Reply to Re: Crazy Old Tim plays all the DMODs of 2000
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073: Birth of an Empire Author: Stephen Ebrey Release Date: August 17, 2000
This DMOD was in development for quite a while. Stephen, also known as "George" for some reason, says he started it in 1998, though there was a period of about a year where he didn't touch it. I think it could have used a bit more development time, however, because I ran into some problematic bugs, and that's with a bugfixing patch released by Ted Shutes (of course) in 2001 installed.
This DMOD throws you right into the action; like the original game, you really have to pick up the plot as you go along. The first thing you see is this rock gliding majestically onto the screen in a magnificent bit of unintentional humor. I laughed my ass off. It's hard to explain without seeing it: just hitting the start button and bam, a rock strolls onto the screen, like it's getting to its spot a little late. "Oh crap, don't mind me guys. I overslept."
Anyway, you play as a goblin named Karg. The goblin sprite is used well as the character with no problems, although it is a little hard to tell if you're close enough to hit with the hammer at times. At the start, you just have to clear a mine of monsters (I love how Karg walks onto a screen and announces, "Oh, a bonca. I'd better kill it."). Once you get aboveground, the real plot comes into focus: the goblins have been oppressed by humans, forced to pay an unfair tax to the king (a certain NPC will tell you that Dink Smallwood's adventure happened 500 years ago). Confronted with the tax collector knights, Karg shows himself to be a bold young goblin who takes no crap from anybody and engages them in battle. After winning, he encourages his people to overthrow and conquer the humans, reasoning that years of untroubled rule have made them soft. Karg proves to be a charismatic leader with a powerful persuasive ability, and soon has everyone on his side.
The first major problem I ran into (apart from a fair number of depth que problems) was in that scene. I defeated the knights and the game froze while the other goblin on the screen endlessly moved around with no base walk set. I've determined that most of the bugs that I encountered throughout this mod had to do with the author using say_stop without ever bothering to freeze the player. This happens with quite a few conversations, meaning you just have to stand around and wait if you want to see them, but it also happens in some spots like this. The problem is that the say_stop command does the same thing as wait() - it stops the script. Therefore, the script can be interrupted at this point by something else, and if it's doing anything important, that can be a disaster.
The map is fairly big for being as short as it is (I finished in about 50 minutes), and not terribly detailed, but there were a nice amount of features and I never felt lost. The amount of wandering I did didn't feel annoying, which is nice. Some screens were really crammed with enemies. One problem I had was that in some places, invisible walls of hardness are used instead of some kind of object you can see blocking your way.
There's some humorous stuff in this mod, like a pig farmer goblin - he says people "made fun of him until they learned where their bacon comes from." Nice counter to that! Also there are a bunch of goblins who seem content to just hit something over and over again forever, which made me giggle.
There are a few secrets. There's a spell to discover called "summon bonca," but rather than create a bonca, it actually freezes you in place and makes you select among the enemies on the screen using an arrow. After you select an enemy, a bonca will appear for less than half a second and attack them once. I don't like this spell, honestly - it leaves you too vulnerable. During a boat segment ("Oh no! Sea slimes!") there's a hidden secret island you can find - there, you can purchase regenerating potions, which simply reverse the poison effect from Crosslink (this is stated in the mod itself). Now, this is a cool and very powerful effect - drink a potion and fight with impunity. It really makes combat feel totally different and I'd like to see it in some other mods. There are "orbs" (a new graphic) you can find throughout the game that lead to a secret path near the end. There, you find fire boncas, which look incredibly cool, but unfortunately flicker to the side once per walk cycle. This path really doesn't lead anywhere, which is disappointing. It ends in a screen that generates fire boncas endlessly, and due to the constantly renewed screenlock, you can't really escape. There's a reference to FIAT, which had already been in development for quite a while, here.
When the goblins come to the human land, there's a segment where you control a soldier with the Mog sprite who has to hold off the human knights for two minutes. This soldier has an awesome spin attack for his magic - it hits everything in range multiple times. Unfortunately, I ran into another bad bug here - if you defeat the soldiers at the end of the time before the text saying you should goes away, you'll get stuck.
Something bothers me about the plot of this mod. I mean, it makes sense, it's constructed fairly well, and the grammar and spelling are good, which sure is a relief, but I feel like Karg's actions ought to be more morally contentious than they're treated here. Everybody falls in line and not a soul ever challenges him. Nobody argues that they shouldn't rock the boat with the humans, despite the risk involved, and the humans who reside on the goblin island have no reaction to the fact that you've declared war on humanity. Once you get to the human land, the first town you come to (Stonebrook, rechristened Smallwood - and like other mods that reused screens from the original game, they didn't remove all the scripts, argh) surrenders instantly, including what I can only presume is Dink's less brave descendant. Okay, that in itself is totally reasonable - who wants to get killed by goblins when they'll accept your surrender instead? - but what seemed bizarre to me is how accepting the humans are. They practically welcome the invading goblins with open arms, agreeing that the King deserves to get it. I can't for a minute accept that the people would so calmly accept being conquered, and anyway this is just setting up a situation that's going to be the reverse of the one that existed at the beginning of the mod!
But get ready for the part that really takes the cake... a human comes up to you and straight-up offers to murder the King himself. Indeed, you take control of this human and do exactly that in a cool if easy boss battle where the King has shields that take a certain amount of damage and guards come in to fight you. Karg ascends to the throne, and it's all way too convenient for me. Are you sure you're the hero of this story, Karg? Do you even care? Do your subjects even care? Hasn't anybody got a motherducking spine?
I dunno. At any rate, despite some annoying bugs that had PLENTY of chance to get fixed, this is a pretty solid little adventure. It didn't blow me away, but it was pretty fun and had some neat ideas in it. If you're looking for alternative hero mods, you could do a lot worse.
This DMOD was in development for quite a while. Stephen, also known as "George" for some reason, says he started it in 1998, though there was a period of about a year where he didn't touch it. I think it could have used a bit more development time, however, because I ran into some problematic bugs, and that's with a bugfixing patch released by Ted Shutes (of course) in 2001 installed.
This DMOD throws you right into the action; like the original game, you really have to pick up the plot as you go along. The first thing you see is this rock gliding majestically onto the screen in a magnificent bit of unintentional humor. I laughed my ass off. It's hard to explain without seeing it: just hitting the start button and bam, a rock strolls onto the screen, like it's getting to its spot a little late. "Oh crap, don't mind me guys. I overslept."
Anyway, you play as a goblin named Karg. The goblin sprite is used well as the character with no problems, although it is a little hard to tell if you're close enough to hit with the hammer at times. At the start, you just have to clear a mine of monsters (I love how Karg walks onto a screen and announces, "Oh, a bonca. I'd better kill it."). Once you get aboveground, the real plot comes into focus: the goblins have been oppressed by humans, forced to pay an unfair tax to the king (a certain NPC will tell you that Dink Smallwood's adventure happened 500 years ago). Confronted with the tax collector knights, Karg shows himself to be a bold young goblin who takes no crap from anybody and engages them in battle. After winning, he encourages his people to overthrow and conquer the humans, reasoning that years of untroubled rule have made them soft. Karg proves to be a charismatic leader with a powerful persuasive ability, and soon has everyone on his side.
The first major problem I ran into (apart from a fair number of depth que problems) was in that scene. I defeated the knights and the game froze while the other goblin on the screen endlessly moved around with no base walk set. I've determined that most of the bugs that I encountered throughout this mod had to do with the author using say_stop without ever bothering to freeze the player. This happens with quite a few conversations, meaning you just have to stand around and wait if you want to see them, but it also happens in some spots like this. The problem is that the say_stop command does the same thing as wait() - it stops the script. Therefore, the script can be interrupted at this point by something else, and if it's doing anything important, that can be a disaster.
The map is fairly big for being as short as it is (I finished in about 50 minutes), and not terribly detailed, but there were a nice amount of features and I never felt lost. The amount of wandering I did didn't feel annoying, which is nice. Some screens were really crammed with enemies. One problem I had was that in some places, invisible walls of hardness are used instead of some kind of object you can see blocking your way.
There's some humorous stuff in this mod, like a pig farmer goblin - he says people "made fun of him until they learned where their bacon comes from." Nice counter to that! Also there are a bunch of goblins who seem content to just hit something over and over again forever, which made me giggle.
There are a few secrets. There's a spell to discover called "summon bonca," but rather than create a bonca, it actually freezes you in place and makes you select among the enemies on the screen using an arrow. After you select an enemy, a bonca will appear for less than half a second and attack them once. I don't like this spell, honestly - it leaves you too vulnerable. During a boat segment ("Oh no! Sea slimes!") there's a hidden secret island you can find - there, you can purchase regenerating potions, which simply reverse the poison effect from Crosslink (this is stated in the mod itself). Now, this is a cool and very powerful effect - drink a potion and fight with impunity. It really makes combat feel totally different and I'd like to see it in some other mods. There are "orbs" (a new graphic) you can find throughout the game that lead to a secret path near the end. There, you find fire boncas, which look incredibly cool, but unfortunately flicker to the side once per walk cycle. This path really doesn't lead anywhere, which is disappointing. It ends in a screen that generates fire boncas endlessly, and due to the constantly renewed screenlock, you can't really escape. There's a reference to FIAT, which had already been in development for quite a while, here.
When the goblins come to the human land, there's a segment where you control a soldier with the Mog sprite who has to hold off the human knights for two minutes. This soldier has an awesome spin attack for his magic - it hits everything in range multiple times. Unfortunately, I ran into another bad bug here - if you defeat the soldiers at the end of the time before the text saying you should goes away, you'll get stuck.
Something bothers me about the plot of this mod. I mean, it makes sense, it's constructed fairly well, and the grammar and spelling are good, which sure is a relief, but I feel like Karg's actions ought to be more morally contentious than they're treated here. Everybody falls in line and not a soul ever challenges him. Nobody argues that they shouldn't rock the boat with the humans, despite the risk involved, and the humans who reside on the goblin island have no reaction to the fact that you've declared war on humanity. Once you get to the human land, the first town you come to (Stonebrook, rechristened Smallwood - and like other mods that reused screens from the original game, they didn't remove all the scripts, argh) surrenders instantly, including what I can only presume is Dink's less brave descendant. Okay, that in itself is totally reasonable - who wants to get killed by goblins when they'll accept your surrender instead? - but what seemed bizarre to me is how accepting the humans are. They practically welcome the invading goblins with open arms, agreeing that the King deserves to get it. I can't for a minute accept that the people would so calmly accept being conquered, and anyway this is just setting up a situation that's going to be the reverse of the one that existed at the beginning of the mod!
But get ready for the part that really takes the cake... a human comes up to you and straight-up offers to murder the King himself. Indeed, you take control of this human and do exactly that in a cool if easy boss battle where the King has shields that take a certain amount of damage and guards come in to fight you. Karg ascends to the throne, and it's all way too convenient for me. Are you sure you're the hero of this story, Karg? Do you even care? Do your subjects even care? Hasn't anybody got a motherducking spine?
I dunno. At any rate, despite some annoying bugs that had PLENTY of chance to get fixed, this is a pretty solid little adventure. It didn't blow me away, but it was pretty fun and had some neat ideas in it. If you're looking for alternative hero mods, you could do a lot worse.
