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199: The Ants (Demo) Author: MiloBones Release Date: July 22, 2004
"I don't have the luxury of questioning orders."
MiloBones once jokingly implied that this was one of the worst DMODs out there. He did this in a reply to me. Yes, I made a post or two over the years without really coming back.
Here's a novel one. There aren't a lot of games that let you play as an ant. Maxis's SimAnt (1991), the game that made the humble antlion into an unlikely star of many young gamers' nightmares, comes to mind. I can't think of another one offhand.
An ant's work is never done.
In "The Ants," the player controls a male ant named Hatman. Hatman can dig in the soil using the attack button, and the magic button allows him to mark a location with a pheromone. You can choose between 'food,' 'danger,' or 'friend' pheromones, but only the 'danger' pheromone is actually used for anything in this demo.
Hatman is ordered to explore some tunnels and mark points of danger, but he's soon trapped in a small area. It's implied that this may not be an accident. Hatman is able to dig his way out to another tunnel by following the voice of a female ant named Elisabetta. After thanking her, Hatman tries to tell her an old ant legend, but he keeps getting interrupted by orders to go do more tasks.
Hatman talks to Elisabetta.
The two ants get on well. Although he insists otherwise, talking to Elisabetta soon makes Hatman begin to question his orders and wonder why he isn't a bit more appreciated. Thematically, it reminds me somewhat of the movie Antz.
This demo establishes an interesting atmosphere, but it's over before you know it. It really is too bad this one wasn't finished; I was totally on board with the concept.
200: The Elves of Rathor Author: Carrie Ann Burton (Carrie2004) Release Date: August 23, 2004
"Canadian beer is the best beer, eh."
Hey, look at that, two hundred DMODs. It took me a bit longer (~7 months) to get here from 100 than it did to get to 100 from the start (~6 months). The Dink community, by contrast, put out the second hundred DMODs quicker than the first. The third took a bit longer, as my current count has number 300 in September of 2009. As for the fourth... it might never come, huh? Sadness.
Dink? Is that you?
"Elves of Rathor" is the first DMOD by Canadian Dinker Carrie2004. We'll be seeing a lot of her, as she put out nine DMODs by the end of 2007.
This is a silly DMOD in which an author self-insert sends Dink to Canada, where he must rescue a princess. The princess of Canada, I guess. Apparently Canada is a monarchy now. The princess doesn't appear in this DMOD, but the King does.
These fat little beavers are a hoot.
It is pretty funny that the Canadian author chooses to portray Canada as a frozen land where every building, even a church, is an igloo, and people say the word 'eh' at the end of virtually every sentence. That right there is enough justification for this DMOD's existence.
There isn't much to "Elves of Rathor." There's only one enemy you really need to fight at the very end, and it certainly isn't challenging if you pick up even a few of the megapotions that are scattered around. The "Canada" town is fun, but when you get to the Rathor area, the titular elves all have only the same few lines to say about how much they hate smelly humans - I would have liked to see more of that. There are some bugs - hardness errors that let you go places you aren't supposed to, a savebot and a tree with no hardness. It isn't strictly a bug, but the fact that you get the fireball spell but can't burn down fir trees feels wrong, somehow. For a simple first DMOD, though, this isn't so bad.
201: Chaos Author: Ric Release Date: August 31, 2004
"ABRACA - POCUS !"
According to Ric, the author of "Bane of the Magi," "Chaos" came about when he was "experimenting and it got playable." I guess sometimes a DMOD just sort of happens on its own.
In fact, this barely qualifies as a DMOD. It seems more like a playground for new graphics and concepts that had a very short "quest" added to it. There's no title screen and no intro. There are some bugs, too, like a fireball scroll that comes back after you've already gotten it and some dialogue that doesn't use the freeze command properly, making it possible to get yourself frozen.
There is a simple plot. Martridge wants Dink to test out a spell, but Dink messes it up and transforms Martridge into an animate tree. Dink then has to go find a bit of money in a nearby cave so he can buy a restoration potion to fix Martridge. After he does this (and maybe after another form for Martridge or two, chosen at random), there doesn't seem to be anything to do, so we'll call that the ending.
Anyway, the original graphics are pretty neat. Let's look at them.
Here you can see the new savebot and the new choice dialog. The latter seems to be badly misplaced for some reason.
Martridge turning into a little tree that walks around is a hilarious visual gag.
..and then he dresses himself up like a Christmas tree! I was almost crying from laughter. You have to see this in motion. This alone makes "Chaos" worth downloading.
There's a house that you can see things pass behind. It's a clever effect, done by having two house sprites - one in the background, and a semitransparent extra on top of it.
This isn't a new graphic, but I wanted to register my approval for the clever use of the rock sprites to make some stairs here. They look like really convincing stairs!
Really, that's all you need to know about this one. The pictures are the reason it exists anyway.
--
Here's a little Dink history note. At the end of August 2004, the .dmod format now used to distribute DMODs became the standard. Earlier DMODs came in a standard .zip file, which you had to unpack and manually move the resultant folder to your Dink Smallwood directory. It wasn't terribly complicated, but some people had trouble with it. The .dmod format is a .tar.bz2 archive that the DFArc frontend recognizes and automatically moves the files where they need to go. It's a neat trick; it really couldn't be simpler to install DMODs than it is now.
--
202: Cursed Author: Carrie Ann Burton Date: September 12, 2004
"A curse has made me...well,half the man I was."
This is currently the only DMOD ever to come out on my birthday. Whee!
The swimming pool filled with cherry Jell-O seemed like a great idea at first...
It seems the King... well, a King, at least... has been cursed, and Dink must travel to the "Deadlands" to fetch a cure. It's a pretty simple errand that doesn't take very long.
I don't think that's King Dan. By the way, if you're wondering where these NPC graphics come from, they're apparently the author's original creations.
Surprisingly, that title screen is a literal depiction of what we see in the DMOD itself.
There are two screens' worth of enemies you have to fight due to screenlocks. These come back immediately, but it's not nearly the problem it was in "The Apprentice" because it's just two screens. The enemies are these little ghouls with scythes, but although they appear to swing their weapons, they're really just like pillbugs.
These guys might look dangerous, but these first ones you encounter are identical to the basic pillbugs from the start of the original game.
This DMOD, like the author's first, has got some personality to it. Most objects are scripted with a talk and hit response ("DINK HATES FURNITURE!"), which is always nice. There's a weird guy in a jester's costume named Pimm who keeps showing up for some reason, and every time you talk to him he makes some kind of joke at Dink's expense. The jokes aren't particularly funny (Are your shoes wet? They must be, with such a drip in them!), but the obnoxiousness of the way he laughs at his own jokes kind of is. There are a few other little gags I liked, such as the fact that an attendant complains when you open the treasure chests in the castle.
There are quite a few hardness problems in this one. Although this is the author's second DMOD, it seems she still hadn't heard of tile-based hardness, because all the hardness in "Cursed" is sprite-based. As a result, hardness is rarely where you'd expect it to be, and frequently full of holes. I got trapped behind the castle in this DMOD after missing the warp on my first attempt at entering it.
---
I'm sorry if the writeups lately have seemed kind of short and lazy. The fact is that the DMODs in 2004 were almost all rather short and simple, and I just don't have that much to say about them. At least I haven't had to hand out the Award of Badness too many times.
Let's be honest, though: I know what those of you who are following this are really interested in. Anybody who's reading this after the fact (unless they're the author of one of these DMODs) is probably scrolling past all this stuff in order to get to the part they really care about. Well, here we go.
Next: Cloud Castle 2.
"I don't have the luxury of questioning orders."
MiloBones once jokingly implied that this was one of the worst DMODs out there. He did this in a reply to me. Yes, I made a post or two over the years without really coming back.
Here's a novel one. There aren't a lot of games that let you play as an ant. Maxis's SimAnt (1991), the game that made the humble antlion into an unlikely star of many young gamers' nightmares, comes to mind. I can't think of another one offhand.
An ant's work is never done.
In "The Ants," the player controls a male ant named Hatman. Hatman can dig in the soil using the attack button, and the magic button allows him to mark a location with a pheromone. You can choose between 'food,' 'danger,' or 'friend' pheromones, but only the 'danger' pheromone is actually used for anything in this demo.
Hatman is ordered to explore some tunnels and mark points of danger, but he's soon trapped in a small area. It's implied that this may not be an accident. Hatman is able to dig his way out to another tunnel by following the voice of a female ant named Elisabetta. After thanking her, Hatman tries to tell her an old ant legend, but he keeps getting interrupted by orders to go do more tasks.
Hatman talks to Elisabetta.
The two ants get on well. Although he insists otherwise, talking to Elisabetta soon makes Hatman begin to question his orders and wonder why he isn't a bit more appreciated. Thematically, it reminds me somewhat of the movie Antz.
This demo establishes an interesting atmosphere, but it's over before you know it. It really is too bad this one wasn't finished; I was totally on board with the concept.
200: The Elves of Rathor Author: Carrie Ann Burton (Carrie2004) Release Date: August 23, 2004
"Canadian beer is the best beer, eh."
Hey, look at that, two hundred DMODs. It took me a bit longer (~7 months) to get here from 100 than it did to get to 100 from the start (~6 months). The Dink community, by contrast, put out the second hundred DMODs quicker than the first. The third took a bit longer, as my current count has number 300 in September of 2009. As for the fourth... it might never come, huh? Sadness.
Dink? Is that you?
"Elves of Rathor" is the first DMOD by Canadian Dinker Carrie2004. We'll be seeing a lot of her, as she put out nine DMODs by the end of 2007.
This is a silly DMOD in which an author self-insert sends Dink to Canada, where he must rescue a princess. The princess of Canada, I guess. Apparently Canada is a monarchy now. The princess doesn't appear in this DMOD, but the King does.
These fat little beavers are a hoot.
It is pretty funny that the Canadian author chooses to portray Canada as a frozen land where every building, even a church, is an igloo, and people say the word 'eh' at the end of virtually every sentence. That right there is enough justification for this DMOD's existence.
There isn't much to "Elves of Rathor." There's only one enemy you really need to fight at the very end, and it certainly isn't challenging if you pick up even a few of the megapotions that are scattered around. The "Canada" town is fun, but when you get to the Rathor area, the titular elves all have only the same few lines to say about how much they hate smelly humans - I would have liked to see more of that. There are some bugs - hardness errors that let you go places you aren't supposed to, a savebot and a tree with no hardness. It isn't strictly a bug, but the fact that you get the fireball spell but can't burn down fir trees feels wrong, somehow. For a simple first DMOD, though, this isn't so bad.
201: Chaos Author: Ric Release Date: August 31, 2004
"ABRACA - POCUS !"
According to Ric, the author of "Bane of the Magi," "Chaos" came about when he was "experimenting and it got playable." I guess sometimes a DMOD just sort of happens on its own.
In fact, this barely qualifies as a DMOD. It seems more like a playground for new graphics and concepts that had a very short "quest" added to it. There's no title screen and no intro. There are some bugs, too, like a fireball scroll that comes back after you've already gotten it and some dialogue that doesn't use the freeze command properly, making it possible to get yourself frozen.
There is a simple plot. Martridge wants Dink to test out a spell, but Dink messes it up and transforms Martridge into an animate tree. Dink then has to go find a bit of money in a nearby cave so he can buy a restoration potion to fix Martridge. After he does this (and maybe after another form for Martridge or two, chosen at random), there doesn't seem to be anything to do, so we'll call that the ending.
Anyway, the original graphics are pretty neat. Let's look at them.
Here you can see the new savebot and the new choice dialog. The latter seems to be badly misplaced for some reason.
Martridge turning into a little tree that walks around is a hilarious visual gag.
..and then he dresses himself up like a Christmas tree! I was almost crying from laughter. You have to see this in motion. This alone makes "Chaos" worth downloading.
There's a house that you can see things pass behind. It's a clever effect, done by having two house sprites - one in the background, and a semitransparent extra on top of it.
This isn't a new graphic, but I wanted to register my approval for the clever use of the rock sprites to make some stairs here. They look like really convincing stairs!
Really, that's all you need to know about this one. The pictures are the reason it exists anyway.
--
Here's a little Dink history note. At the end of August 2004, the .dmod format now used to distribute DMODs became the standard. Earlier DMODs came in a standard .zip file, which you had to unpack and manually move the resultant folder to your Dink Smallwood directory. It wasn't terribly complicated, but some people had trouble with it. The .dmod format is a .tar.bz2 archive that the DFArc frontend recognizes and automatically moves the files where they need to go. It's a neat trick; it really couldn't be simpler to install DMODs than it is now.
--
202: Cursed Author: Carrie Ann Burton Date: September 12, 2004
"A curse has made me...well,half the man I was."
This is currently the only DMOD ever to come out on my birthday. Whee!
The swimming pool filled with cherry Jell-O seemed like a great idea at first...
It seems the King... well, a King, at least... has been cursed, and Dink must travel to the "Deadlands" to fetch a cure. It's a pretty simple errand that doesn't take very long.
I don't think that's King Dan. By the way, if you're wondering where these NPC graphics come from, they're apparently the author's original creations.
Surprisingly, that title screen is a literal depiction of what we see in the DMOD itself.
There are two screens' worth of enemies you have to fight due to screenlocks. These come back immediately, but it's not nearly the problem it was in "The Apprentice" because it's just two screens. The enemies are these little ghouls with scythes, but although they appear to swing their weapons, they're really just like pillbugs.
These guys might look dangerous, but these first ones you encounter are identical to the basic pillbugs from the start of the original game.
This DMOD, like the author's first, has got some personality to it. Most objects are scripted with a talk and hit response ("DINK HATES FURNITURE!"), which is always nice. There's a weird guy in a jester's costume named Pimm who keeps showing up for some reason, and every time you talk to him he makes some kind of joke at Dink's expense. The jokes aren't particularly funny (Are your shoes wet? They must be, with such a drip in them!), but the obnoxiousness of the way he laughs at his own jokes kind of is. There are a few other little gags I liked, such as the fact that an attendant complains when you open the treasure chests in the castle.
There are quite a few hardness problems in this one. Although this is the author's second DMOD, it seems she still hadn't heard of tile-based hardness, because all the hardness in "Cursed" is sprite-based. As a result, hardness is rarely where you'd expect it to be, and frequently full of holes. I got trapped behind the castle in this DMOD after missing the warp on my first attempt at entering it.
---
I'm sorry if the writeups lately have seemed kind of short and lazy. The fact is that the DMODs in 2004 were almost all rather short and simple, and I just don't have that much to say about them. At least I haven't had to hand out the Award of Badness too many times.
Let's be honest, though: I know what those of you who are following this are really interested in. Anybody who's reading this after the fact (unless they're the author of one of these DMODs) is probably scrolling past all this stuff in order to get to the part they really care about. Well, here we go.
Next: Cloud Castle 2.
