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--Crazy Old Tim Plays All the DMODs--
Directory
1998 | HTML version
1999 | HTML version
2000 | HTML version
2001 | Article version
2002 | Article version
2003
2004
2006
2007
2008-2009
2010
2011-2015
2005 sure was a year that happened.
Okay, seriously, I've got nothing to say about 2005. I have at least one thing planned to say at the beginning of the all the other remaining topics, but I'm drawing a blank here. There was no DMOD contest in 2005. Twenty-three DMODs were released. The year's biggest release seems to be Metatarasal's "The Scourger," which came out in November.
Now that I mention it, there's an interesting trend of the "big" DMOD releases coming toward the end of the year. "Prophecy of the Ancients," "Crosslink," "Stone of Balance" and "FIAT" came out in December. "Friends Beyond 3" came out in November. "Pilgrim's Quest" was an October release. Even "Cloud Castle 2" and "Initiation" came out in September, which is still pretty late in the year. The biggest exception to this rule so far is probably the "Quest for Dorinthia" mods. I don't know what to make of this, but it is a weirdly strong pattern.
207: The Ultimate Challenge Authors: Dinkholland, Missdink Release Date: January 13, 2005
"And I am an old man and I can't fight against all these monsters. I am to old for that."
Missdink is not to be confused with MsDink, the author of "Furball."
This DMOD is not the ultimate challenge in any sense. If 'ultimate' means 'last,' well, I've still got 144+ more DMODs to play. If it means 'greatest,' it's not really that much of a challenge. Now, if it had been called "The Ultimate Grindfest," I might almost agree.
"The Ultimate Challenge" is very unusual in that the most daunting obstacles to your progress are a pair of objects you can't push until your strength reaches a certain value. Usually, when you require the player to be at least so strong in order to push something, you take some kind of step to make sure they don't have a weapon equipped while pushing. Failing that, you at least have the script take the weapon's added strength into account, because it doesn't make any sense that Dink is better at pushing things while he's carrying a sword. Here, however, this effect is worked into the design. You'll never be strong enough to make it past the barriers without equipping a sword.
The first barrier, a large fountain, requires a strength of 30 to pass. There are enough strength potions littered around in this DMOD that I was able to pass this with the claw sword. The second barrier, however, takes an insane 65 strength to push. Even with the light sword, which can be purchased in this DMOD for 10,000 gold, it took some serious grinding to make it to 65. Fortunately, I had been putting all of my points into strength anyway, which I don't usually do. Still, I had to grind all the way to level 14 to get Dink's strength high enough to pass. It turns out there is something built into the DMOD to help you - somebody sells golden apples that give you a strength point for 5000 gold each - but I didn't notice. Oh well, it still only took me 48 minutes to beat the game.
What is this rock MADE of?
This one is unusual in that it only has a smallish romp's worth of content, but it tries to ramp everything up into an "ultimate" climax by making you grind for lots of experience and gold. The grinding isn't too bad because there are stone giants and dragons that give you 400 experience points each and drop a fixed 200 gold.
And there are a LOT of them.
I opened by talking about grinding because that's what the DMOD is really about, but I guess I should talk about the plot too. The game opens with Dink in his home, where he says goodbye to his wife and bizarre adult-proportioned but action-figure-sized son and goes out for... a walk, I guess. He immediately runs into an old beggar, who is crying because his daughter is missing. Dink is, of course, on the case. After that, you just sort of wander around a big old field with a lot of open space. The tiling isn't great, although I've seen many DMODs do a lot worse. A number of things happen - for example, Dink happens upon a bunch of dead people and arbitrarily decides to kill the monsters who did it - but very little of it relates to the main "quest," such as it is.
It's possible to purchase or acquire every item from the original game except for the regular and flame bows and the throwing axe. You can also find wizards with names from The Lord of the Rings (Gandalf, Smeagol, Saruman) who will each sell you one of the original spells for 1,000 gold. Yep, Fireball is the same price as Hellfire here.
Some of the map decoration is oddly geometrical.
The boss, the "Stone Giant King," has one of the highest defenses I've seen in an enemy that you're supposed to kill by normal means with 58. Even with the 65 attack you need to reach him, Dink's attacks often do 1 or 0 damage. This is because the engine takes a random value from the top half of the range from 0 to your attack score and uses that as the power for a given attack. Still, the battle is anticlimactically easy. The stone giant moves quite slowly, and although it took me a while to kill him, he only managed to hit me once. Dink saves the girl, and there's an ending screen with an odd feature - a save point, although you're trapped on the ending screen and can't really do anything anymore. If nothing else, it made it easy to check my play time.
I actually felt like the grinding was the strongest part of "Ultimate Challenge," because at least it's different than the usual "go here, then go there" formula followed by most DMODs. Killing swaths of enemies and watching numbers go up can be kind of fun, particularly when it happens quickly, like it does here. It's ultimately pretty pointless, however, if you're not grinding toward an interesting conclusion.
208: The Goblin Castle Author: Ambikesh (Akamb) Release Date: February 10, 2005
"What did he say?"
REPUTATION NOTE: This DMOD is tied for last (0.1) on the Dink Network.
"Is it broken?" my wife asked me. "Did the download mess up or something?"
"No, this is what it's really like," I assured her.
"Ohhhh," she said. "I get it now. It's not broken, it's just s***."
Six screens. One line of dialogue, quoted in the header above (two if you count a sign reading, "Smallwood residence"). Zero goblins. Zero castles. Hell, there isn't even anything that could metaphorically be a goblin castle. Honestly, there really isn't anything at all.
"Goblin Castle" isn't the earliest DMOD to have a score of 0.1. It shares that dishonor with ThinkDink's "Ghosts of the Cast: The Quest for the Axe of Destruction." Honestly, I feel like putting that on the same level as this does a disservice to ThinkDink's work. It is that bad.
You begin the DMOD in an upstairs room. You walk downstairs. There, you see a woman, and after a pause, Dink asks, "What did he say?" There is another pause, and then there are no more words. Trying to talk to the woman does nothing. It is a surreal, worrying scene that threatens to peel at the edges of my brain like peeling the tinfoil off a potato. What did who say? Why doesn't she say anything? What the Hell is going on here? What goblins?
So you go outside, hoping you'll find some answers out there, or, I dunno, at least a pillbug to punch or something. But all that's out there are three screens surrounded by an odd-looking treeline with poor hardness. There is nothing on the screens except the house you left and the sign. You can't even re-enter the house. Look, I tried:
"House face, house face!" They taunted him. And because he knew they were right, he could not even cry.
If you look at the scripts, you'll find that there's supposed to be an intro of sorts, except that it isn't attached to anything. It has references to a global variable that doesn't exist in the DMOD. The script that delivers the single, cryptic line has all sorts of dialogue hidden behind checks of variables whose values are never set. The exchange with the woman, who calls herself Aunt Mary, is supposed to go like this:
Mary: The guard from Goodheart castle came here while you were asleep.
Dink: What did he say?
Mary: He said that King Daniel wants to see you.
I suppose King Daniel wants to see Dink about some kind of castle of goblins. I don't actually know, since the scripts contain no other references to the issue.
Maybe Dink's house is the 'goblin castle,' and Dink himself is the goblin. You see, he... no. I really can't BS my way out of this one. There just isn't enough to work with.
One of the many 0.0-rated reviews is by the author. He says that he was 11 years old when he made this. Of his own DMOD, he offers this opinion: "It is totally trash and I am still perplexed why redink1 or any of the other staff members haven't eliminated this Dmod's name from the download list. It is really extraordinary that such rubbish has still not been thrown away." I definitely couldn't say it any better.
I think we have a new leader in the "worst DMOD of all time" competition. Generally, you want to release things that have some kind of content.
209: Impossible Scenarios Author: Nam Hoang Release Date: February 10, 2005
"This excruciating D-Mod will have you crying for your mommy in MINUTES!"
Nam Hoang is the author of "Legend of the Pillbug," which wasn't totally horrible but left a strange impression of being led along a path by a velvet rope.
Nam goes to great lengths to warn us about his mighty DMOD. It will destroy us. It will make us swear oaths to various gods. It will create for us various new and unpleasant bodily orifices. He warns us in the description, in the dmod.diz file, in the readme, in the DMOD itself. "No whining," the mod snottily declares.
Which is odd, because "Impossible Scenarios" isn't particularly hard. It isn't very long, either. It consists of a series of "obstacles" or challenges marked with signs that number them and give a difficulty rating. I was encouraged by the concept. There's something satisfying about taking the different elements of gameplay, cutting them into small chunks, naming and numbering them. The Wario-Ware series has done this sort of thing very well. "Impossible Scenarios" has a pretty cool idea, but what it does with it is really unsatisfying.
In the first section, there are some screens with pillbugs and boncas who are mostly enclosed by fences. The enemies have just one hit point each, so this hardly presents a challenge. Making things even easier is the fact that the first time one of the enemies on each screen dies, the screen unlocks. The game says that it starts off slow "for noobs," but the mod ends up being short enough that this is a significant portion of this "impossible" DMOD.
Honestly, I feel sort of sorry for them. Doesn't seem right.
This is followed by a segment where the player must navigate paths lined with deadly thorny brambles, which do 999 damage when touched. This part actually can get kind of tricky, and I'll admit that I died a fair number of times. It still can't have taken me more than a few minutes all together, though.
DAMMIT NOT AGAIN
After the thorns, you come to the biggest part of the game: a snowy maze built from fences. I expected this to be like Jeff Speed's "Labyrinth," but in fact it's a lot simpler and more annoying. The path through the maze is actually pretty simple. It's only hard to tell where you're supposed to go because your view is blocked by thick groups of trees. You just have to sort of stumble your way through blindly. What's worse is that a big open area in the maze has tons more of the instant death thorns. They're placed on the edges of screens and not screenmatched, so that you have no idea you're walking into them until it's too late. This is a real dick move and an example of fake difficulty. The sign in this area said that it would make you "hate fences," but it really just made me not like the author very much.
Where am I going, exactly?
And that's it. When you get to the end of the maze area, there are no more challenges. Despite the large number of golden hearts I'd picked up, there was no boss or anything. It made me suspect that the author just got lazy and stopped making the DMOD in the middle. The game ends on a screen with a very large number of ducks to kill.
"I'm finished!!"
The title "Impossible Scenarios" makes you expect a tough test of skill, but there's none of that here. Once I actually started playing, I expected an amusing collection of different kinds of gameplay, but the DMOD doesn't really deliver on that, either. Stay away from this one. Somebody could, however, make a neat (or truly excruciating) DMOD based on the same format.
Directory
1998 | HTML version
1999 | HTML version
2000 | HTML version
2001 | Article version
2002 | Article version
2003
2004
2006
2007
2008-2009
2010
2011-2015
2005 sure was a year that happened.
Okay, seriously, I've got nothing to say about 2005. I have at least one thing planned to say at the beginning of the all the other remaining topics, but I'm drawing a blank here. There was no DMOD contest in 2005. Twenty-three DMODs were released. The year's biggest release seems to be Metatarasal's "The Scourger," which came out in November.
Now that I mention it, there's an interesting trend of the "big" DMOD releases coming toward the end of the year. "Prophecy of the Ancients," "Crosslink," "Stone of Balance" and "FIAT" came out in December. "Friends Beyond 3" came out in November. "Pilgrim's Quest" was an October release. Even "Cloud Castle 2" and "Initiation" came out in September, which is still pretty late in the year. The biggest exception to this rule so far is probably the "Quest for Dorinthia" mods. I don't know what to make of this, but it is a weirdly strong pattern.
207: The Ultimate Challenge Authors: Dinkholland, Missdink Release Date: January 13, 2005
"And I am an old man and I can't fight against all these monsters. I am to old for that."
Missdink is not to be confused with MsDink, the author of "Furball."
This DMOD is not the ultimate challenge in any sense. If 'ultimate' means 'last,' well, I've still got 144+ more DMODs to play. If it means 'greatest,' it's not really that much of a challenge. Now, if it had been called "The Ultimate Grindfest," I might almost agree.
"The Ultimate Challenge" is very unusual in that the most daunting obstacles to your progress are a pair of objects you can't push until your strength reaches a certain value. Usually, when you require the player to be at least so strong in order to push something, you take some kind of step to make sure they don't have a weapon equipped while pushing. Failing that, you at least have the script take the weapon's added strength into account, because it doesn't make any sense that Dink is better at pushing things while he's carrying a sword. Here, however, this effect is worked into the design. You'll never be strong enough to make it past the barriers without equipping a sword.
The first barrier, a large fountain, requires a strength of 30 to pass. There are enough strength potions littered around in this DMOD that I was able to pass this with the claw sword. The second barrier, however, takes an insane 65 strength to push. Even with the light sword, which can be purchased in this DMOD for 10,000 gold, it took some serious grinding to make it to 65. Fortunately, I had been putting all of my points into strength anyway, which I don't usually do. Still, I had to grind all the way to level 14 to get Dink's strength high enough to pass. It turns out there is something built into the DMOD to help you - somebody sells golden apples that give you a strength point for 5000 gold each - but I didn't notice. Oh well, it still only took me 48 minutes to beat the game.
What is this rock MADE of?
This one is unusual in that it only has a smallish romp's worth of content, but it tries to ramp everything up into an "ultimate" climax by making you grind for lots of experience and gold. The grinding isn't too bad because there are stone giants and dragons that give you 400 experience points each and drop a fixed 200 gold.
And there are a LOT of them.
I opened by talking about grinding because that's what the DMOD is really about, but I guess I should talk about the plot too. The game opens with Dink in his home, where he says goodbye to his wife and bizarre adult-proportioned but action-figure-sized son and goes out for... a walk, I guess. He immediately runs into an old beggar, who is crying because his daughter is missing. Dink is, of course, on the case. After that, you just sort of wander around a big old field with a lot of open space. The tiling isn't great, although I've seen many DMODs do a lot worse. A number of things happen - for example, Dink happens upon a bunch of dead people and arbitrarily decides to kill the monsters who did it - but very little of it relates to the main "quest," such as it is.
It's possible to purchase or acquire every item from the original game except for the regular and flame bows and the throwing axe. You can also find wizards with names from The Lord of the Rings (Gandalf, Smeagol, Saruman) who will each sell you one of the original spells for 1,000 gold. Yep, Fireball is the same price as Hellfire here.
Some of the map decoration is oddly geometrical.
The boss, the "Stone Giant King," has one of the highest defenses I've seen in an enemy that you're supposed to kill by normal means with 58. Even with the 65 attack you need to reach him, Dink's attacks often do 1 or 0 damage. This is because the engine takes a random value from the top half of the range from 0 to your attack score and uses that as the power for a given attack. Still, the battle is anticlimactically easy. The stone giant moves quite slowly, and although it took me a while to kill him, he only managed to hit me once. Dink saves the girl, and there's an ending screen with an odd feature - a save point, although you're trapped on the ending screen and can't really do anything anymore. If nothing else, it made it easy to check my play time.
I actually felt like the grinding was the strongest part of "Ultimate Challenge," because at least it's different than the usual "go here, then go there" formula followed by most DMODs. Killing swaths of enemies and watching numbers go up can be kind of fun, particularly when it happens quickly, like it does here. It's ultimately pretty pointless, however, if you're not grinding toward an interesting conclusion.
208: The Goblin Castle Author: Ambikesh (Akamb) Release Date: February 10, 2005
"What did he say?"
REPUTATION NOTE: This DMOD is tied for last (0.1) on the Dink Network.
"Is it broken?" my wife asked me. "Did the download mess up or something?"
"No, this is what it's really like," I assured her.
"Ohhhh," she said. "I get it now. It's not broken, it's just s***."
**********This DMOD, "The Goblin Castle,"********** ********Has been awarded the prestigious********* ****DINK FOREVER MEMORIAL AWARD OF BADNESS***** *********On this day October 7, 2014*********
Six screens. One line of dialogue, quoted in the header above (two if you count a sign reading, "Smallwood residence"). Zero goblins. Zero castles. Hell, there isn't even anything that could metaphorically be a goblin castle. Honestly, there really isn't anything at all.
"Goblin Castle" isn't the earliest DMOD to have a score of 0.1. It shares that dishonor with ThinkDink's "Ghosts of the Cast: The Quest for the Axe of Destruction." Honestly, I feel like putting that on the same level as this does a disservice to ThinkDink's work. It is that bad.
You begin the DMOD in an upstairs room. You walk downstairs. There, you see a woman, and after a pause, Dink asks, "What did he say?" There is another pause, and then there are no more words. Trying to talk to the woman does nothing. It is a surreal, worrying scene that threatens to peel at the edges of my brain like peeling the tinfoil off a potato. What did who say? Why doesn't she say anything? What the Hell is going on here? What goblins?
So you go outside, hoping you'll find some answers out there, or, I dunno, at least a pillbug to punch or something. But all that's out there are three screens surrounded by an odd-looking treeline with poor hardness. There is nothing on the screens except the house you left and the sign. You can't even re-enter the house. Look, I tried:
"House face, house face!" They taunted him. And because he knew they were right, he could not even cry.
If you look at the scripts, you'll find that there's supposed to be an intro of sorts, except that it isn't attached to anything. It has references to a global variable that doesn't exist in the DMOD. The script that delivers the single, cryptic line has all sorts of dialogue hidden behind checks of variables whose values are never set. The exchange with the woman, who calls herself Aunt Mary, is supposed to go like this:
Mary: The guard from Goodheart castle came here while you were asleep.
Dink: What did he say?
Mary: He said that King Daniel wants to see you.
I suppose King Daniel wants to see Dink about some kind of castle of goblins. I don't actually know, since the scripts contain no other references to the issue.
Maybe Dink's house is the 'goblin castle,' and Dink himself is the goblin. You see, he... no. I really can't BS my way out of this one. There just isn't enough to work with.
One of the many 0.0-rated reviews is by the author. He says that he was 11 years old when he made this. Of his own DMOD, he offers this opinion: "It is totally trash and I am still perplexed why redink1 or any of the other staff members haven't eliminated this Dmod's name from the download list. It is really extraordinary that such rubbish has still not been thrown away." I definitely couldn't say it any better.
I think we have a new leader in the "worst DMOD of all time" competition. Generally, you want to release things that have some kind of content.
209: Impossible Scenarios Author: Nam Hoang Release Date: February 10, 2005
"This excruciating D-Mod will have you crying for your mommy in MINUTES!"
Nam Hoang is the author of "Legend of the Pillbug," which wasn't totally horrible but left a strange impression of being led along a path by a velvet rope.
Nam goes to great lengths to warn us about his mighty DMOD. It will destroy us. It will make us swear oaths to various gods. It will create for us various new and unpleasant bodily orifices. He warns us in the description, in the dmod.diz file, in the readme, in the DMOD itself. "No whining," the mod snottily declares.
Which is odd, because "Impossible Scenarios" isn't particularly hard. It isn't very long, either. It consists of a series of "obstacles" or challenges marked with signs that number them and give a difficulty rating. I was encouraged by the concept. There's something satisfying about taking the different elements of gameplay, cutting them into small chunks, naming and numbering them. The Wario-Ware series has done this sort of thing very well. "Impossible Scenarios" has a pretty cool idea, but what it does with it is really unsatisfying.
In the first section, there are some screens with pillbugs and boncas who are mostly enclosed by fences. The enemies have just one hit point each, so this hardly presents a challenge. Making things even easier is the fact that the first time one of the enemies on each screen dies, the screen unlocks. The game says that it starts off slow "for noobs," but the mod ends up being short enough that this is a significant portion of this "impossible" DMOD.
Honestly, I feel sort of sorry for them. Doesn't seem right.
This is followed by a segment where the player must navigate paths lined with deadly thorny brambles, which do 999 damage when touched. This part actually can get kind of tricky, and I'll admit that I died a fair number of times. It still can't have taken me more than a few minutes all together, though.
DAMMIT NOT AGAIN
After the thorns, you come to the biggest part of the game: a snowy maze built from fences. I expected this to be like Jeff Speed's "Labyrinth," but in fact it's a lot simpler and more annoying. The path through the maze is actually pretty simple. It's only hard to tell where you're supposed to go because your view is blocked by thick groups of trees. You just have to sort of stumble your way through blindly. What's worse is that a big open area in the maze has tons more of the instant death thorns. They're placed on the edges of screens and not screenmatched, so that you have no idea you're walking into them until it's too late. This is a real dick move and an example of fake difficulty. The sign in this area said that it would make you "hate fences," but it really just made me not like the author very much.
Where am I going, exactly?
And that's it. When you get to the end of the maze area, there are no more challenges. Despite the large number of golden hearts I'd picked up, there was no boss or anything. It made me suspect that the author just got lazy and stopped making the DMOD in the middle. The game ends on a screen with a very large number of ducks to kill.
"I'm finished!!"
The title "Impossible Scenarios" makes you expect a tough test of skill, but there's none of that here. Once I actually started playing, I expected an amusing collection of different kinds of gameplay, but the DMOD doesn't really deliver on that, either. Stay away from this one. Somebody could, however, make a neat (or truly excruciating) DMOD based on the same format.
