Reply to Re: Crazy Old Tim plays all the DMODs of 2000
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--2000 part 4: Wherein I whine and complain a lot--
067: Friends Beyond 1 Author: Wesley McElwee Release Date: May 4, 2000 (Remake 4/22/2001)
As I mentioned when talking about "Quest for Dorinthia," what I'm playing here is in fact a remake. It was released on April 22, 2001 and according to Wesley, "Everything about this dmod has been redone. It's a little longer and has a story line." Well, a story line is a good thing to have! This is the only version of "Friends Beyond 1" currently available.
I take it that the original mod really didn't have a story at all, because there's very little of it to be found here. After the slick title screen (there's also a really neat fade-in effect, but a screenshot doesn't do it justice), Dink explains that he was at his summer vacation home (he's totally got one of those) when... something happened. That something seems to be a girl seeking magical revenge on her little village for very ill-defined reasons (or at least ill-defined as far as *I* got, but I'll get to that).
There aren't many scripts in this DMOD. There's a pretty large map with competently made screens, plenty of enemies that you never have to fight for most of the game, some lovely MIDIs to keep you company, and a few secrets to find. The only quest I encountered was to collect eight blue flowers (Wesley did a nice job recoloring the flower graphics) in order to get the claw sword and unlock the next bit of story. After finding my way through some mazelike screens for twenty minutes, I finally found the next event, in which an elderly character tells you to get the light sword from the caves behind their house. The cave you see behind the house is a dead end with a bunch of slimes and a gold heart. There's a cool screen with a mirror effect, though it does nothing. The reflected Dink doesn't move exactly like it should, but given how fiddly movement is in DinkC, it'd take a lot of work to make it do so.
Actually, there's a sign before that telling you that the "next room needs some work, but is an interesting idea I think." Granted, but it's weird to see the author directly speaking to the player in this manner. It's hard to take this mod seriously as an actual game with a story; it feels more like the author playing around with DMOD authoring, though he achieved some interesting things along the way.
As I was saying, the cave you are absolutely directed towards is a dead end. There's no guide for this game on the Dink Solutions - there's one for the original version, but they're so different that that's useless here. I was ready to give up, but then I found ExDeathEvn's video playthrough. It turns out there's a DIFFERENT cave you have to reach by pushing a rather inconspicuous rock (it's surrounded by other rocks). I'm sorry, but barring things that are simply broken, this is the worst game design I've come across in a DMOD. You may disagree, but I think trying to trick the player into getting stuck is nuts.
You find that the evil girl has murdered the townspeople, but they had so little to say when they were alive that it's hard to care much. You can follow her bloody trail to a Darklands-type area where you promptly get lost again. I got stuck once more and gave up. Youtube was being crappy when I tried to watch ExDeathEvn's playthrough some more, and he seemed as annoyed at the game as I was.
"Friends Beyond 1" does some unusual things with combat. A lot of screens randomly have one of a couple of different sets of monster placement, which means that you can beat all the monsters and return instantly to find more. The magic costs seem to have been increased. There's a screen in the darklands area where, after beating all the regular monsters, two dragons walk onto the screen. The first time this happened, it felt like such a cool idea that I actually smiled, but this happens EVERY time you walk onto that screen (which is locked until you beat everything, by the way). It would have worked better as a one-time event, to put it mildly.
On the positive side, there are some spiffy original graphics here, including creepy mutant versions of the pillbug and the slime. I also really appreciated this house with a corner broken off that you could enter from that direction - both the concept and the execution were really neat and I loved to see imagination put to use.
There's some cool stuff to see in FB1, and a well-put-together if somewhat generic map, but overall it seems to lack substance; I mostly felt like I was just wandering. That probably wouldn't bother me much if it weren't for the obtuse things you're required to do to progress, but as it was, I couldn't be bothered. Sorry. I did see potential here, so maybe the sequels are better.
068: Crystal of Power (Trailer) Author: Chris Martin Release Date: June 13, 2000
Hey, you guys, I'm going to play a DMOD!
(literally one minute later)
Oh. Uh... Well, then.
This is the shortest trailer I've ever seen. First of all, there's no title screen - the one from the original game is used. Pressing start takes you to the only screen, where an eeeevil farmer demands that a maiden tell him where the Crystal of Power is. (He's supposed to appear in an explosion, but the scene is made confusing by the fact that he's actually there before the explosion happens - yep, despite being short and having no gameplay, this still isn't bugfree). She refuses and says that Dink Smallwood will defeat him! This is the closest Dink Smallwood gets to appearing in the trailer. He banishes her to an alternate dimension, cackles about his sure victory, and we're told that the DMOD is coming in fall 2000.
The story is trite to the point of being laughable, but it isn't terrible - it's coherent and even workable, and I'd accept it as the story of an actual DMOD. I can't imagine why you'd release a trailer with this little to show, however, unless your story was especially intriguing, which this isn't. That's why it gets my special shiny award. Anyway, since this was never finished we can only assume that in this universe, Dink never even found out about this and the unidentified evil man was victorious.
069: Vagabond's Quest: Dungeon of Dispair (Demo) Author: Ethan Sherr-Ziarko Release Date: June 18, 2000
I'll be danged, Ethan of Slimes and Island of Giants is still at it. I was not expecting that. I respect that kind of continued effort.
This mod is based on a long-gone online RPG called Vagabond's Quest. The readme says that certain graphics are taken from "the might & magic dmod." Was there ever a DMOD based on the Might & Magic series? I wanna play it! By the way, that's how "Despair" is spelled on both the title screen and in the dmod.diz. That's clearly the real title of this one.
Unfortunately, this isn't as good as Island of Giants. Despite its many flaws, that mod was a fairly coherent adventure and even had a couple of interesting things going for it. This one might have some unusual features, but overall it's an unbelievably broken mess.
At least I got a laugh out of the very silly intro. It starts with the common "Dink just had a wild party" trope that's been going around since Snyder's mods. Dink says, "dang, I'm tired, I don't even feel like chick tonight!" I'm serious, this is exactly what he says. Then he proclaims that he's going to bed, and, um, in a way I guess he does. He is, of course, summoned to help some mining town. Their mine has been infested with "imps" (goblins).
Hardness and depth ques are a total joke in this DMOD, with Dink able to stand, for example, behind the fire in a fireplace. There are also many bugs, such as the weapon clerk script also being attached to the bottle shelf. Despite this and a kind of bland appearance, the town does have some interesting things in it. The weapon shop sells a bow that comes with 99 arrows - it's useless because there's no bow lore here, but it was kind of neat to see that somebody finally implemented ammunition. There's an armor shop that sells a "small shield," which can take up to 50 hits for Dink while it's equipped. Because of how Dink's combat works, though, this isn't very useful without having magic (and guess what there's none of in this mod).
You're not allowed to actually go to the mine when you get to town. Despite a pleading voice summoning Dink specifically, nobody in town knows who he is, and they think he looks too wimpy to let him in. All you can do, therefore, is grind up to level 4 (Yes, 4! That's 1400 exp!) at the odd-looking training room, which generates enemies that give 5, 10, or 20 exp. The 20 exp enemies are too tough for you to fight much at the start.
I guess you're expected to slowly build up your gold so you can buy weapons and defense upgrades, but that would take forever, and what's worse, there are no savebots in this mod! One death and all your work is out the window. There's also a little gambling game, but it's inefficient and buggy. It doesn't check to make sure you have enough gold to make your bet, and the way it works is that you only win if all three of the other dice rolls are lower (no ties) than Dink's. Oh, and for one of the betting values, it forgets to even remove your gold if you lose.
I wisely decided all of this was a waste of time and cheated myself up some equipment and, using the console, some experience points. I like grinding as much as anybody (I love me some Dragon Quest), but this just doesn't feel rewarding.
The mine features a neat-looking skeleton boss borrowed from another game, but I think it's too difficult, and I think I'm rather good at this game. There's a night/darkness effect on some of the screens - it looks like scanlines, but would still work well enough if the depth dot were set correctly. Unfortunately, it isn't, and anything toward the bottom of the screen pops in front. Bummer.
The bigger bummer is that this demo is completely impossible to finish without some pretty obnoxiously over-the-top cheating. There's a certain screen that you reach with a stairway you need to take, but this is impossible. Every time you enter the screen, Dink walks straight to the bottom and into the next screen no matter what. If only Dink had had chick instead; it would have been a better use of his time.
---
Sorry I covered so little this time, but I'm having trouble focusing on this right now and I don't want to force it. Next time I'll be looking at "Friends Beyond 2" and the sequel to "9 Gems of Life."
067: Friends Beyond 1 Author: Wesley McElwee Release Date: May 4, 2000 (Remake 4/22/2001)
As I mentioned when talking about "Quest for Dorinthia," what I'm playing here is in fact a remake. It was released on April 22, 2001 and according to Wesley, "Everything about this dmod has been redone. It's a little longer and has a story line." Well, a story line is a good thing to have! This is the only version of "Friends Beyond 1" currently available.
I take it that the original mod really didn't have a story at all, because there's very little of it to be found here. After the slick title screen (there's also a really neat fade-in effect, but a screenshot doesn't do it justice), Dink explains that he was at his summer vacation home (he's totally got one of those) when... something happened. That something seems to be a girl seeking magical revenge on her little village for very ill-defined reasons (or at least ill-defined as far as *I* got, but I'll get to that).
There aren't many scripts in this DMOD. There's a pretty large map with competently made screens, plenty of enemies that you never have to fight for most of the game, some lovely MIDIs to keep you company, and a few secrets to find. The only quest I encountered was to collect eight blue flowers (Wesley did a nice job recoloring the flower graphics) in order to get the claw sword and unlock the next bit of story. After finding my way through some mazelike screens for twenty minutes, I finally found the next event, in which an elderly character tells you to get the light sword from the caves behind their house. The cave you see behind the house is a dead end with a bunch of slimes and a gold heart. There's a cool screen with a mirror effect, though it does nothing. The reflected Dink doesn't move exactly like it should, but given how fiddly movement is in DinkC, it'd take a lot of work to make it do so.
Actually, there's a sign before that telling you that the "next room needs some work, but is an interesting idea I think." Granted, but it's weird to see the author directly speaking to the player in this manner. It's hard to take this mod seriously as an actual game with a story; it feels more like the author playing around with DMOD authoring, though he achieved some interesting things along the way.
As I was saying, the cave you are absolutely directed towards is a dead end. There's no guide for this game on the Dink Solutions - there's one for the original version, but they're so different that that's useless here. I was ready to give up, but then I found ExDeathEvn's video playthrough. It turns out there's a DIFFERENT cave you have to reach by pushing a rather inconspicuous rock (it's surrounded by other rocks). I'm sorry, but barring things that are simply broken, this is the worst game design I've come across in a DMOD. You may disagree, but I think trying to trick the player into getting stuck is nuts.
You find that the evil girl has murdered the townspeople, but they had so little to say when they were alive that it's hard to care much. You can follow her bloody trail to a Darklands-type area where you promptly get lost again. I got stuck once more and gave up. Youtube was being crappy when I tried to watch ExDeathEvn's playthrough some more, and he seemed as annoyed at the game as I was.
"Friends Beyond 1" does some unusual things with combat. A lot of screens randomly have one of a couple of different sets of monster placement, which means that you can beat all the monsters and return instantly to find more. The magic costs seem to have been increased. There's a screen in the darklands area where, after beating all the regular monsters, two dragons walk onto the screen. The first time this happened, it felt like such a cool idea that I actually smiled, but this happens EVERY time you walk onto that screen (which is locked until you beat everything, by the way). It would have worked better as a one-time event, to put it mildly.
On the positive side, there are some spiffy original graphics here, including creepy mutant versions of the pillbug and the slime. I also really appreciated this house with a corner broken off that you could enter from that direction - both the concept and the execution were really neat and I loved to see imagination put to use.
There's some cool stuff to see in FB1, and a well-put-together if somewhat generic map, but overall it seems to lack substance; I mostly felt like I was just wandering. That probably wouldn't bother me much if it weren't for the obtuse things you're required to do to progress, but as it was, I couldn't be bothered. Sorry. I did see potential here, so maybe the sequels are better.
068: Crystal of Power (Trailer) Author: Chris Martin Release Date: June 13, 2000
Hey, you guys, I'm going to play a DMOD!
(literally one minute later)
Oh. Uh... Well, then.
***********This DMOD, "Crystal of Power,"********** ********Has been awarded the prestigious********* ****DINK FOREVER MEMORIAL AWARD OF BADNESS***** *********On this day November 6, 2013********
This is the shortest trailer I've ever seen. First of all, there's no title screen - the one from the original game is used. Pressing start takes you to the only screen, where an eeeevil farmer demands that a maiden tell him where the Crystal of Power is. (He's supposed to appear in an explosion, but the scene is made confusing by the fact that he's actually there before the explosion happens - yep, despite being short and having no gameplay, this still isn't bugfree). She refuses and says that Dink Smallwood will defeat him! This is the closest Dink Smallwood gets to appearing in the trailer. He banishes her to an alternate dimension, cackles about his sure victory, and we're told that the DMOD is coming in fall 2000.
The story is trite to the point of being laughable, but it isn't terrible - it's coherent and even workable, and I'd accept it as the story of an actual DMOD. I can't imagine why you'd release a trailer with this little to show, however, unless your story was especially intriguing, which this isn't. That's why it gets my special shiny award. Anyway, since this was never finished we can only assume that in this universe, Dink never even found out about this and the unidentified evil man was victorious.
069: Vagabond's Quest: Dungeon of Dispair (Demo) Author: Ethan Sherr-Ziarko Release Date: June 18, 2000
I'll be danged, Ethan of Slimes and Island of Giants is still at it. I was not expecting that. I respect that kind of continued effort.
This mod is based on a long-gone online RPG called Vagabond's Quest. The readme says that certain graphics are taken from "the might & magic dmod." Was there ever a DMOD based on the Might & Magic series? I wanna play it! By the way, that's how "Despair" is spelled on both the title screen and in the dmod.diz. That's clearly the real title of this one.
Unfortunately, this isn't as good as Island of Giants. Despite its many flaws, that mod was a fairly coherent adventure and even had a couple of interesting things going for it. This one might have some unusual features, but overall it's an unbelievably broken mess.
At least I got a laugh out of the very silly intro. It starts with the common "Dink just had a wild party" trope that's been going around since Snyder's mods. Dink says, "dang, I'm tired, I don't even feel like chick tonight!" I'm serious, this is exactly what he says. Then he proclaims that he's going to bed, and, um, in a way I guess he does. He is, of course, summoned to help some mining town. Their mine has been infested with "imps" (goblins).
Hardness and depth ques are a total joke in this DMOD, with Dink able to stand, for example, behind the fire in a fireplace. There are also many bugs, such as the weapon clerk script also being attached to the bottle shelf. Despite this and a kind of bland appearance, the town does have some interesting things in it. The weapon shop sells a bow that comes with 99 arrows - it's useless because there's no bow lore here, but it was kind of neat to see that somebody finally implemented ammunition. There's an armor shop that sells a "small shield," which can take up to 50 hits for Dink while it's equipped. Because of how Dink's combat works, though, this isn't very useful without having magic (and guess what there's none of in this mod).
You're not allowed to actually go to the mine when you get to town. Despite a pleading voice summoning Dink specifically, nobody in town knows who he is, and they think he looks too wimpy to let him in. All you can do, therefore, is grind up to level 4 (Yes, 4! That's 1400 exp!) at the odd-looking training room, which generates enemies that give 5, 10, or 20 exp. The 20 exp enemies are too tough for you to fight much at the start.
I guess you're expected to slowly build up your gold so you can buy weapons and defense upgrades, but that would take forever, and what's worse, there are no savebots in this mod! One death and all your work is out the window. There's also a little gambling game, but it's inefficient and buggy. It doesn't check to make sure you have enough gold to make your bet, and the way it works is that you only win if all three of the other dice rolls are lower (no ties) than Dink's. Oh, and for one of the betting values, it forgets to even remove your gold if you lose.
I wisely decided all of this was a waste of time and cheated myself up some equipment and, using the console, some experience points. I like grinding as much as anybody (I love me some Dragon Quest), but this just doesn't feel rewarding.
The mine features a neat-looking skeleton boss borrowed from another game, but I think it's too difficult, and I think I'm rather good at this game. There's a night/darkness effect on some of the screens - it looks like scanlines, but would still work well enough if the depth dot were set correctly. Unfortunately, it isn't, and anything toward the bottom of the screen pops in front. Bummer.
The bigger bummer is that this demo is completely impossible to finish without some pretty obnoxiously over-the-top cheating. There's a certain screen that you reach with a stairway you need to take, but this is impossible. Every time you enter the screen, Dink walks straight to the bottom and into the next screen no matter what. If only Dink had had chick instead; it would have been a better use of his time.
---
Sorry I covered so little this time, but I'm having trouble focusing on this right now and I don't want to force it. Next time I'll be looking at "Friends Beyond 2" and the sequel to "9 Gems of Life."
