magic, but when you pick up icons dropped by enemies, you get a use added to your stock up to a maximum of 9 per spell. The fireball gives you a stronger attack until you change screens, the sheep turns all enemies into sheep that die in one hit (careful, they can still hurt you if you touch them!), and to be honest, I never figured out what the middle one does. With a magic system like this implemented, it's not hard to imagine a genuine MP mechanic being used in a DMOD. Hell, I bet I could do it if I really wanted to, using this as a base.

As you progress through the levels, a few different variations come up, such as sailing a ship, driving a ballista, and a level where there are creature-generating structures to destroy instead of a timer. These changes help keep things interesting.

Things can be tough early on, particularly the axe throwers. Your best bet is to keep moving and let the orcs hit each other - they won't target each other, but they'll hit each other plenty trying to get at you. If you want to win, you should always increase defense when you get the chance to increase a stat at the end of each level. Your starting attack will always be sufficient, and you'll never have to cast magic in rapid succession, but if you keep increasing defense the game will become quite easy, as you'll be completely invulnerable to projectiles since the game's coinflip mercy-damage doesn't trigger for missiles.

There are some problems with this mod, most of which probably would've been worked out if it had been finished. First of all, the MIDIs don't loop, which would be easy to fix. Secondly, although all screens are present, sometimes you can't enter certain screens for some unknown reason. Third, firing straight down doesn't work very well - unlike in all other directions, trying to repeat this causes the projectiles to hit right in front of you, so you should avoid shooting downward. Another problem is that when a lot is going on, sometimes picking up an icon causes the game to crash. The most disappointing thing, however, is that after going through all the effort to reach the end, nothing happens. There's a credits script in the story folder, but it's never called. This feels like an awful shame.

Despite the problems, I highly recommend this mod to all Dink fans. It's really impressive how much this feels like its own game, and the result is quite fun. Cheers to Dan for pushing the concept of what you can do in a DMOD a little bit further with this one.

048: Reconstruction: The Freedmen's Bureau Author: Dan Walma Release Date: December 12, 1999

I remember this one. It was quite the curiosity at the time, and still is. Dan seems to have managed to use a DMOD as part of an assignment for his AP History class (his essay is included in the package). That's pretty cool!

This edutaining game focuses on a somewhat obscure aspect of the utterly botched "Reconstruction" effort that followed the American Civil War. Not too many people even here in the United States (heck, even here in the South) know about the Freedmen's Bureau, and if you read Dan's essay you'll learn that this is because they were almost completely ineffective in their task of helping former slaves and destitute whites in the years after the war. Their problems were many - they misunderstood the problem and tried to help people who didn't really need it, they underestimated the level of racial hatred in the South at the time, they had too little budget and too much paperwork, and to top it all off, what little they might have accomplished was deliberately sabotaged by President Andrew Johnson. They most success they had was in starting schools.

For obvious reasons, this is another non-combat DMOD. It's more emphatically so than redink1's own Halloween mod - not only can't you punch anything, you don't even have any displayed stats except money. You take on the role of an agent of the Freedmen's Bureau (who happens to look like Dink Smallwood), and your task is to help the people of Huntsville, Alabama, which wasn't hit particularly hard by the war but suffered its effects like everywhere else in the South.

The new graphics come from Sid Meier's Gettysburg. Mostly, they just do the job, but that horse looks amazingly at home in a Dink game. I wonder how many other games have graphics that you could plausibly use in any DMOD you like. redink's efforts to make some of the NPCs look like black people make the point, but that's all. I can hardly blame him, as it would be very difficult to do it well, but it's a reminder of how much the population of Dink World could use a boost in variety. I'd like it if we could have black characters.

To progress in "Reconstruction," you need to talk to your supervisor to get $450, go out and do what he tells you to, come back to him for your next task, and repeat. Most of the people you offer help to don't want or need it, which reflects the actual experience of the agents. What's interesting is that while you have to go to each of your objectives, you get to decide whether you actually want to be helpful or not. I expected your budget to be insufficient to give everyone what they want, given the history of the Bureau, but actually you've got more than enough to be as generous as possible. If you would like to run out of money, you can waste it getting drunk at a bar. Have enough drinks (purchased from bartender "Kevin Zettler," named after Bunniemaster) and you'll actually pass out. All this really does is waste $250. Speaking of joke names, one of the white townsfolk is named "Lucas Art." Hah.

You only get a rather mild sense of the racial hatred that pervaded the South in those days. One of the white plantation owners distrusts you as an agent of the Freedmen's Bureau, citing this actual article of the time, which is incredibly offensive, but still mild compared to all of the violence done against blacks at the time. You can get actual gratitude out of another one of the plantation owners if you find an unemployed black man to work for him, which is as good as you could expect.

There are three different endings depending on how you play. Incidentally, I am a big fan of the fact that in the best ending, it says that you "have striven." You don't see the past participle of "strive" much, but Dan used it correctly. It made my pedant's heart sing.

There's also a simple Reconstruction-era trivia game you can play. I did quite well, scoring 7000 points. This includes a two player mode, using Q and B as buzzers like in You Don't Know Jack. This is the first two-player element in a DMOD that I'm aware of (the engine doesn't allow for much in this department).

This mod is educational and interesting, but it can be a bit of a slog getting around redink's Huntsville. If you've got the Ultimate Cheat, you might as well set your speed to Fast - it won't affect gameplay in this mod, it just makes all the walking around less of a chore.

049: Gnug's Attack Author: Mike "WC" Braecklein Jr. Release Date: December 24, 1999

WC (short for "wcinfrcr," don't ask me) is one of the authors of the original WinDinkEdit, which was first released in January 2001 and revolutionized DMOD creation. That doesn't have anything to do with THIS strange little thing, though.

Let's not beat around the bush.

************This DMOD, "Gnug's Attack,"************
********Has been awarded the prestigious*********
****DINK FOREVER MEMORIAL AWARD OF BADNESS*****
********On this day September 27, 2013*******

I downloaded this twice to make sure my download wasn't simply corrupted, but I got the same thing both times. There is simply nothing here. There are four indoor screens whose hardness is a joke and four scripts containing nothing but the text "ÿþ." It seems to me that this was supposed to be a short movie and nothing more, but the version currently on the Dink Network does precisely nothing and has to be the worst DMOD available.

Gnug's Attack, or "Gungs Attack TRUE STORY" as the dmod.diz calls it, seems to have been intended to be about creatures called Gnugs (or possibly Gungs) invading the Dink IRC chat, or possibly some kind of online gaming service - I honestly can't tell. This is an in-joke that I don't get, I'm afraid. All I have to go by is a text file included in the archive, which doesn't tell me much either. The only thing in the actual "game" that I'd call "content" is this rather odd title screen.

Let me talk about something else, instead. I remember three anonymous people (possibly the same person) coming to troll discussion on one of the many Dink websites back in the day. I remember them saying that they were rich and "owned a major company," yet somehow they had time in their busy schedule to come and troll us. They posted many messages insulting the community and making discussion impossible. They also implied that one female member of the community couldn't possibly be an actual woman, and if she was, that just meant it was even more pathetic that she was playing a dumb game. I recall spending the better part of a day debating (well, mostly insulting) this person or persons, using a lot of swear words and insinuating that they were actually bums who lived on a street corner and were doing this from a library or something. It wasn't terribly mature behavior on my part, but at the time I felt like I was really kicking his/their asses, rhetorically speaking.

Let's pretend those guys were gnugs! Now this DMOD means something to me and I give it an eleven out of ten for daring to tell the true story of a valiant battle from days of yore. Freedom isn't free, you guys. Never forget.

050: Crosslink (Demo) Author: Paul Pliska Release Date: December 24, 1999

REPUTATION NOTE: This DMOD is one of the select group to have a score of 9.0 or better (9.4) on The Dink Network.

This is currently the highest-rated demo on the Dink Network. It's also the highest-rated DMOD of 1999, and the only one from that year to have an "outstanding" score. I would have to agree with the community that this is the DMOD of the year without hesitation. The second through fifth best are all by Dan Walma, though.

Boy, did this generate a lot of buzz when it came out. I wasn't really hanging around Dink or playing it around this time, but I did fire it back up to check this out. "Crosslink" is full of cool, original ideas that make it stand out from the crowd, and its features are at a level not seen in a standard Dink adventure since "Prophecy of the Ancients" over a year prior. I guess I should explain what I mean by that. What I mean is that whereas most DMODs fit their ideas to the existing DMOD framework, POTA and Crosslink instead make DinkC do things to fit their ideas. These mods go the extra mile to fully realize their vision. Sure, it's fine to have the player do something and fade to the result or even explain it in text, but it really grabs the player when you go ahead and show the world changing in new and significant ways.

In the opening darkness, a story is told through sound. We hear a crash, something breaking, a woman's scream. Dink wakes up to find a different kind of opening darkness has opened up all over his house in Stonebrook. One of the cool things about "Crosslink" is that it re-uses environments and characters from the original game in an interesting way. That wavy void has swallowed up everything west of the middle of Dink's house, and the sense of the big threat is more immediate than it's been in any other mod. If you're dumb enough to walk into the blackness, Dink evaporates. The blackness progresses eastward some before you manage to get out of the first area, driving the point home that the world is ending right NOW dammit. This is great stuff.

Quite a few of the characters from the original game are here, and some of them are developed a bit - Lyna has apparently taken up Milder's sword and was apparently able to take down a slayer. Very interesting. You'll even find the guy from the totally pointless robbery segment that you can sometimes trigger in the bar in Terris. Even old Ethel is back with Quackers, whom you can murder again, which of course I did. This, oddly, causes another Quackers to turn up good as new later. Maybe Quackers is the Dink world's Kenny. Anyway, you have to help Martridge evacuate everyone to a land far away from the advancing oblivion, which occurs in an awfully long cutscene.

The rest of the mod takes place in a snowy area, where you've got to be careful not to fall into cracks in the ice. This can be quite difficult, as the cracks will suddenly appear as you walk around. I lost quite a bit of progress more than once this way. Another cool but frustrating mechanic is that some enemies will poison you on contact, turning your health meter green and causing you to periodically take 1 damage. You'll soon find it's not worth the risk and mostly resort to chucking fireballs at things. Of course, if you really want an easy time, Paul left a cheat menu in the last magic slot.

Like POTA, this game does something interesting with player input. You can press A to use an item or magic in an alternate way or Z to drop it. This initially required pressing M and then a second key, but Paul updated the mod to take advantage of version 1.06's ability to look for any key the player presses. This is a really awesome idea that opens up item use in Dink Smallwood, but sadly, it's barely used at all in this demo.

Somewhat long story short, you find a strange rift that leads to another world, that world being from The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall, quite a remarkable game for its time (the most recent game in the series, Skyrim, is still getting expansions). What went on there really captivated me: Dink could see the limits of their world that the characters there couldn't, and there's a character in that world who seems to be able to make out Dink's HUD in a dim sort of way. To be honest with you, I find this sort of thing almost perversely fascinating.

Fourth wall breaking goes on all the time in DMODs and indeed in games, but it's usually tongue-in-cheek, just a joke that relies on not taking things too seriously. If you continue to take things seriously while stripping away that fourth wall, you find that characters are forced to confront the reality of their game-world, and the way they react to this says a lot about them. The way the player reacts to it says a lot about them as well. There is so much story potential in this idea; I feel as if I'm standing at the edge of a crevasse and inside shines the light of creation. I turn my head this way and that, able to catch only fleeting glimpses of it, but I know it's there. It's there and if I could bring it into focus, it would stream out brilliantly and paint the colors and intensify the depth of everything around me, for ever.

It's a tease. You get so caught up into this game that you forget it's coming, and when it does, it makes you feel like you've climbed a long winding staircase only to find that the last step is nothing but air. "What do we do next?" says Dink. "Nothing," says Martridge. For this is only a demo. I've encountered this moment in plenty of DMODs, but I never did anything but shrug before. I let out a genuinely audible groan here. Things were just getting going!

Apart from the obvious problem of not being finished, this DMOD has a few other issues. There are a few conversations that needlessly use "say" instead of "say_stop," requiring you to stand around and wait. There's a knight you can't talk to without making the game crash so hard that you have to kill the task to escape. There are misspellings throughout. Despite this last point, the writing is actually quite sharp. I particularly enjoyed Martridge's metaphor that their world is like a piece of fabric that is unraveling, and that adjoining worlds are like glass phials that can break and leak into one another.

Crosslink is fantastic while it lasts; I just wish there were more. Luckily, I know there is more, much more coming. This is just the beginning, and the future is looking bright. See you cats in the futuristic year 2000.