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November 25th 2014, 04:13 AM
custom_coco.gif
CocoMonkey
Bard He/Him United States
Please Cindy, say the whole name each time. 
**The DMOD Drought Diaries**
~Chapter 2: Aural Presentation (Mid 2006)~

The second record gap between DMODs didn't remain the record nearly as long as the first. No DMODs were released between Dink vs. Milder 2 on June 10th and the Failure Contest entries on September 26th, a gap of 108 days (over three months). This may well be because every active DMOD producer was busy working on their entry to the contest, which was announced on July 24th.

I was briefly hanging out in the community around this time. Really, this happened before the release of "Dink vs. Milder 2," but this is my best chance to mention it. I reviewed a couple of DMODs, updated "Tragic Death of Zink Smallwood" (breaking it as much as I fixed it, sadly) and started my first attempt at a comeback DMOD. This attempt didn't get far before I realized I was still utterly garbage at making maps and decided that I was better off letting that sleeping dog lie. The time for the return of the CocoMonkey was not yet right. There's information on that DMOD idea I had here if you're curious. If you're not curious, that link leads to a post about waffles for all you know.

Cypry released his DinkC editor on July 31st. I use this all the time. The prompts while you're typing a function and the instant access to the DinkC reference are quite handy.

On August 6th, Dan Walma released the Dink Smallwood v1.08 Aural+ patch. I don't really understand why he did this only in a forum post (which is still stickied) and didn't post a news update about it. I feel like some players who could benefit from this patch probably don't even know about it. Aural+ fixes MIDI lag that happens on non-ancient versions of Windows and adds MP3 support to the game.

Aural+ has been installed by many users, I'm sure, to fix the MIDI lag, which is horrendous. The game grinds to a halt when switching MIDIs without it. When I have to use the main game rather than FreeDink for some reason (usually testing my own DMODs), Aural+ is what I'm running.

The MP3 support, although it's a feature some people had expressed a desire for, was doomed to disuse from the start. The first problem is that, unlike with MIDI music, Dan would not allow authors to upload MP3s to which they didn't have the rights. I certainly don't blame him - obviously, distributing copyrighted MP3s is a great way to attract negative legal attention - but it seriously limits what can be used. The second problem is that the patch is kind of low-visibility compared to the main version, and DMOD authors would be catering to an even smaller audience. The third problem is that MP3s are required to be uploaded in a separate file from the DMOD itself, making authors even less likely to want to bother.

Unsurprisingly, Aural+'s MP3 support has been ignored by DMOD authors. There's only one DMOD I know of that has an associated MP3 pack. FreeDink and Dink Smallwood HD both support .ogg (Ogg Vorbis) files, but not .mp3. I don't think any authors have tried to include .ogg files with their DMOD, and I doubt anybody ever will. I guess players can add their own soundtracks if they feel like it. I wonder if anybody's ever done that.

--
The Failure DMOD Contest
--

The fourth successful DMOD contest on the Dink Network had the theme of failure. Redink1 was very specific about what he meant by "failure."

The D-Mod shall give the player a clear goal to achieve. This goal must be the focus of the D-Mod, and cannot be a subquest.

The D-Mod shall prevent the player from achieving this goal, or make it possible to fail to achieve this goal.

When the player fails to achieve the goal, the D-Mod shall tell, show, or explain the consequences of this failure.


This is a pretty interesting theme! Success is a key feature of the plot of most games; the hero or heroes may (and probably do) fail at some tasks along the way, but having them fail at their ultimate goal is nearly unheard of, even in those cases where achieving the goal doesn't lead to the happiest of endings. This assumption is built into the way we discuss video games. When I've completed a video game, I tend to say that I "beat" it - I succeeded in overcoming whatever obstacles it presented. Of course, unless you make a game that's basically indifferent to player input (there are an increasing number of these kinds of games out there, mind you) or one without a "real" ending, there's going to have to be a condition in which the player succeeds, but it's not going to feel like success if the story ends in failure.

The meaning of "failure" could have been quite vague, so it was a good choice to lay out the requirements so clearly. In these writeups, I'll make sure to take note of how well the mods fulfill these conditions. Put another way, I'll examine how well they succeed at making the player fail.

In an amusing bit of irony, the Failure Contest was the biggest success to date in terms of turnout, with eight entries.

--

233: The Attack of the Evil Wizard (Beta) Author: Colin Holser (VonZeppelin) Release Date: September 26, 2006
"You want me to give up my vacation so that I can stop a gnome from murdering someone's pig?"

This DMOD came in last place in the contest. Since this is the Failure Contest, you could argue that this author stayed truer to its spirit than anybody else.

VonZeppelin uploaded a couple of graphical files before this, his only DMOD. His set of alternate hairdos for Dink sprites enabled me to give the antagonist in "Malachi the Jerk" his uniquely hateable look. It was kind of annoying having to put the hair on all of the frames myself, but it was still a useful file.

With its nearly unanimous last-place finish, I was expecting "Attack of the Evil Wizard" to be really crappy, this contest's "Computer Virus." It is not! It's actually pretty decent - above average, even, if it weren't for the bugs. The maps are pretty good, and it's got plenty of personality. The quest is totally reasonable in terms of gameplay. I had a better time playing this than "A Very Dink Christmas," which had lots of original ideas but failed to make a coherent whole.


Hee hee! Danny boy.

Oh boy, those bugs, though. This DMOD feels like it was wrapped up in a hurry and left unfinished. There was actually an update after the contest, which means that the version that was voted on was even buggier, easily explaining its last-place finish. One judge said, "Multiple hardness errors, and signs can't be talked to. 0 health does not kill Dink." None of those problems are present in the version I played, but the update left a great many bugs and a general unfinished feeling intact. A healer will take your money, but won't heal you, leaving Dink to go around farming hearts. A shop that claims to sell a clawsword will give you nothing in return for your money if you try to buy it. Quite a few enemies and a couple of NPCs have been left unscripted. There's one spot with an invisible wall at the end of what looks like a path. Every little blade of grass on the map will stop your fireballs. There's a house that cycles madly through the sequence of house graphics. I could almost look past it all if it weren't for the bugs that make the DMOD impossible to finish.

A dragon boss toward the end of the DMOD and the final boss both are supposed to trigger cutscenes when they die, but only the first line is spoken and Dink is left frozen. The last thing you'll see if you don't fix the game yourself is Dink saying "Yay, I won," which is a funny ending for a Failure Contest DMOD. I gave these scripts a quick and dirty fix by adding the line "script_attach(1000)" in both cases. These kinds of bugs are hard to understand. Self-testing is the worst way to test a video game, but even a simple self-test, no matter how unthorough, is guaranteed to catch a bug that makes the game impossible to finish. It's crazy to encounter multiple such bugs in a game that's been not only released, but patched.


The map comes with some advice. The bit about slayers not being so tough is a damned lie. You're better off avoiding them.

In "Attack of the Evil Wizard," Dink, accompanied by the wizard Martridge, is sent to save a town that is menaced by an evil wizard named Ermadgrit. He fails, of course. You spend much of the DMOD going around talking to everybody, trying to figure out who can help you next, but there are some other segments to break it up, like a trip to the (ridiculously big subterranean cavern at the) bottom of a well.


Somebody tells Dink a dumb story about how he dropped a pie down the well. It's a nice touch that it's actually there when you get down there.

Dink eventually is teleported away somewhere on what he hopes is a lead to Ermadgrit, but when he returns, he finds that everyone in town has been murdered in an extremely grisly fashion. It's entertaining to walk through the town you've spent the last half-hour in and around, but redecorated in blood and guts.


Ermadgrit is either a poor speller, or he ran out of blood before he got to the apostrophe and the E.


Somebody's been busy! If you're curious, the Dead Dragon Carcass was already present as part of the church.


"I love what you've done with the place." "And all for under fifty bucks!"

The big plot twist (which I feel pretty comfortable spoiling here) is that the evil wizard was Martridge all along. As soon as this was revealed, I became profoundly disappointed in myself for not noticing until then that "Ermadgrit" is an anagram of "Martridge." Anyway, Martridge decided that he hates the world for constantly mocking his height. He does make a really great point when chiding Dink for not suspecting him: "The only thing I ever did for you was give you fireball magic..." It's true, Martridge's role as a loyal ally of Dink is something that's been established almost entirely in various DMODs that may or may not be in continuity with each other. This was very clever, and I liked it a lot despite the fact that you could pick apart how much sense it makes that Martridge lets Dink hang around and have the chance to fight him (he teleports Dink early in the DMOD - why not just teleport him into the ocean?). The actual battle is kind of disappointing, though - it's pretty much just a regular dragon, which makes me wonder how he managed such devastation in the first place.


Dink confronts Martridge on some new volcanic-ash style land.

This DMOD technically follows the guidelines set out in the contest. Dink is assigned a specific task (save the town), fails to accomplish it, and we see the results. It doesn't feel like it's quite in the spirit of the assignment, though. For one thing, the failure to save the village doesn't really feel like Dink's fault. He was given no help and there was never any hint of Martridge's treachery. More importantly, although the townsfolk all die, Dink does kill the evil wizard, thereby, we may presume, saving the rest of the world from his wrath. That's not a failure. If this is a failure DMOD, so is "Pilgrim's Quest." Dink complains at the end that now he'll never get off of the island, but I think it's a stretch to assume nobody will come looking for him when King Dan knows where he is.

234: Ex-Peppermint Author: Robert Tolda (Square Watermelon) Release Date: September 26, 2006
"Hi-o, I am the cotten candy frog. Can I take your order?"

"Ex-Peppermint" (boy, what a title) came in seventh place in the contest. I don't really understand how it didn't come in last. "Evil Wizard" must have really been unplayable in its original release.


This does not bode well. Look, they even misspelled "peppermint."

The author has said that virtually everything "wrong" with "Ex-Peppermint" is a deliberate creative decision. Unlike some similar claims in the past, I actually believe this, but that doesn't make this a good DMOD.

This DMOD doesn't have anything to do with peppermint, as far as I ccan tell. Honestly, it doesn't seem to have anything to do with anything at all. Nothing makes a bit of sense. Dink frequently walks on things like trees and walls and is walled off by grassy plains. Not only does it ignore the established rules of Dink Smallwood, it isn't even internally consistent - the same tile will mean something different from screen to screen. There's lots of text, but it's mostly just absurd babbling, and even when it's coherent, there isn't really much of a plot to piece together. Oh, and I sure hope you like the word "poop," because you'll be seeing it a lot.


The "treelines" are paths and the red things are warps. This is the first real gameplay screen. None of this is explained to the player, you just have to sort of muddle your way through.

The combat in "Ex-Peppermint" is different from the norm in that fists and weapons are omitted in favor of a variety of magic attacks and abilities. The magic meter is renamed PP, and the different abilities use it in different ways. In addition to the regular full fireball, there's a "quick" fireball that doesn't use the whole magic meter and does less damage, a fire-punch, a dash that speeds Dink up while the PP meter drains, and other abilities that I gave up on the mod before unlocking. All of the magic attacks, including the basic fireball, increase in power with your magic stat. The different abilities have their own assigned keys on the keyboard - for some reason, they don't seem to work in FreeDink, so I had to switch to 1.08 Aural+ in order to even survive past the first few screens.


I cheated up a crazy magic stat in order to demonstrate how the fireball increases in size as well as power.


Dink uses the fire punch, or "burning monkey technique" as the DMOD insists on calling it.

The enemies are insanely difficult. Screwing up once is usually good enough to get you killed. Since there's no real plot, I had little motivation to struggle through and gave up. This is one of the least playable mods and the single most confusing DMOD I've ever seen. I'm not alone, as I can't find any evidence that anybody other than the author has ever beaten this thing. Areas I managed to reach in this DMOD included a maze made out of pies and filled with bread enemies, a maze that swarmed with wasps, and a series of odd-looking rooms connected by stairways. Have some screenshots.


This is the first DMOD to use the wasps, which had been added to the site recently. They're my favorite add-on enemy.


Okay, I kind of like the pie maze, at least in concept.


The cat enemy is, of course, by Simon Klaebe. It looks just incredible in motion, particularly its attack.

It's an experimental DMOD, but I don't think the experiment went well. It was hard to figure out what to do, and once you did figure it out, it was even harder to do it. The player is never given an explanation of why Dink is in this strange place or what he's trying to do there. The dialogue mostly struck me as juvenile and obnoxious, with the usual references to things like monkeys and bananas as well as the constant discussion of poop, although there were a few jokes that I liked.

There are some bugs that I'm pretty sure aren't intentional. Multiple conversations will leave the player frozen, and I got stuck in a wall more than once.

Although a sense of failure was omnipresent in "Ex-Peppermint" - my failure, Dink's failure, the failure of logic and sanity - the DMOD doesn't follow the contest rules, either. Remember, it was stated that "The D-Mod shall give the player a clear goal to achieve. This goal must be the focus of the D-Mod, and cannot be a subquest." There's no clear goal at all in this one, at least not one that's the focus of the D-Mod. Some sort of task for Dink to fail at may be introduced near the end, but that doesn't constitute a clear main goal.

At least it isn't boring. We've got another new champ in the "Weirdest DMOD" category for sure. I hope this one stays on top, because my mind can't take much more.