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223: An Age of Darkness Author: Dinkdragon Release Date: July 1, 2005
"well, the knowing of my death is clearly overreacted!"
Already there's another DMOD by Dinkdragon, author of the very bad "Dink Bigwood." Hopefully I won't have to get drunk to handle this one.
Actually, "An Age of Darkness" is much better than the author's first mod, which is kind of impressive since it came out less than a month later. Whereas I found a lot to hate and nothing to like about "Bigwood," "AOD" has some neat ideas in it. I might even be a fan of it if it weren't marred by several big problems. These problems include quite a few screens with "invisible wall" edges, multiple NPCs who will freeze the game if you talk to them before it's time to do so in order to advance the story, graphical glitches, and errors in the text. These problems aren't nearly as bad as they were in "Bigwood," but they still hold this DMOD back from being really enjoyable. Still, it's good to see improvement. For example, although the text is marred by spelling, grammatical and punctuation errors as well as some confusing sentence constructions, it was easy to tell what the author was getting at. In "Bigwood," it was often next to impossible. That's progress. I'm almost disappointed that this is DinkDragon's final DMOD.
Despite the title and a splash screen that features skulls and blood, the story of "AOD" is very silly and impossible to take seriously. Refreshingly, the DMOD does not even seem to try; I think this is why, in those moments where the mod wasn't breaking on me, I quite enjoyed it. The intro (which doesn't bother freezing the player) tells a grim tale of a world overrun by giant pillbugs. Yes, pillbugs. You play as a slayer named Gorbac. You'd think that the pillbugs would pose no threat to you, and you'd be right - they are ridiculously easy to kill. Still, the other members of your slayer village are too afraid of the supposed pillbug apocalypse to leave their homes.
The world will fall before the might of pillbugs!
Contrary to the "ominous" setup, the quest is a series of silly tasks. Gorbac will retrieve items such as a lemonade recipe, a copy of the movie Starship Troopers ("a masterpiece") and a board game to get help from various NPCs. There's a village populated entirely by headless ducks. Nothing is taken seriously, and it is pretty great.
Hahaha. But seriously, how did you fit those tasty humans into that tiny box?
There's also more to the DMOD than you'd think. There are quite a few tasks to accomplish, and it took me 39 minutes to finish the game. Dinkdragon makes use of graphics and scripts made by the community, including a windmill and a snow effect made by Simon Klaebe, pretty trees by Dan Walma, an awesome spell from "Friends Beyond 3" and the skeleton enemy from "Legend of TerraEarth." Unfortunately, the skeleton is poorly implemented. It seems to jump several feet backwards every time it attacks. The main character swap isn't done very well either. In addition to the maddeningly common problem of turning into Dink when you push (this is so easy to fix!), Gorbac, for reasons I can't begin to fathom, started turning into a pig every time I walked about ten minutes into the DMOD. He kept this up until the end: slayer when idling or attacking, pig when moving. Honestly, it was pretty funny.
The climactic battle between a pig and a skeleton!
The map isn't terrible, but it is kind of odd. The tiling has some minor problems. Ledges just sort of end instead of being neatly rounded off in a way that makes visual sense. You can never tell whether or not you can walk off the screen in a certain direction until you try because of all the invisible walls. This creates a lot of major hardness problems, as you can scoot along the edge of the screen past many obstacles and skip big sections of the game. There's loads of gold in the game, much of it deliberately placed, but nowhere to use it except a couple of healing shops where you'll never spend it all. But you know, it was lots of fun being a slayer, especially when the human NPCs reacted in the way you'd expect.
Damn, it feels good to be a slayer.
You never get to confront the "giant pillbug," but it doesn't really matter. I appreciated the chance to be a scary slayer, and I enjoyed the silly atmosphere and some neat if not fully realized ideas like the TV and a castle wall you can walk on the top of. It's just the freezing bugs and constant invisible walls that really drag this one down.
Hahaha, and he took the time to write that down. Love it.
224: Tile Puzzle (Demo) Author: MiloBones Release Date: July 24, 2005
"TRY TO REACH THE PURPLE SQUARE"
From the author of "The Ants" comes another unusual DMOD. The name "tile puzzle" makes you think of a sliding tile puzzle, but this, in my opinion, is something more interesting: an attempt to create a tile-based puzzle game like Chip's Challenge in the Dink engine.
Here's a little screenshot from the PC version of Chip's Challenge, for reference.
In Chip's Challenge, made in 1989 by Chuck Sommerville for the Atari Lynx and later PC, you play a little guy named Chip McCallahan who runs around collecting chips and avoiding hazards. Everything in the game is tile-based. Everything takes up exactly one tile, and Chip moves one tile's length at a time. In development it was even known as "Tile World." There have been quite a few Chip's Challenge clones and a handful of fan-made level packs. This game came with my childhood Windows 95 computer as part of the "Microsoft Entertainment Pack," along with games like SkiFree and Rattler Race. Whoa, memories.
In this short three-level demo, a few of the many different kinds of tiles from Chip's Challenge have been implemented. Here's what it looks like:
"Tile Puzzle" comes with no explanation. It took me a minute or two to figure it out.
Each tile type has a different effect. The spike tiles are just walls. Stepping on the arrows will force Dink to move in the direction they indicate, while stepping on fire or water will bring swift death... unless you collect the stars. In Chip's Challenge, different kinds of footwear enable you to ignore tiles' usual effects - fire boots for fire, swim fins for water and suction cup boots for arrows. Here, color coded stars have the same effect. There's a major difference in "Tile Puzzle," however - unlike in its inspiration, where shoes last for the duration of a level (or until a certain tile takes them away), only the star you most recently collected will be in effect. Another difference is that when you step onto a water tile with a blue star, you'll end up in an underwater area instead of simply swimming across.
The underwater areas look like this.
Once you figure out how the stars work, it's not difficult to solve the three puzzles included in the demo. It's quite a barebones release, with no title screen or sound of any kind. It also would have been better if Dink moved one tile at a step like Chip does. As it is, Dink's free movement can end up getting you stuck inside a wall. Tile-based movement is definitely possible in the Dink engine - "Frogger" does something similar. Still, it works pretty well once you figure it out, and I always love to see DMOD authors trying different types of games.
"well, the knowing of my death is clearly overreacted!"
Already there's another DMOD by Dinkdragon, author of the very bad "Dink Bigwood." Hopefully I won't have to get drunk to handle this one.
Actually, "An Age of Darkness" is much better than the author's first mod, which is kind of impressive since it came out less than a month later. Whereas I found a lot to hate and nothing to like about "Bigwood," "AOD" has some neat ideas in it. I might even be a fan of it if it weren't marred by several big problems. These problems include quite a few screens with "invisible wall" edges, multiple NPCs who will freeze the game if you talk to them before it's time to do so in order to advance the story, graphical glitches, and errors in the text. These problems aren't nearly as bad as they were in "Bigwood," but they still hold this DMOD back from being really enjoyable. Still, it's good to see improvement. For example, although the text is marred by spelling, grammatical and punctuation errors as well as some confusing sentence constructions, it was easy to tell what the author was getting at. In "Bigwood," it was often next to impossible. That's progress. I'm almost disappointed that this is DinkDragon's final DMOD.
Despite the title and a splash screen that features skulls and blood, the story of "AOD" is very silly and impossible to take seriously. Refreshingly, the DMOD does not even seem to try; I think this is why, in those moments where the mod wasn't breaking on me, I quite enjoyed it. The intro (which doesn't bother freezing the player) tells a grim tale of a world overrun by giant pillbugs. Yes, pillbugs. You play as a slayer named Gorbac. You'd think that the pillbugs would pose no threat to you, and you'd be right - they are ridiculously easy to kill. Still, the other members of your slayer village are too afraid of the supposed pillbug apocalypse to leave their homes.
The world will fall before the might of pillbugs!
Contrary to the "ominous" setup, the quest is a series of silly tasks. Gorbac will retrieve items such as a lemonade recipe, a copy of the movie Starship Troopers ("a masterpiece") and a board game to get help from various NPCs. There's a village populated entirely by headless ducks. Nothing is taken seriously, and it is pretty great.
Hahaha. But seriously, how did you fit those tasty humans into that tiny box?
There's also more to the DMOD than you'd think. There are quite a few tasks to accomplish, and it took me 39 minutes to finish the game. Dinkdragon makes use of graphics and scripts made by the community, including a windmill and a snow effect made by Simon Klaebe, pretty trees by Dan Walma, an awesome spell from "Friends Beyond 3" and the skeleton enemy from "Legend of TerraEarth." Unfortunately, the skeleton is poorly implemented. It seems to jump several feet backwards every time it attacks. The main character swap isn't done very well either. In addition to the maddeningly common problem of turning into Dink when you push (this is so easy to fix!), Gorbac, for reasons I can't begin to fathom, started turning into a pig every time I walked about ten minutes into the DMOD. He kept this up until the end: slayer when idling or attacking, pig when moving. Honestly, it was pretty funny.
The climactic battle between a pig and a skeleton!
The map isn't terrible, but it is kind of odd. The tiling has some minor problems. Ledges just sort of end instead of being neatly rounded off in a way that makes visual sense. You can never tell whether or not you can walk off the screen in a certain direction until you try because of all the invisible walls. This creates a lot of major hardness problems, as you can scoot along the edge of the screen past many obstacles and skip big sections of the game. There's loads of gold in the game, much of it deliberately placed, but nowhere to use it except a couple of healing shops where you'll never spend it all. But you know, it was lots of fun being a slayer, especially when the human NPCs reacted in the way you'd expect.
Damn, it feels good to be a slayer.
You never get to confront the "giant pillbug," but it doesn't really matter. I appreciated the chance to be a scary slayer, and I enjoyed the silly atmosphere and some neat if not fully realized ideas like the TV and a castle wall you can walk on the top of. It's just the freezing bugs and constant invisible walls that really drag this one down.
Hahaha, and he took the time to write that down. Love it.
224: Tile Puzzle (Demo) Author: MiloBones Release Date: July 24, 2005
"TRY TO REACH THE PURPLE SQUARE"
From the author of "The Ants" comes another unusual DMOD. The name "tile puzzle" makes you think of a sliding tile puzzle, but this, in my opinion, is something more interesting: an attempt to create a tile-based puzzle game like Chip's Challenge in the Dink engine.
Here's a little screenshot from the PC version of Chip's Challenge, for reference.
In Chip's Challenge, made in 1989 by Chuck Sommerville for the Atari Lynx and later PC, you play a little guy named Chip McCallahan who runs around collecting chips and avoiding hazards. Everything in the game is tile-based. Everything takes up exactly one tile, and Chip moves one tile's length at a time. In development it was even known as "Tile World." There have been quite a few Chip's Challenge clones and a handful of fan-made level packs. This game came with my childhood Windows 95 computer as part of the "Microsoft Entertainment Pack," along with games like SkiFree and Rattler Race. Whoa, memories.
In this short three-level demo, a few of the many different kinds of tiles from Chip's Challenge have been implemented. Here's what it looks like:
"Tile Puzzle" comes with no explanation. It took me a minute or two to figure it out.
Each tile type has a different effect. The spike tiles are just walls. Stepping on the arrows will force Dink to move in the direction they indicate, while stepping on fire or water will bring swift death... unless you collect the stars. In Chip's Challenge, different kinds of footwear enable you to ignore tiles' usual effects - fire boots for fire, swim fins for water and suction cup boots for arrows. Here, color coded stars have the same effect. There's a major difference in "Tile Puzzle," however - unlike in its inspiration, where shoes last for the duration of a level (or until a certain tile takes them away), only the star you most recently collected will be in effect. Another difference is that when you step onto a water tile with a blue star, you'll end up in an underwater area instead of simply swimming across.
The underwater areas look like this.
Once you figure out how the stars work, it's not difficult to solve the three puzzles included in the demo. It's quite a barebones release, with no title screen or sound of any kind. It also would have been better if Dink moved one tile at a step like Chip does. As it is, Dink's free movement can end up getting you stuck inside a wall. Tile-based movement is definitely possible in the Dink engine - "Frogger" does something similar. Still, it works pretty well once you figure it out, and I always love to see DMOD authors trying different types of games.
