Reply to Re: Crazy Old Tim plays all the DMODs of 2000
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--2000 Part 2: Between the Dorinthias--
Bill Szczytko released an epic followup to Quest for Dorinthia a little less than a month after the original came out. That's just nuts; I've got no idea how he did it. I've been working on Malachi the Jerk about as long and I've only got 42 screens done.
Another impressive thing is that, the Dink boom well underway, five DMODs were released in that same period. Can you imagine if that happened now? Heh. Anyway, combine that with the title of the 55th release I'll be covering and you get a silly title for a segment.
055: Between the Shadows (Intro) Author: Michael "Silencer" Firsikov Release Date: February 11, 2000
When I spoke very briefly in an unimpressed way about Sword of Paranor (You really couldn't have expected much from those DMODs given the very short time frame they had to be finished in for Mike's contest - considering that, it was done quite well), I didn't talk about Silencer. I personally owe a lot of thanks to Silencer for Created Worlds, an early frontend for DMODs that I used from when it first came out until I left the community for the second time around the end of 2000. From today's viewpoint, it can't stand up to DFarc, but at the time, it beat the pants off of doing this...
c:
cd dink
dink -game dmodname
For every single DMOD you wanted to run. It also had a download feature, and as I recall, you could reskin it (I think I remember doing this). So thanks for that, Silencer, if you're out there. I just wanted to show a bit of love for a simple program that was once a godsend and now seems entirely forgotten.
This is an intro that's over 8 megabytes even when compressed for download; this is because there's nothing in it except a lot of bitmaps and quite a bit of .wav sound. According to the dmod.diz, this was intended to be a separate download to accompany a never-to-come DMOD, and its purpose was "to be introduced to the story." Okay.
After a fairly well-executed THX Sound gag (Check out that Jokerman font!), We're treated to a few minutes of lovely pre-rendered bitmaps. I'm serious, they're really well done and I'm impressed, especially considering that they were made in early 2000. This was close to professional quality at the time. Interspersed between them are opening credits, although nearly all of them credit "Michael Firsikov (Silencer)." All the while, a spooky wave file plays and you feel pretty creeped out.
While this feels shockingly cinematic and sets a mood very well, it does a poor job of introducing me to any story. A man (Dink in different clothes? It's possible) sets down a dead, naked woman (content warning: in some shots, though not the ones I took, you can see her nipples). Some threatining characters appear. Some heroic-looking characters are shown. Beyond that, I haven't a clue what's going on. The DMOD certainly isn't going to tell you - it just dumps you to a static image and leaves it to you to quit. You even have control at this point, though you can't do anything.
The movie has smooth fades between the still images. The animated sequences are quite choppy, but they DO look animated, which is impressive considering the limitations of the engine. I certainly haven't seen anybody else do anything like this. The closest I've seen was Mystery Island, and those were simple still frames. On the one hand, I'd say that if the DMOD in question actually existed, they'd have been better served to release this intro as some sort of video file. Since it doesn't, however, this serves as an effective demonstration of how you can make truly cinematic cutscenes within a DMOD. Beyond that, it's an interesting piece of art that holds up surprisingly well visually, but I can't make out much of a plot.
056: Frogger (Demo) Author: Dan Walma Release Date: February 13, 2000
It's Frogger. No, seriously. This isn't a Dinkanoid-type thing, it is straight-the-hell-up Frogger by Konami in 1981. Dan even put that character mishmash that briefly shows up when you boot up the arcade machine in - nice touch! Nearly all of the graphics in this mod are from the original Frogger, and none of them are from Dink Smallwood.
In case you've somehow never heard of Frogger, it's an arcade classic where you, a frog, hop across a busy street and across turtles and logs into several "home" spots at the top of the screen. Simple but challenging. I went back and played the original arcade game just before playing this for comparison's sake.
This being a demo, it's missing some features. There's no sound except a MIDI, and the turtles (mercifully) do not dunk under the water. The time bar doesn't function. Furthermore, the movement feels a little weird. It isn't quite the smooth "hop hop hop" from the arcade game, though it's close. At a guess, I'd say you'd use sp_x and sp_y to achieve this sort of movement in DinkC, but to really replicate the arcade game the character has to appear to move between the spots... man. These "entirely different game" DMODs always require an impressive amount of effort.
Returning to the gameplay, as I said, the movement feels just a tad weird and the cars move faster than in the arcade, so the "road" segment is pretty tough. Once you get to the water segment, however, it's much easier than the original, as the logs seem to move a bit slower and the turtles don't disappear. Other than that, this is incredibly faithful and feels a lot like playing the real thing.
There's no title screen, you boot right to the action. Getting a game over just makes the game reset. However, unlike Dinkers, this does qualify as a game you'd actually play, and you do get acknowledgement for winning. Hurray! The game then restarts as if you'd died.
I always find these ports of different sorts of games impressive and cool. I think Dan was just practicing coding and the different sorts of things you could do with the engine, but I'm always glad to see that these exist for sheer novelty. "Hey, did you know somebody made Frogger in Dink Smallwood?" "Wow, really? That's cool." That sort of thing. Yet again, it's demonstrated that you can do pretty much anything.
057: The 9 Gems of Life Authors: Jveenhof, Wolfblitz Release Date: February 15, 2000
Jan Willem Veenhof is back with a proper DMOD, a pretty serious quest that took me over an hour to finish. I bet it helped that Wolfblitz did most of the mapping. I have such a hard time with mapping myself that if I ever make another mod after the one I'm making, it'll probably be because somebody else collaborated with me and did the mapping.
Despite many problems, I had a good time playing "9 Gems." You'll probably notice a more positive tone here than in my writeups of undoubtedly superior mods like "Quest for Dorinthia." I'm sorry if this is frustrating. I guess I've got certain buttons a game has to press to really get me enjoying it. Then again, maybe it just has to do with the fact that I played this after coming back from a substantial break from playing DMODs. Maybe I was just in a good mood. Who knows? This is the problem with critique; experience is so subjective.
It's a good thing we've got the DMOD.diz and such to tell us, because the title screen doesn't really give us the whole title. It does feature amusing buttons that change their text when you mouseover them, though.
There's a fairly substantial intro that tells us the story. It's a very standard video game RPG plot: the ultimate evil (here known as "Jaitz") was banished a millennium ago by 9 powerful entities (actually, it is kind of interesting that they're the Ancients, including Seth). Their power is scattered in nine super-macguffins by an ancestor of the hero (I like to see this, it sort of follows up on the wizard in the secret ice castle in the original that tells Dink he comes from a long line of heroes). Jaitz returns and Dink must collect the 9 gems of life to banish him once more.
Spelling and grammar problems have plagued the great majority of DMODs since the start, but this intro is so full of them that it's kind of hard to read, which is a shame because it's trying to tell you a proper story. In the game itself, while the English is FAR from perfect, it's much better, making one wonder why they didn't go back and touch up the introduction.
Dink wears a costume given to him by his sweetie Dorinthia. Yes, it really is Dorinthia, referred to by name, which means that this mod has a pretty impressive turnaround time as well. I'm not sure what the point was of using a completely new set of hero graphics, since you play as Dink anyway and friggin' EVERYBODY you ever run into knows who you are (even in the few cases they don't, Dink freely announces it), including the resurrected Cast, who are exactly the ones whom you're supposed to be hiding from. Oh well, at least it's a change of pace. The graphics are taken from the Genesis/Mega Drive game Beyond Oasis, and actually look pretty spiffy, even though they don't exactly fit into the world of Dink Smallwood. You get used to it. The sword slash actually looks smoother than the one from the original game. The walking graphics do look odd and seem to shuffle, but it isn't too bad. There's even a push graphic. It's unintentionally possible to see Dink out of costume in a couple of places, but only a couple.
Costume or not, this is a standard Dink sort of adventure. You go from town to town solving people's problems. You're actually pretty far into the mod before you start encountering gems of life, and when you've gotten three of them, you're done. To me, this suggests that a trilogy was intended, but since I haven't played the sequel yet, I won't comment on that now.
I like the variation between the locations, including a very nice-looking desert town and a snowy town (Summers and Winters, names lifted directly from EarthBound). The game uses the "rock you have to get past" sort of problem several times, even making you use a bomb twice, but at least it uses this as an opportunity for humor (check out that neat town miniature, by the way). "9 Gems" is generally pretty funny, making use of both the fourth wall humor and the usual Dink brand of refreshing bluntness. There are also some callbacks to other mods, including End of Time (though oddly, after that line it says that if you don't understand you should "play Lost In Dink") and Crosslink (falling into cracks in the icy water produces the same dialogue and effect here as in that mod). There are also the most talkative set of enemies I've ever seen. Talking enemies aren't new, but almost every one in this game has several different crazy things to say.
What I really enjoyed about "9 Gems" is that it was always clear what I was to do next, at least until the final, snowy section, when things became clear as mud (you're required to find two maddeningly hard to find keys - I used a walkthrough). There isn't much of an ending, but there are scrolling credits with a rather stunning image of our hero. There's no reference anywhere in the mod or its documentation to the source of these graphics, by the way, so at first I assumed Jveenhof actually made them. Looking at the actual original graphics in this mod, that was a pretty silly assumption.
Now, I can tell you that I had a good time (I did), but I can't objectively call this a very good mod, unfortunately. Things that are supposed to be hard aren't, things that aren't are, the depth que is rarely what it's supposed to be, there are invisible walls in the desert section, some screens don't match up at all, and the game balance is way off. Powerups are given out like it's Discount Powerup Warehouse over here. I ended up with crazy stats, as you can see in that credits shot above. Combat is extremely easy. The exceptions are some black, fast-moving slayers who remain a daunting challenge until your stats get really nuts, but you can just avoid them. Really, even with everything I've just said I'm understating how broken this mod is - you repeatedly clip under a bridge while crossing it, for example. Enemies reappear instantly instead of waiting 5 minutes, which is unintentional, as one of them specifically says they'll be back in five minutes if you kill them. Worst of all, it's possible to get completely stuck in a number of ways, including using your bombs when you shouldn't or simply walking into a certain building.
It's kind of maddening. I've seen so many mods that barely got off of the starting line, but here's one that got four/fifths of the way to an impressive finish and then just sort of wandered off. With the same basic structure but lots more polish, this could have been a great mod that I'd wholeheartedly recommend. As it is, you can have a good time with it, but you'd better be willing to overlook a lot.
058: The Orion (Demo) Author: Jonathon Manning Release Date: February 20, 2000
OK, here's one I'd never even heard of. I just went back over my list, and yes, that's a first for me.
I believe that a proper video game demonstration has to have a certain value as a game itself. It has to have some gameplay and an ending. Otherwise, it isn't representative of the product you're demonstrating.
Some of the DMODs released as a "demo" don't meet these criteria at all. To me, this kind of release feels less like a demo and more like, "Well, I've gotten something done, I should release it!" Unless your not-even-a-demo does something particularly special, you really shouldn't. But hey, I released things with even less content as finished games. Anyway, as you've guessed by now, "Orion" is one of these kinds of releases.
The plot is that Dink takes a vacation three months after the original, but as he books the cheapest trip available to save money, he ends up in the crappy town of "Orion," where he discovers that Seth is back somehow and controlling people with magic. That's it, really.
Orion hardly qualifies as a town. There's one building, a mine you can't enter, and two warps, only one of which works, and that one takes you to "Grimwood forest." Lovely. You do almost nothing in this mod - there's absolutely nothing to fight, and once you reach the forest and travel a couple of screens, you're done. The only thing you can really do is talk to two NPCs, one of whom refuses to speak to you.
There are a couple of nice prerendered fullscreen bitmaps. I hope they weren't made for this. Seems like wasted effort.
I did get a laugh or two out of the total nonchalance of the characters toward everything, and I do think this was a deliberate attempt at humor. When a man is suddenly killed by a giant fireball that appears out of nowhere right in front of Dink and the mayor of Orion, the mayor says, "That was probably some kind of spell directed at him." "Probably," Dink responds. When Dink finds out that Seth has returned, he says, "I suppose I'd better kill him, then." To me, this is perfect for Dink's character.
The ending screen says to expect the full version in March; unsurprisingly, this didn't happen. While demos back then, unlike anything since 2007, were sometimes followed by full releases, I doubt any such demos had this little content.
059: Fairy Goodness Author: Someone Release Date: February 20, 2000
"Hey, Someone made a DMOD called Fairy Goodness."
"Who made it?"
"Someone did."
"What I'm asking you is, what is the name of the person who made Fairy Goodness?"
"No, What's on second."
And so on.
Someone, with a capital S, is the creator of popular script editor CEdit and has written some useful tutorials. I should mention that IkkeJW is given credit on the title screen for fixing a couple of bugs.
"Fairy Goodness" is a little arcade-style game in which you, according to the readme, are "some sort of angel sent by God to go to hell to destroy all the evil bad guys." The titular fairy goodness is the pig feed you sprinkle on the evil bad guys in order to make them explode in a miniature mushroom cloud. Fun times.
Actually, I'm thanked in the readme. "Tim Maurer, for so thoughtfully forgetting to delete mapnuke.exe in his DMOD when all the Dink file sites had their files down
." Aww, you're welcome, Someone, not that I remember what mapnuke.exe was. I'm amazed that you still had one of my DMODs on your hard drive. Also proof that somebody else spells DMOD in all caps. I know that "D-Mod" makes more sense, but I've said "DMOD" so many times I can't stop now.
The game is pretty tough because you don't have much life and the enemies come at you fast. In several attempts I never got past level 4, because the goblins and slayers on that level can take you out pretty much immediately. The only way to restore your health is by using the bombs that take out all enemies on the screen, but you only get three of those, and you can't get any more. If you play this, my advice is to try and stay away from your enemies, because your pig feed has a surprisingly long range. If you're like me, you'll find this becomes pretty much impossible to do pretty quickly.
The MIDI doesn't loop, although you can restart it by pressing M. I'd forgotten, but before 1.08 (which came out in 2006, for those who've forgotten or never knew in the first place) there was no such thing as a "loopmidi()" function. Making the MIDIs loop by themselves before that would've involved a script that runs constantly and somehow knows exactly how long the current MIDI is and plays it again when it's done. I wouldn't usually say something like this, but the desirability of looping MIDIs is so obvious that I'm kind of bewildered that RTSoft never implemented such a thing.
In 2002, this was updated to support online multiplayer(!!) and given the title Fairy Goodness Online. I didn't play that version, so I don't know how it works, sorry. Look, I've got a lot of DMODs to get through, I wasn't about to spend however much time it would have taken trying to get that to work and somebody to play it with me. It's interesting that it was ever managed at all. Someone credits Silencer with the "whole 'internet Dink' idea."
--
That's all for now. Next time, Dorinthia again! Already! Wow.
You know, despite what I said before, I miss my Dink CD. Finding it on my CD shelf was what inspired me to come back here in the first place, so the fact that I managed to lose it is pretty bizarre.
Bill Szczytko released an epic followup to Quest for Dorinthia a little less than a month after the original came out. That's just nuts; I've got no idea how he did it. I've been working on Malachi the Jerk about as long and I've only got 42 screens done.
Another impressive thing is that, the Dink boom well underway, five DMODs were released in that same period. Can you imagine if that happened now? Heh. Anyway, combine that with the title of the 55th release I'll be covering and you get a silly title for a segment.
055: Between the Shadows (Intro) Author: Michael "Silencer" Firsikov Release Date: February 11, 2000
When I spoke very briefly in an unimpressed way about Sword of Paranor (You really couldn't have expected much from those DMODs given the very short time frame they had to be finished in for Mike's contest - considering that, it was done quite well), I didn't talk about Silencer. I personally owe a lot of thanks to Silencer for Created Worlds, an early frontend for DMODs that I used from when it first came out until I left the community for the second time around the end of 2000. From today's viewpoint, it can't stand up to DFarc, but at the time, it beat the pants off of doing this...
c:
cd dink
dink -game dmodname
For every single DMOD you wanted to run. It also had a download feature, and as I recall, you could reskin it (I think I remember doing this). So thanks for that, Silencer, if you're out there. I just wanted to show a bit of love for a simple program that was once a godsend and now seems entirely forgotten.
This is an intro that's over 8 megabytes even when compressed for download; this is because there's nothing in it except a lot of bitmaps and quite a bit of .wav sound. According to the dmod.diz, this was intended to be a separate download to accompany a never-to-come DMOD, and its purpose was "to be introduced to the story." Okay.
After a fairly well-executed THX Sound gag (Check out that Jokerman font!), We're treated to a few minutes of lovely pre-rendered bitmaps. I'm serious, they're really well done and I'm impressed, especially considering that they were made in early 2000. This was close to professional quality at the time. Interspersed between them are opening credits, although nearly all of them credit "Michael Firsikov (Silencer)." All the while, a spooky wave file plays and you feel pretty creeped out.
While this feels shockingly cinematic and sets a mood very well, it does a poor job of introducing me to any story. A man (Dink in different clothes? It's possible) sets down a dead, naked woman (content warning: in some shots, though not the ones I took, you can see her nipples). Some threatining characters appear. Some heroic-looking characters are shown. Beyond that, I haven't a clue what's going on. The DMOD certainly isn't going to tell you - it just dumps you to a static image and leaves it to you to quit. You even have control at this point, though you can't do anything.
The movie has smooth fades between the still images. The animated sequences are quite choppy, but they DO look animated, which is impressive considering the limitations of the engine. I certainly haven't seen anybody else do anything like this. The closest I've seen was Mystery Island, and those were simple still frames. On the one hand, I'd say that if the DMOD in question actually existed, they'd have been better served to release this intro as some sort of video file. Since it doesn't, however, this serves as an effective demonstration of how you can make truly cinematic cutscenes within a DMOD. Beyond that, it's an interesting piece of art that holds up surprisingly well visually, but I can't make out much of a plot.
056: Frogger (Demo) Author: Dan Walma Release Date: February 13, 2000
It's Frogger. No, seriously. This isn't a Dinkanoid-type thing, it is straight-the-hell-up Frogger by Konami in 1981. Dan even put that character mishmash that briefly shows up when you boot up the arcade machine in - nice touch! Nearly all of the graphics in this mod are from the original Frogger, and none of them are from Dink Smallwood.
In case you've somehow never heard of Frogger, it's an arcade classic where you, a frog, hop across a busy street and across turtles and logs into several "home" spots at the top of the screen. Simple but challenging. I went back and played the original arcade game just before playing this for comparison's sake.
This being a demo, it's missing some features. There's no sound except a MIDI, and the turtles (mercifully) do not dunk under the water. The time bar doesn't function. Furthermore, the movement feels a little weird. It isn't quite the smooth "hop hop hop" from the arcade game, though it's close. At a guess, I'd say you'd use sp_x and sp_y to achieve this sort of movement in DinkC, but to really replicate the arcade game the character has to appear to move between the spots... man. These "entirely different game" DMODs always require an impressive amount of effort.
Returning to the gameplay, as I said, the movement feels just a tad weird and the cars move faster than in the arcade, so the "road" segment is pretty tough. Once you get to the water segment, however, it's much easier than the original, as the logs seem to move a bit slower and the turtles don't disappear. Other than that, this is incredibly faithful and feels a lot like playing the real thing.
There's no title screen, you boot right to the action. Getting a game over just makes the game reset. However, unlike Dinkers, this does qualify as a game you'd actually play, and you do get acknowledgement for winning. Hurray! The game then restarts as if you'd died.
I always find these ports of different sorts of games impressive and cool. I think Dan was just practicing coding and the different sorts of things you could do with the engine, but I'm always glad to see that these exist for sheer novelty. "Hey, did you know somebody made Frogger in Dink Smallwood?" "Wow, really? That's cool." That sort of thing. Yet again, it's demonstrated that you can do pretty much anything.
057: The 9 Gems of Life Authors: Jveenhof, Wolfblitz Release Date: February 15, 2000
Jan Willem Veenhof is back with a proper DMOD, a pretty serious quest that took me over an hour to finish. I bet it helped that Wolfblitz did most of the mapping. I have such a hard time with mapping myself that if I ever make another mod after the one I'm making, it'll probably be because somebody else collaborated with me and did the mapping.
Despite many problems, I had a good time playing "9 Gems." You'll probably notice a more positive tone here than in my writeups of undoubtedly superior mods like "Quest for Dorinthia." I'm sorry if this is frustrating. I guess I've got certain buttons a game has to press to really get me enjoying it. Then again, maybe it just has to do with the fact that I played this after coming back from a substantial break from playing DMODs. Maybe I was just in a good mood. Who knows? This is the problem with critique; experience is so subjective.
It's a good thing we've got the DMOD.diz and such to tell us, because the title screen doesn't really give us the whole title. It does feature amusing buttons that change their text when you mouseover them, though.
There's a fairly substantial intro that tells us the story. It's a very standard video game RPG plot: the ultimate evil (here known as "Jaitz") was banished a millennium ago by 9 powerful entities (actually, it is kind of interesting that they're the Ancients, including Seth). Their power is scattered in nine super-macguffins by an ancestor of the hero (I like to see this, it sort of follows up on the wizard in the secret ice castle in the original that tells Dink he comes from a long line of heroes). Jaitz returns and Dink must collect the 9 gems of life to banish him once more.
Spelling and grammar problems have plagued the great majority of DMODs since the start, but this intro is so full of them that it's kind of hard to read, which is a shame because it's trying to tell you a proper story. In the game itself, while the English is FAR from perfect, it's much better, making one wonder why they didn't go back and touch up the introduction.
Dink wears a costume given to him by his sweetie Dorinthia. Yes, it really is Dorinthia, referred to by name, which means that this mod has a pretty impressive turnaround time as well. I'm not sure what the point was of using a completely new set of hero graphics, since you play as Dink anyway and friggin' EVERYBODY you ever run into knows who you are (even in the few cases they don't, Dink freely announces it), including the resurrected Cast, who are exactly the ones whom you're supposed to be hiding from. Oh well, at least it's a change of pace. The graphics are taken from the Genesis/Mega Drive game Beyond Oasis, and actually look pretty spiffy, even though they don't exactly fit into the world of Dink Smallwood. You get used to it. The sword slash actually looks smoother than the one from the original game. The walking graphics do look odd and seem to shuffle, but it isn't too bad. There's even a push graphic. It's unintentionally possible to see Dink out of costume in a couple of places, but only a couple.
Costume or not, this is a standard Dink sort of adventure. You go from town to town solving people's problems. You're actually pretty far into the mod before you start encountering gems of life, and when you've gotten three of them, you're done. To me, this suggests that a trilogy was intended, but since I haven't played the sequel yet, I won't comment on that now.
I like the variation between the locations, including a very nice-looking desert town and a snowy town (Summers and Winters, names lifted directly from EarthBound). The game uses the "rock you have to get past" sort of problem several times, even making you use a bomb twice, but at least it uses this as an opportunity for humor (check out that neat town miniature, by the way). "9 Gems" is generally pretty funny, making use of both the fourth wall humor and the usual Dink brand of refreshing bluntness. There are also some callbacks to other mods, including End of Time (though oddly, after that line it says that if you don't understand you should "play Lost In Dink") and Crosslink (falling into cracks in the icy water produces the same dialogue and effect here as in that mod). There are also the most talkative set of enemies I've ever seen. Talking enemies aren't new, but almost every one in this game has several different crazy things to say.
What I really enjoyed about "9 Gems" is that it was always clear what I was to do next, at least until the final, snowy section, when things became clear as mud (you're required to find two maddeningly hard to find keys - I used a walkthrough). There isn't much of an ending, but there are scrolling credits with a rather stunning image of our hero. There's no reference anywhere in the mod or its documentation to the source of these graphics, by the way, so at first I assumed Jveenhof actually made them. Looking at the actual original graphics in this mod, that was a pretty silly assumption.
Now, I can tell you that I had a good time (I did), but I can't objectively call this a very good mod, unfortunately. Things that are supposed to be hard aren't, things that aren't are, the depth que is rarely what it's supposed to be, there are invisible walls in the desert section, some screens don't match up at all, and the game balance is way off. Powerups are given out like it's Discount Powerup Warehouse over here. I ended up with crazy stats, as you can see in that credits shot above. Combat is extremely easy. The exceptions are some black, fast-moving slayers who remain a daunting challenge until your stats get really nuts, but you can just avoid them. Really, even with everything I've just said I'm understating how broken this mod is - you repeatedly clip under a bridge while crossing it, for example. Enemies reappear instantly instead of waiting 5 minutes, which is unintentional, as one of them specifically says they'll be back in five minutes if you kill them. Worst of all, it's possible to get completely stuck in a number of ways, including using your bombs when you shouldn't or simply walking into a certain building.
It's kind of maddening. I've seen so many mods that barely got off of the starting line, but here's one that got four/fifths of the way to an impressive finish and then just sort of wandered off. With the same basic structure but lots more polish, this could have been a great mod that I'd wholeheartedly recommend. As it is, you can have a good time with it, but you'd better be willing to overlook a lot.
058: The Orion (Demo) Author: Jonathon Manning Release Date: February 20, 2000
OK, here's one I'd never even heard of. I just went back over my list, and yes, that's a first for me.
I believe that a proper video game demonstration has to have a certain value as a game itself. It has to have some gameplay and an ending. Otherwise, it isn't representative of the product you're demonstrating.
Some of the DMODs released as a "demo" don't meet these criteria at all. To me, this kind of release feels less like a demo and more like, "Well, I've gotten something done, I should release it!" Unless your not-even-a-demo does something particularly special, you really shouldn't. But hey, I released things with even less content as finished games. Anyway, as you've guessed by now, "Orion" is one of these kinds of releases.
The plot is that Dink takes a vacation three months after the original, but as he books the cheapest trip available to save money, he ends up in the crappy town of "Orion," where he discovers that Seth is back somehow and controlling people with magic. That's it, really.
Orion hardly qualifies as a town. There's one building, a mine you can't enter, and two warps, only one of which works, and that one takes you to "Grimwood forest." Lovely. You do almost nothing in this mod - there's absolutely nothing to fight, and once you reach the forest and travel a couple of screens, you're done. The only thing you can really do is talk to two NPCs, one of whom refuses to speak to you.
There are a couple of nice prerendered fullscreen bitmaps. I hope they weren't made for this. Seems like wasted effort.
I did get a laugh or two out of the total nonchalance of the characters toward everything, and I do think this was a deliberate attempt at humor. When a man is suddenly killed by a giant fireball that appears out of nowhere right in front of Dink and the mayor of Orion, the mayor says, "That was probably some kind of spell directed at him." "Probably," Dink responds. When Dink finds out that Seth has returned, he says, "I suppose I'd better kill him, then." To me, this is perfect for Dink's character.
The ending screen says to expect the full version in March; unsurprisingly, this didn't happen. While demos back then, unlike anything since 2007, were sometimes followed by full releases, I doubt any such demos had this little content.
059: Fairy Goodness Author: Someone Release Date: February 20, 2000
"Hey, Someone made a DMOD called Fairy Goodness."
"Who made it?"
"Someone did."
"What I'm asking you is, what is the name of the person who made Fairy Goodness?"
"No, What's on second."
And so on.
Someone, with a capital S, is the creator of popular script editor CEdit and has written some useful tutorials. I should mention that IkkeJW is given credit on the title screen for fixing a couple of bugs.
"Fairy Goodness" is a little arcade-style game in which you, according to the readme, are "some sort of angel sent by God to go to hell to destroy all the evil bad guys." The titular fairy goodness is the pig feed you sprinkle on the evil bad guys in order to make them explode in a miniature mushroom cloud. Fun times.
Actually, I'm thanked in the readme. "Tim Maurer, for so thoughtfully forgetting to delete mapnuke.exe in his DMOD when all the Dink file sites had their files down
." Aww, you're welcome, Someone, not that I remember what mapnuke.exe was. I'm amazed that you still had one of my DMODs on your hard drive. Also proof that somebody else spells DMOD in all caps. I know that "D-Mod" makes more sense, but I've said "DMOD" so many times I can't stop now.The game is pretty tough because you don't have much life and the enemies come at you fast. In several attempts I never got past level 4, because the goblins and slayers on that level can take you out pretty much immediately. The only way to restore your health is by using the bombs that take out all enemies on the screen, but you only get three of those, and you can't get any more. If you play this, my advice is to try and stay away from your enemies, because your pig feed has a surprisingly long range. If you're like me, you'll find this becomes pretty much impossible to do pretty quickly.
The MIDI doesn't loop, although you can restart it by pressing M. I'd forgotten, but before 1.08 (which came out in 2006, for those who've forgotten or never knew in the first place) there was no such thing as a "loopmidi()" function. Making the MIDIs loop by themselves before that would've involved a script that runs constantly and somehow knows exactly how long the current MIDI is and plays it again when it's done. I wouldn't usually say something like this, but the desirability of looping MIDIs is so obvious that I'm kind of bewildered that RTSoft never implemented such a thing.
In 2002, this was updated to support online multiplayer(!!) and given the title Fairy Goodness Online. I didn't play that version, so I don't know how it works, sorry. Look, I've got a lot of DMODs to get through, I wasn't about to spend however much time it would have taken trying to get that to work and somebody to play it with me. It's interesting that it was ever managed at all. Someone credits Silencer with the "whole 'internet Dink' idea."
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That's all for now. Next time, Dorinthia again! Already! Wow.
You know, despite what I said before, I miss my Dink CD. Finding it on my CD shelf was what inspired me to come back here in the first place, so the fact that I managed to lose it is pretty bizarre.
