The Dink Network

205: Search for Mother Author: Luncare Release Date: December 4, 2004
"Walagobolinkblongzong!!"

This is another DMOD without much to it, but it wasn't as bad as I was expecting. This is probably because of an update a few months after its release that seems to have fixed the bugs that the reviews complain about.


Why does this feel like the setup to a bad joke?

In "Search for Mother," Dink is bummed because his mom is dead. But then somebody says she might not be dead! She's in a place called the "Land of Destruction!" Dink runs there immediately! This paragraph is exactly as detailed about things as the actual intro!

You start in a tiny, weird forest area that I got lost in for a few minutes. The path forward is a tiny gap in the hardness that appears to be blocked by those bush sprites that are usually hard.


Here's what I'm talking about. It's not the clearest path I've ever seen.

Most of the DMOD takes place in a Darklands-type area. There's a sort of village, but all but one of the houses are locked, and nobody has anything useful to say. There's an odd, open-air shop where you can get a sword, but I went the "wrong" way first and had to punch a 100 HP bonca to death before I ran into a sign telling me I should go back and get the sword.


Oh no! Fortunately, this is just a nightmarish vision of some sort.

I had to fight a slayer with my fists to get the money to buy the sword, but the game was pretty easy (and short) after that. There's a hidden fireball spell that helped make the final battle against a Cast knight pretty easy.

Dink has an alarming tendency to walk right through solid objects during cutscenes in this DMOD. That ol' pig farmer is playing with fire, and it eventually catches up to him: right before the bonca boss, a cutscene ends with Dink somewhere he's not supposed to be. I was only able to get back on track without cheating because of the problem with hardness around the edge of screenlocked screens.

Dink finds his mother and asks the obvious question: why isn't she dead? Her response is one of the dumbest things I've read in some time: "It wasn't me, Dink. It was my sister Julia."

Wow. Even "a wizard did it" would have been better. Wow.

Okay, so apparently:

*Dink's mom has a twin sister we didn't know about
*Dink therefore has another aunt we didn't know about
*This mysterious aunt had taken the place of Dink's mother at their home at some point. How long before the start of the original game had this happened? Who knows?
*It isn't particularly upsetting to Dink's mom that her sister died in a fire

There isn't really anything to recommend this one, but there are worse DMODs with a higher rating than it has. And hey, Mr. SBV makes a cameo. Sorry, I'm still a "Green Voice" fanboy.

206: The Golden Buddha Author: Carrie Burton Release Date: December 7, 2004
"Pure thoughts suck!!"

I lost the first version of this writeup to a power outage, right before I was going to save. It was probably a lot better than this one.

Okay, I think I get how this goes now.

["Elves of Rathor"/"Cursed"/"The Golden Buddha"] is a DMOD by Carrie2004 in which Dink has to travel through an unusual setting ([Canada and the elvish land of Rathor/a version of Hell with huge pools of blood/Possibly a Japanese garden]) in order to retrieve something ([the Princess of Canada/a cure for a curse/a golden Buddha statue]). It's all rather silly, there are some new graphics, and the whole process is done in maybe five minutes.


Dink has clear priorities.

Yes, the basic template seems quite familiar to me. Still, these have more to make them stand out than a lot of DMODs.

Monks throughout the settlement in which you start (not a temple or monastery, oddly) each have some kind of wise saying to spout at Dink. Dink always counters with something like, nuh-uh, being dumb/violent/lewd is actually awesome. It's refreshing to meet a man who knows exactly what he wants out of life.


This is consistent with what I know about Dink's character.

There are quite a few new graphics here for such a short DMOD. Most of them don't really fit into the Dink style, but they still seem to work within the context of this DMOD. In addition to trees and such, there are new black-headed ducks, which I quite liked, and sheep, which don't look so hot. There's a new weapon, the "feather of fortitude," a big feather that Dink somehow uses to cut or bludgeon his enemies. The best new graphic is the new desert tileset, which looks really good in the Dink world. It's all the more impressive given how much has already been done with desert settings since "Stone of Balance."


The sprites aren't much to look at, but those tiles are pretty sweet.

Dink soon finds that the statue has been stolen by a pirate, despite the lack of any nearby body of water. Don't ask me. The boss and only enemy you have to fight is a goblin wearing a pirate hat, which looks hilarious.


hahahaha lookit him. Is it goblin Halloween?

Once you find the statue, that's it. You don't even get to take it back to the monks, the DMOD is just over. Once again, there isn't much in the way of gameplay or plot here. I appreciate the way Carrie's mods create colorful new settings, but that's all they really do.

At least there are fewer hardness errors than in the author's previous DMODs. There are still hardness errors, but they don't mess up every single screen like they did in "Rathor" and "Cursed." There is a bridge that Dink appears to walk underneath when he should be going across it. Still, this isn't bad for a short lark.

--

My, my, another year in the can already. A lot of my writeups for 2004 were awfully short, but a lot of 2004's DMODs were awfully short, and I didn't have much to say about many of them. The Weird DMOD Contest produced some interesting results, and of course "Cloud Castle 2" and "Initiation" coming out in the same week was crazy. "The Ants" intrigued me, and I liked what Carrie's mods did with graphics and setting, but there were a lot of nondescript little mods this year.

My previous attempts at handing out end-of-year awards got zero responses, so I guess it really doesn't matter if I don't keep doing them. I doubt I'd shock anybody by saying "Cloud Castle 2" was the best DMOD of the year, with "Initiation" a not particularly close, but still extremely comfortable second place. I'm not sure what I'd give third place to. I'd give it to "The Ants" for a really interesting different direction, but it stops way too quickly and abruptly for that. I guess I'd have to give it to "Triangle Mover." Even though I couldn't handle the pace, I always love to see authors implementing new and wildly different kinds of gameplay. The fact that I'd give out third place to a DMOD that I was too frustrated to finish, though, unfortunately goes to show how much most of the year's DMODs excited me.

Even so, it's nice to see that so many new people were still trying their hand at DMOD development, and little of it was really terrible like the mods that had me passing out the Awards of Badness like free candy in the 2003 topic. I think the Dink community could sorely use that kind of effort now, even if the results aren't spectacular. It's impressive that development was still going so strong in the seventh year after the game's release. DMOD releases continued on a regular pace throughout 2005, not hitting their first significant slump until 2006.

See you next time. So, you know, tomorrow, probably. It's not like I've got a lot else to do with myself.