Reply to Re: Crazy Old Tim plays all the DMODs of 2000
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Hey, I guess I should keep doing this. Judging by the poll, it's pretty popular around here (then again, illiteracy is surprisingly popular as well).
This write-up is going to exist in a limbo between parts until the HTML version, I guess. Epic DMOD post!
060: Quest for Dorinthia II: The Island Revenge Author: Bill Szczytko Release Date: February 20, 2000
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.
I am absolutely gobsmacked about this. It doesn't seem possible - another epic in under a month? You should watch me work on my DMOD - everything except scripting takes me forever. I guarantee you'd wrest the mouse from me in frustration in less than 15 minutes.
Not even considering how quickly it was made, I was really impressed with Dorinthia 2. It's still not quite as good as Prophecy or Crosslink, but it was a major improvement over the original in pretty much every way and I'd put it in the same category as those two("the great DMODs"). I had a great time except for a bit near the end where figuring out what to do was a pain. I think I managed to finish in just barely under three hours, and that's with all secrets and a fair amount of getting lost, so this might stretch the definition of "epic" a bit - then again, maybe not. I'm not sure what the definition is. So far, everything I've played that wasn't called an "epic" took less than two. Is that the mark? *shrug*
Once again, I must apologize for not getting screenshots from the second half of the game. As with last time, I forgot to turn my screen capture on for the second session. You guys had better get used to my incompetence, I guess - it seems to be in it for the long haul.
There's a fairly lengthy intro to this one in which King Dan really lets Milder have it and there's way more conversation about Dink and Dorinthia getting it on that is super creepy because the little girl sprite is used. Also, really Dorinthia? Right in front of your DAD? Her primary character trait seems to be a sexual fixation. Dink says she's a "tornado in the sack." Hoo boy. I'd probably find this closer to funny than disturbing if she didn't appear to be a child.
There's another plot about an evil wizard plotting trouble for Dink. It's related to the first installment, but even though I played that not long ago, I was kind of lost during the references to the first game's plot. I think this is because Bill updated this mod last year to reflect changes in the plot of Quest For Dorinthia: SE. Anyway, Dink is called away from his beloved Dorinthia for something inconsequential, and when he comes back, she's been kidnapped and Dink is left a disturbing note. Indeed, the evil wizard turns up frequently to taunt and torment Dink by ruining whatever he's got going at that moment, and it's really effective at making you hate him. Actually, the plot gets pretty dark. A lot of people you're given the opportunity to sympathize with die, and there's nothing you can do about it. You're almost never able to save all those whom you set out to. It's always at least indirectly the wizard's doing.
Speaking of the wizard, it does seem pretty dumb that he never kills Dink when it seems that he can just show up right in front of him as he pleases. I understand that he wants a more drawn-out revenge, but he keeps expressing his confidence that the next obstacle Dink faces will kill him even as this expectation becomes less and less reasonable. The wizard's behavior stands out as pretty obnoxiously dumb even for a video game villain. Still, I cared about the plot at times, which wasn't true in the original, so that's a plus.
This mod has a really strange sense of humor about it, which I enjoyed. It's usually kind of crude and frequently sexual, but it's not as direct as that description makes it sound. It's kind of twisted on the side of the sort of joke you typically expect. I laughed often, and my laughs were usually of the "I can't believe he said that, what a crazy game!" variety. I found myself wondering why I couldn't write dialogue as funny, and I think that's the best compliment I can pay in that department.
The maps are the biggest improvement over the mod's predecessor. They look better, for a start - okay, maybe this was achieved mostly by pasting the same few sprites over and over, but it worked. The screens look lush instead of plain. More importantly, the "lost wandering" gameplay that dragged the first "Dorinthia" down so much has been replaced by very deliberate paths. I like this very much - it's just more fun.
The structure of the game is kind of interesting. You're told at the start that you will have to complete five quests on the island of Baron, and you meet a character who gives you the first one and says to return to him, but he is soon killed. I think that presenting a rigid structure like this and then taking it away is kind of a brilliant move, and underscores how ruthless and cruel the antagonist is.
You should be prepared to spend lots of time fighting enemies, by the way, as you will be required to buy a souped-up throwing axe for 12,000 gold. I didn't mind this - actually, it was kind of fun to do some grinding - but others might. Partially due to this, I managed to reach level 12 in this mod, not quite equaling my record of 13 from Prophecy. I wonder how long that'll stand. The experience curve is ridiculously high.
Dink encounters some interesting scenarios here. You come to a village under a spell that turns everyone into copies of Dink who insult him("How do you know about my collection?", Dink replies to that one). You are to try to save a Goblin village overrun by slimes, or as this mod constantly refers to them, 'slimers.' The goblins are portrayed with great sympathy, which makes it all the more devastating when you see the ruin of their city. Corpses are everywhere, and even Dink, who is portrayed here as a bit of a womanizing jerk, is stunned and chilled to his core by the sight. Slimes are absolutely everywhere. I've got to say that it's one of the more disturbing bits of drama I've seen in a DMOD so far.
Over an hour in, I got stuck on something and had to check the walkthrough (it turns out that the posters in town change what they say after a certain event - I am not sure how I was supposed to know this). While I was at it, I went ahead and looked up the secrets so I wouldn't miss them like last time. I had already found one of them on my own - it involved a talking rock and awarded the boomerang, which is a throwing axe in all but name and appearance. The others involve bits of missing hardness that I know I'd never have found, and for a bonus, there's a place where you have to use certain items on a rock without any indication at all you ought to do this or indeed anything at all. Yeah, play this one with a walkthrough. I'm not really on board with hiding your secrets in this manner, at least not if you're going to tell the player later on that they missed secrets, as these mods do.
Speaking of the secrets, they include a really wicked spell that rather oddly uses the unused lightning bolt icon from the original graphics. It looks like a double Hellfire, but it's actually much better. I will repeat that: it is much better than a double Hellfire. That's nuts. It's better because it does way the Hell more damage. Oh, baby. What's more, you get enough magic points to make this castable pretty much constantly. Yes, this makes the mod pretty easy, but I guess that's what you get for going out of your way. It's still not trivial to beat the mod, as the masses of enemies get pretty nuts toward the end.
I would be remiss not to note that you can feed pigs in this mod. It doesn't achieve anything except finally getting Dink to acknowledge the odd sprite choice for Milder.
Where I got really frustrated was when you have to find the "snow boots" near the end. The entrance to their area is hidden behind a tree, and the area the tree is in is itself hidden behind some trees. Even with the walkthrough's help, I absolutely could not find this - I finally found it with the aid of some explicit instructions given by Simeon in a topic on TDN from 2004. (I also found a topic about favorite DMOD authors where somebody jokingly said I was theirs. They actually said "the guy who made the Dink Forever series," but hey, that's me.) Now, despite my views on secrets, ultimately, I suppose you can make your secrets as hidden as you want to, since they aren't necessary. Hiding things that are necessary to proceed is another matter. I understand puzzles, of course, and you don't have to GIVE the player the answer, but I am strongly of the opinion that you need to lead them far enough that they can put some basic things together and figure it out. This moment really interrupted my enjoyment of this mod, which is a shame.
But those snow boots... they looked like the herb boots from the original game. I didn't think much of it until I equipped them. They ARE the herb boots!
YESSSSSSSSS
All is forgiven, Bill! Thank you thank you thank you.
Why do DMOD authors hate the herb boots? This is the first time I've seen them since Lost In Dink, which came out in 1998 and was the 28th DMOD I went over! POTA also featured a way to travel quickly (turn into a slime), but even that was still 1998 and DMOD number 31 on my list. I sure hope these things make a comeback at some point. They ruled the original game. Okay, so here you get them very near the end, but at least it's something. They even make cutscenes faster. Maybe this is why DMOD authors hate them - they make assumptions that you can make about how long scripted events will take inaccurate. I think it's worth accounting for. People like going fast, I'm sure of it. Even if you think the rabbit-punching is too unbalanced, give people a version that doesn't punch or something. It's worth it.
The final boss is very easy. This is partially because I got the secrets, but I'm sure it would have been anyway because there are three full hearts on the screen. Oh yeah, and it turns out that Milder was involved with the evil plot. I had sort of gotten on board with him being the obnoxious, worthless jackass he was in these mods, because it was pretty funny, but this seems a bit much. Oh well. This is the first time Dink fights Milder since Dinkopolis, for you trivia buffs.
The ending is extremely brief, but it's the journey that matters, and this one was pretty awesome. Let me say one last time how amazing it is that this came out less than a month after Quest for Dorinthia. You may have noticed that I didn't talk about bugs - this is because, apart from a tiling error or two and a number of depth que errors (mostly to do with decoration), I didn't encounter any. That's pretty amazing in itself, and though I know I'm playing an updated version, I give full credit for that. Few authors bother to go back and do that.
This write-up is going to exist in a limbo between parts until the HTML version, I guess. Epic DMOD post!
060: Quest for Dorinthia II: The Island Revenge Author: Bill Szczytko Release Date: February 20, 2000
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.
I am absolutely gobsmacked about this. It doesn't seem possible - another epic in under a month? You should watch me work on my DMOD - everything except scripting takes me forever. I guarantee you'd wrest the mouse from me in frustration in less than 15 minutes.
Not even considering how quickly it was made, I was really impressed with Dorinthia 2. It's still not quite as good as Prophecy or Crosslink, but it was a major improvement over the original in pretty much every way and I'd put it in the same category as those two("the great DMODs"). I had a great time except for a bit near the end where figuring out what to do was a pain. I think I managed to finish in just barely under three hours, and that's with all secrets and a fair amount of getting lost, so this might stretch the definition of "epic" a bit - then again, maybe not. I'm not sure what the definition is. So far, everything I've played that wasn't called an "epic" took less than two. Is that the mark? *shrug*
Once again, I must apologize for not getting screenshots from the second half of the game. As with last time, I forgot to turn my screen capture on for the second session. You guys had better get used to my incompetence, I guess - it seems to be in it for the long haul.
There's a fairly lengthy intro to this one in which King Dan really lets Milder have it and there's way more conversation about Dink and Dorinthia getting it on that is super creepy because the little girl sprite is used. Also, really Dorinthia? Right in front of your DAD? Her primary character trait seems to be a sexual fixation. Dink says she's a "tornado in the sack." Hoo boy. I'd probably find this closer to funny than disturbing if she didn't appear to be a child.
There's another plot about an evil wizard plotting trouble for Dink. It's related to the first installment, but even though I played that not long ago, I was kind of lost during the references to the first game's plot. I think this is because Bill updated this mod last year to reflect changes in the plot of Quest For Dorinthia: SE. Anyway, Dink is called away from his beloved Dorinthia for something inconsequential, and when he comes back, she's been kidnapped and Dink is left a disturbing note. Indeed, the evil wizard turns up frequently to taunt and torment Dink by ruining whatever he's got going at that moment, and it's really effective at making you hate him. Actually, the plot gets pretty dark. A lot of people you're given the opportunity to sympathize with die, and there's nothing you can do about it. You're almost never able to save all those whom you set out to. It's always at least indirectly the wizard's doing.
Speaking of the wizard, it does seem pretty dumb that he never kills Dink when it seems that he can just show up right in front of him as he pleases. I understand that he wants a more drawn-out revenge, but he keeps expressing his confidence that the next obstacle Dink faces will kill him even as this expectation becomes less and less reasonable. The wizard's behavior stands out as pretty obnoxiously dumb even for a video game villain. Still, I cared about the plot at times, which wasn't true in the original, so that's a plus.
This mod has a really strange sense of humor about it, which I enjoyed. It's usually kind of crude and frequently sexual, but it's not as direct as that description makes it sound. It's kind of twisted on the side of the sort of joke you typically expect. I laughed often, and my laughs were usually of the "I can't believe he said that, what a crazy game!" variety. I found myself wondering why I couldn't write dialogue as funny, and I think that's the best compliment I can pay in that department.
The maps are the biggest improvement over the mod's predecessor. They look better, for a start - okay, maybe this was achieved mostly by pasting the same few sprites over and over, but it worked. The screens look lush instead of plain. More importantly, the "lost wandering" gameplay that dragged the first "Dorinthia" down so much has been replaced by very deliberate paths. I like this very much - it's just more fun.
The structure of the game is kind of interesting. You're told at the start that you will have to complete five quests on the island of Baron, and you meet a character who gives you the first one and says to return to him, but he is soon killed. I think that presenting a rigid structure like this and then taking it away is kind of a brilliant move, and underscores how ruthless and cruel the antagonist is.
You should be prepared to spend lots of time fighting enemies, by the way, as you will be required to buy a souped-up throwing axe for 12,000 gold. I didn't mind this - actually, it was kind of fun to do some grinding - but others might. Partially due to this, I managed to reach level 12 in this mod, not quite equaling my record of 13 from Prophecy. I wonder how long that'll stand. The experience curve is ridiculously high.
Dink encounters some interesting scenarios here. You come to a village under a spell that turns everyone into copies of Dink who insult him("How do you know about my collection?", Dink replies to that one). You are to try to save a Goblin village overrun by slimes, or as this mod constantly refers to them, 'slimers.' The goblins are portrayed with great sympathy, which makes it all the more devastating when you see the ruin of their city. Corpses are everywhere, and even Dink, who is portrayed here as a bit of a womanizing jerk, is stunned and chilled to his core by the sight. Slimes are absolutely everywhere. I've got to say that it's one of the more disturbing bits of drama I've seen in a DMOD so far.
Over an hour in, I got stuck on something and had to check the walkthrough (it turns out that the posters in town change what they say after a certain event - I am not sure how I was supposed to know this). While I was at it, I went ahead and looked up the secrets so I wouldn't miss them like last time. I had already found one of them on my own - it involved a talking rock and awarded the boomerang, which is a throwing axe in all but name and appearance. The others involve bits of missing hardness that I know I'd never have found, and for a bonus, there's a place where you have to use certain items on a rock without any indication at all you ought to do this or indeed anything at all. Yeah, play this one with a walkthrough. I'm not really on board with hiding your secrets in this manner, at least not if you're going to tell the player later on that they missed secrets, as these mods do.
Speaking of the secrets, they include a really wicked spell that rather oddly uses the unused lightning bolt icon from the original graphics. It looks like a double Hellfire, but it's actually much better. I will repeat that: it is much better than a double Hellfire. That's nuts. It's better because it does way the Hell more damage. Oh, baby. What's more, you get enough magic points to make this castable pretty much constantly. Yes, this makes the mod pretty easy, but I guess that's what you get for going out of your way. It's still not trivial to beat the mod, as the masses of enemies get pretty nuts toward the end.
I would be remiss not to note that you can feed pigs in this mod. It doesn't achieve anything except finally getting Dink to acknowledge the odd sprite choice for Milder.
Where I got really frustrated was when you have to find the "snow boots" near the end. The entrance to their area is hidden behind a tree, and the area the tree is in is itself hidden behind some trees. Even with the walkthrough's help, I absolutely could not find this - I finally found it with the aid of some explicit instructions given by Simeon in a topic on TDN from 2004. (I also found a topic about favorite DMOD authors where somebody jokingly said I was theirs. They actually said "the guy who made the Dink Forever series," but hey, that's me.) Now, despite my views on secrets, ultimately, I suppose you can make your secrets as hidden as you want to, since they aren't necessary. Hiding things that are necessary to proceed is another matter. I understand puzzles, of course, and you don't have to GIVE the player the answer, but I am strongly of the opinion that you need to lead them far enough that they can put some basic things together and figure it out. This moment really interrupted my enjoyment of this mod, which is a shame.
But those snow boots... they looked like the herb boots from the original game. I didn't think much of it until I equipped them. They ARE the herb boots!
YESSSSSSSSS
All is forgiven, Bill! Thank you thank you thank you.
Why do DMOD authors hate the herb boots? This is the first time I've seen them since Lost In Dink, which came out in 1998 and was the 28th DMOD I went over! POTA also featured a way to travel quickly (turn into a slime), but even that was still 1998 and DMOD number 31 on my list. I sure hope these things make a comeback at some point. They ruled the original game. Okay, so here you get them very near the end, but at least it's something. They even make cutscenes faster. Maybe this is why DMOD authors hate them - they make assumptions that you can make about how long scripted events will take inaccurate. I think it's worth accounting for. People like going fast, I'm sure of it. Even if you think the rabbit-punching is too unbalanced, give people a version that doesn't punch or something. It's worth it.
The final boss is very easy. This is partially because I got the secrets, but I'm sure it would have been anyway because there are three full hearts on the screen. Oh yeah, and it turns out that Milder was involved with the evil plot. I had sort of gotten on board with him being the obnoxious, worthless jackass he was in these mods, because it was pretty funny, but this seems a bit much. Oh well. This is the first time Dink fights Milder since Dinkopolis, for you trivia buffs.
The ending is extremely brief, but it's the journey that matters, and this one was pretty awesome. Let me say one last time how amazing it is that this came out less than a month after Quest for Dorinthia. You may have noticed that I didn't talk about bugs - this is because, apart from a tiling error or two and a number of depth que errors (mostly to do with decoration), I didn't encounter any. That's pretty amazing in itself, and though I know I'm playing an updated version, I give full credit for that. Few authors bother to go back and do that.
