Reply to Re: Crazy Old Tim plays all the DMODs of 2000
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I'm aware that wasn't a real example of Godwin's Law, just making a joke 
054: The Quest for Dorinthia Author: Bill Szczytko Release Date: January 28, 2000
Szczytko. Boy, to think I have trouble with people mispronouncing "Maurer" all sorts of strange ways, Bill must have one Hell of a time.
"Quest for Dorinthia" is only the second "Epic" DMOD by this site's reckoning; it had been a bit over a year since Prophecy of the Ancients. It certainly has a lot of map screens, and it took me three hours to complete.
The epic is certainly the most popular kind of DMOD - in a poll on the Dink Network as I write this, currently 56% of respondents say it's the best length for one. Furthermore, of the 17 epics on TDN, 13 have a score of 9.0 or better, while just two have a score of less than 8. It's easy to see the appeal - an Epic gives you a lot to do, allows for the slow development of a story, and clearly shows an awful lot of effort on the part of the author(s). Prophecy of the Ancients was certainly a blast, but I'm not so ready to accept that making your DMOD large and lengthy inherently makes it better. While "Dorinthia" is still a good DMOD, it might have been a better one if the map weren't so darn big.
Before I go any further, I should make it clear that I played the original DMOD, not the remake. The remake sounds much improved, which is good to hear for reasons I'll be getting into.
I went back and forth on what to do about remade DMODs. There are two: This one and Friends Beyond, which came out later in 2000 and was remade in 2001. I decided I'd play both versions of Dorinthia, but just the remake of FB. Of course, this is partially because the original version of Friends Beyond isn't on the site, but it's mostly because Bill released "The Quest for Dorinthia: Special Edition" in 2012, and I'm trying to go in chronological order and follow the way DMOD-making developed over time. Putting something from over a decade later in this spot would be nonsense. "Friends Beyond" was remade less than a year after its original release, so this isn't such a concern.
I had never played this one and went in with no expectations. I found it to be not nearly on the level of Prophecy of the Ancients or even Crosslink, but I'd still have to say it's the third-best DMOD so far to actually feature Dink Smallwood on a standard RPG quest, and that's pretty darn good. Please keep in mind that this is my opinion as I go on to complain about this DMOD.
(I apologize in advance for a lack of screenshots toward the end of the mod; in my last session, I forgot to open my screen-capture software.)
Actually, let's focus on the good points first. The main things I liked were the abundance of out-of-the-way paths that led to powerups and the humor. The humor in this mod is a pretty breezy sort. Not that Prophecy of the Ancients was deadly serious or anything, but "Quest for Dorinthia" almost never takes itself seriously, and I was totally on board with that. The fourth wall is broken a lot even for a DMOD, and even when it's in place, it's pretty transparent, with characters mostly seeming to know how this sort of thing goes by now. For me, this really worked; I thought it was clever and didn't go overboard. Toward the end there's a direct reference to a scene from Prophecy of the Ancients and Dink has to tell the Goblins they're in the wrong DMOD. This reminded me of the endings to Blazing Saddles and Leisure Suit Larry 3 and cracked me up. The downside, I suppose, is that even when villages were threatened and/or on fire, I didn't actually feel an ounce of drama, but I'd rather have the humor in this case because the plot doesn't go much of anywhere regardless.
Some of the humor was on the crude side, but I got a laugh or two out of this as well. If you ask an old man if he has trouble "performing" at his age, he responds, "Bend over and I'll show you..." Needless to say, Dink declines this invitation. Something I was less comfortable with was a woman who murders guys for the cause of female supremacy. Dink asks if there's some laundry she could be doing and thinks to himself that he often wishes that he was willing to "beat on" women. I mean, this is supposed to be a joke, but it just made me uncomfortable. I'm not one to bring gender politics into everything (believe me, I hate it when people do that, because it's usually an excuse to start hating on men), but in this DMOD women are either crazy she doges or a piece of ass, and it bummed me out a little bit. I don't mean to overemphasize this, but this sort of attitude towards women has actually been pretty common in otherwise good DMODs so far. Crosslink is the biggest counterexample I can think of; it took its female characters very seriously.
In QFD, Dink is sent to a land where the King has been replaced by an impostor to free the land from the influence of an evil wizard and to rescue the King's daughter Dorinthia, who speaks to Dink in a dream in what is probably the closest this mod ever gets to a serious dramatic scene. He's been sent there after Milder FlatStomp, who's been resurrected because apparently wizards can do that, because Milder, at least in this DMOD, is an utterly useless boob who does nothing but get drunk and get in the way. This seems out of character to me - in the original, he struck me as arrogant and not too bright, but ultimately a man of noble intentions at least as far as knighthood went. Furthermore, for reasons I can't possibly fathom the blue merchant sprite is used for Milder - okay, so maybe he changed clothes, but it doesn't even have the same hair color. Oh well; as I said, the story isn't taken too seriously at any rate. I mean, you're told early on that there are three crystals, which sure sounds like a series of Macguffins, but they all end up being on the same screen. What's the point?
There are some technical problems with this DMOD, but they're mostly minor hardness and depth-dot errors, with only a couple of showstoppers. One river bank is missing hardness, allowing you to wander the whole river, but this doesn't really get you anything. You can see quite the cache of powerups, but you can't actually get to them until you're supposed to be able to, which isn't much later. By the way, in this mod, all of the potions look like megapotions, even though they're mostly just regular strength and magic potions. I encountered at least one story battle you can go back and fight again, bringing up the old cutscene and possibly messing up the story variables - I wouldn't know, because I loaded my game.
The map is large and does a good job of giving you the feeling of freedom to explore, but this has some serious drawbacks. As I said, there are lots of goodies to find, which is good, but there's also lots of aimless and time-consuming wandering, which is boring and frustrating. This is true even if you're not looking for secrets, as the game frequently fails to give you adequate direction and leaves you to discover the next thing you have to do in your wanderings. I managed to get through without a guide, but I did waste an awful lot of time and got pretty frustrated. Quite a few screens are empty and you kind of wonder why they're there. At least there's a map, the first honest-to-goodness map based on the editor screens with a "you are here" sparkle since the original unless I'm mistaken, which I probably am. Even so, these are rare but nice to have in a big DMOD.
There's not much music in this mod, though what's there is good. You'll be wandering around in silence quite a bit of the time. Tracks from the original game are used extensively, but that's fine because this is actually pretty uncommon in DMODs.
The screens don't look bad, aside from some tiling problems here and there, but the grassy world is generally quite plain and repetitive (You might not think that screen looks bad, but there are a lot of others that look just like it). There are a couple of large villages, but mostly the doors are locked and the people won't say anything of consequence to you. There are a couple of things that you can't do without getting killed instantly, which is a real pain as you're likely to lose a lot of progress.
There is one very cool element here that hadn't appeared in a proper DMOD before - a lantern effect. This works very well, and it isn't just impressive visually, it has a major impact on gameplay. You move and fight differently when you can only see a small area. I wouldn't mind seeing this in more mods. I remember that Dan Walma released one of the earliest "demonstration mods" back when I was still an active member of the community showing how to do this - you have an extremely large black sprite with a transparent section follow Dink around, making sure to have it draw on top of everything. I'm glad somebody actually used it.
The dmod.diz and the game itself make a big selling point of the two big secrets in this game. Really there's a series of secrets, and you can't find the later ones without finding the earlier ones. Despite having been quite thorough, I didn't find these, and when I came across a character later who said it was "too bad [I hadn't] found the magic, I guess the skulls weren't enough," I went back and scoured the map to no avail. Finally I used a guide, and I found out that the skulls indicate where you can walk through places that appear to be solid, but in most cases this only works if you've found the previous secrets. The first one is on a screen that has multiple skulls and bones, which is misleading. This isn't how you hide secrets in games - when you want to give the player a hint, you don't mislead them and you remain consistent. Worse, when I went back and got fireball, the game declared me a cheater and subtracted 50 from my stats, which caused my game to crash.
I had not, in fact, cheated. Looking at it now, I see that it just checks to see if your attack is over 52. There are so many strength potions in this mod that it's not so hard to reach 53 with the claw sword equipped, and that's what happened to me. The lesson to be learned here is that if you're going to try to stop cheating, be dang sure you don't get anybody who isn't. I lost LOADS of progress, became very grumpy, and was nearly soured on this mod altogether. I decided that the secrets could go take a flying leap and went on to beat the mod without them. Despite my awesome stats, the final boss was actually pretty tough because he moved so fast the engine couldn't make the motion fluid at all. I won on my first try with, I'm not kidding, one hit point left. How about that? The game took one last chance to tell me I hadn't found the secrets during the ending. Bite me.
Dink and Dorinthia fall instantly in love, which disturbed the Hell out of me because the "little girl" sprite was used for Dorinthia instead of the "maiden" sprite. I know Dink could hit on "Chelsae" (still think this was just a misspelling) from the original, but here it is strongly implied they actually do it. Ew.
I guess I lied when I said I went in with no expectations, because I was a bit disappointed and "Quest for Dorinthia" is perfectly fine on its own merits. If you wanted a real meaty Dink adventure, here you were, and there weren't many available at this time. It was even pretty funny. It's just that "Prophecy" set the bar for epics so dang high, which I didn't fully appreciate while I was playing it. In that game, each area had its own theme, events, and things to do. The writing wasn't spectacular, but the game design and technical achievement were quite literally so - they were a spectacle, the kind to make you say "wow" out loud. Everything fit together in the manner of a professional game. Nothing else but Crosslink has been on that level so far. I shouldn't hold that against mods like this one. Mainly, the snafu with the secrets put me in a bad mood and over-influenced my opinion. I think that if you have secrets, the player should be allowed to go back and find them if they've missed them, but maybe that's just me.
All of this is pretty irrelevant anyway, because if I were you I'd play the remake instead. As it was, if you could tolerate some wandering this was pretty fun, and Bill deserves lots of credit for actually finishing a big project like this. The fact that over a year passed between POTA and this should tell you how hard that is to do.
054: The Quest for Dorinthia Author: Bill Szczytko Release Date: January 28, 2000
Szczytko. Boy, to think I have trouble with people mispronouncing "Maurer" all sorts of strange ways, Bill must have one Hell of a time.
"Quest for Dorinthia" is only the second "Epic" DMOD by this site's reckoning; it had been a bit over a year since Prophecy of the Ancients. It certainly has a lot of map screens, and it took me three hours to complete.
The epic is certainly the most popular kind of DMOD - in a poll on the Dink Network as I write this, currently 56% of respondents say it's the best length for one. Furthermore, of the 17 epics on TDN, 13 have a score of 9.0 or better, while just two have a score of less than 8. It's easy to see the appeal - an Epic gives you a lot to do, allows for the slow development of a story, and clearly shows an awful lot of effort on the part of the author(s). Prophecy of the Ancients was certainly a blast, but I'm not so ready to accept that making your DMOD large and lengthy inherently makes it better. While "Dorinthia" is still a good DMOD, it might have been a better one if the map weren't so darn big.
Before I go any further, I should make it clear that I played the original DMOD, not the remake. The remake sounds much improved, which is good to hear for reasons I'll be getting into.
I went back and forth on what to do about remade DMODs. There are two: This one and Friends Beyond, which came out later in 2000 and was remade in 2001. I decided I'd play both versions of Dorinthia, but just the remake of FB. Of course, this is partially because the original version of Friends Beyond isn't on the site, but it's mostly because Bill released "The Quest for Dorinthia: Special Edition" in 2012, and I'm trying to go in chronological order and follow the way DMOD-making developed over time. Putting something from over a decade later in this spot would be nonsense. "Friends Beyond" was remade less than a year after its original release, so this isn't such a concern.
I had never played this one and went in with no expectations. I found it to be not nearly on the level of Prophecy of the Ancients or even Crosslink, but I'd still have to say it's the third-best DMOD so far to actually feature Dink Smallwood on a standard RPG quest, and that's pretty darn good. Please keep in mind that this is my opinion as I go on to complain about this DMOD.
(I apologize in advance for a lack of screenshots toward the end of the mod; in my last session, I forgot to open my screen-capture software.)
Actually, let's focus on the good points first. The main things I liked were the abundance of out-of-the-way paths that led to powerups and the humor. The humor in this mod is a pretty breezy sort. Not that Prophecy of the Ancients was deadly serious or anything, but "Quest for Dorinthia" almost never takes itself seriously, and I was totally on board with that. The fourth wall is broken a lot even for a DMOD, and even when it's in place, it's pretty transparent, with characters mostly seeming to know how this sort of thing goes by now. For me, this really worked; I thought it was clever and didn't go overboard. Toward the end there's a direct reference to a scene from Prophecy of the Ancients and Dink has to tell the Goblins they're in the wrong DMOD. This reminded me of the endings to Blazing Saddles and Leisure Suit Larry 3 and cracked me up. The downside, I suppose, is that even when villages were threatened and/or on fire, I didn't actually feel an ounce of drama, but I'd rather have the humor in this case because the plot doesn't go much of anywhere regardless.
Some of the humor was on the crude side, but I got a laugh or two out of this as well. If you ask an old man if he has trouble "performing" at his age, he responds, "Bend over and I'll show you..." Needless to say, Dink declines this invitation. Something I was less comfortable with was a woman who murders guys for the cause of female supremacy. Dink asks if there's some laundry she could be doing and thinks to himself that he often wishes that he was willing to "beat on" women. I mean, this is supposed to be a joke, but it just made me uncomfortable. I'm not one to bring gender politics into everything (believe me, I hate it when people do that, because it's usually an excuse to start hating on men), but in this DMOD women are either crazy she doges or a piece of ass, and it bummed me out a little bit. I don't mean to overemphasize this, but this sort of attitude towards women has actually been pretty common in otherwise good DMODs so far. Crosslink is the biggest counterexample I can think of; it took its female characters very seriously.
In QFD, Dink is sent to a land where the King has been replaced by an impostor to free the land from the influence of an evil wizard and to rescue the King's daughter Dorinthia, who speaks to Dink in a dream in what is probably the closest this mod ever gets to a serious dramatic scene. He's been sent there after Milder FlatStomp, who's been resurrected because apparently wizards can do that, because Milder, at least in this DMOD, is an utterly useless boob who does nothing but get drunk and get in the way. This seems out of character to me - in the original, he struck me as arrogant and not too bright, but ultimately a man of noble intentions at least as far as knighthood went. Furthermore, for reasons I can't possibly fathom the blue merchant sprite is used for Milder - okay, so maybe he changed clothes, but it doesn't even have the same hair color. Oh well; as I said, the story isn't taken too seriously at any rate. I mean, you're told early on that there are three crystals, which sure sounds like a series of Macguffins, but they all end up being on the same screen. What's the point?
There are some technical problems with this DMOD, but they're mostly minor hardness and depth-dot errors, with only a couple of showstoppers. One river bank is missing hardness, allowing you to wander the whole river, but this doesn't really get you anything. You can see quite the cache of powerups, but you can't actually get to them until you're supposed to be able to, which isn't much later. By the way, in this mod, all of the potions look like megapotions, even though they're mostly just regular strength and magic potions. I encountered at least one story battle you can go back and fight again, bringing up the old cutscene and possibly messing up the story variables - I wouldn't know, because I loaded my game.
The map is large and does a good job of giving you the feeling of freedom to explore, but this has some serious drawbacks. As I said, there are lots of goodies to find, which is good, but there's also lots of aimless and time-consuming wandering, which is boring and frustrating. This is true even if you're not looking for secrets, as the game frequently fails to give you adequate direction and leaves you to discover the next thing you have to do in your wanderings. I managed to get through without a guide, but I did waste an awful lot of time and got pretty frustrated. Quite a few screens are empty and you kind of wonder why they're there. At least there's a map, the first honest-to-goodness map based on the editor screens with a "you are here" sparkle since the original unless I'm mistaken, which I probably am. Even so, these are rare but nice to have in a big DMOD.
There's not much music in this mod, though what's there is good. You'll be wandering around in silence quite a bit of the time. Tracks from the original game are used extensively, but that's fine because this is actually pretty uncommon in DMODs.
The screens don't look bad, aside from some tiling problems here and there, but the grassy world is generally quite plain and repetitive (You might not think that screen looks bad, but there are a lot of others that look just like it). There are a couple of large villages, but mostly the doors are locked and the people won't say anything of consequence to you. There are a couple of things that you can't do without getting killed instantly, which is a real pain as you're likely to lose a lot of progress.
There is one very cool element here that hadn't appeared in a proper DMOD before - a lantern effect. This works very well, and it isn't just impressive visually, it has a major impact on gameplay. You move and fight differently when you can only see a small area. I wouldn't mind seeing this in more mods. I remember that Dan Walma released one of the earliest "demonstration mods" back when I was still an active member of the community showing how to do this - you have an extremely large black sprite with a transparent section follow Dink around, making sure to have it draw on top of everything. I'm glad somebody actually used it.
The dmod.diz and the game itself make a big selling point of the two big secrets in this game. Really there's a series of secrets, and you can't find the later ones without finding the earlier ones. Despite having been quite thorough, I didn't find these, and when I came across a character later who said it was "too bad [I hadn't] found the magic, I guess the skulls weren't enough," I went back and scoured the map to no avail. Finally I used a guide, and I found out that the skulls indicate where you can walk through places that appear to be solid, but in most cases this only works if you've found the previous secrets. The first one is on a screen that has multiple skulls and bones, which is misleading. This isn't how you hide secrets in games - when you want to give the player a hint, you don't mislead them and you remain consistent. Worse, when I went back and got fireball, the game declared me a cheater and subtracted 50 from my stats, which caused my game to crash.
I had not, in fact, cheated. Looking at it now, I see that it just checks to see if your attack is over 52. There are so many strength potions in this mod that it's not so hard to reach 53 with the claw sword equipped, and that's what happened to me. The lesson to be learned here is that if you're going to try to stop cheating, be dang sure you don't get anybody who isn't. I lost LOADS of progress, became very grumpy, and was nearly soured on this mod altogether. I decided that the secrets could go take a flying leap and went on to beat the mod without them. Despite my awesome stats, the final boss was actually pretty tough because he moved so fast the engine couldn't make the motion fluid at all. I won on my first try with, I'm not kidding, one hit point left. How about that? The game took one last chance to tell me I hadn't found the secrets during the ending. Bite me.
Dink and Dorinthia fall instantly in love, which disturbed the Hell out of me because the "little girl" sprite was used for Dorinthia instead of the "maiden" sprite. I know Dink could hit on "Chelsae" (still think this was just a misspelling) from the original, but here it is strongly implied they actually do it. Ew.
I guess I lied when I said I went in with no expectations, because I was a bit disappointed and "Quest for Dorinthia" is perfectly fine on its own merits. If you wanted a real meaty Dink adventure, here you were, and there weren't many available at this time. It was even pretty funny. It's just that "Prophecy" set the bar for epics so dang high, which I didn't fully appreciate while I was playing it. In that game, each area had its own theme, events, and things to do. The writing wasn't spectacular, but the game design and technical achievement were quite literally so - they were a spectacle, the kind to make you say "wow" out loud. Everything fit together in the manner of a professional game. Nothing else but Crosslink has been on that level so far. I shouldn't hold that against mods like this one. Mainly, the snafu with the secrets put me in a bad mood and over-influenced my opinion. I think that if you have secrets, the player should be allowed to go back and find them if they've missed them, but maybe that's just me.
All of this is pretty irrelevant anyway, because if I were you I'd play the remake instead. As it was, if you could tolerate some wandering this was pretty fun, and Bill deserves lots of credit for actually finishing a big project like this. The fact that over a year passed between POTA and this should tell you how hard that is to do.
