Reply to Re: Crazy Old Tim Plays All the DMODs of 2006
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244: Call to Greatness Authors: Hezzu, Lunacre Release Date: November 30, 2006
"They are coming..."
I don't know much about Lunacre's collaborator here. Judging from Hezzu's representation by the maiden sprite ingame, she must be female. Maybe the crazy humor in the mod is her contribution, because I don't remember Lunacre's other DMODs being quite this wacky.
"Call to Greatness" is a joke DMOD that nearly tricked me into thinking it was something with serious gameplay. There's really no coherent plot, just a series of jokey twists. The f-word is used a lot.
This f-word. Just so there's no confusion.
There's a character called "The Storyteller" who is set up like she's going to be a narrator character, but she (I'm assuming? It's the androgynous old person sprite and they're called a witch at one point) never gets to say much. Every time she shows up, she ends up exploding while shouting, "NOOOOOO!" with an accompanying voice clip. Most of the time, there's a character called "the critic" (this one is definitely a girl) who shows up, declares that the storyteller has violated some rule of DMOD storytelling, and banishes her repeatedly to Hell.
There are more odd characters in this one. Dink has a "pet" wizard he calls Fluffy (he angrily insists that this is not his name, but he's never called anything else to my recollection) and a stone giant butler named James. In the intro, Dink is warned by his little-girl janitor of some unspecified threat that is coming to kill everybody. This is the closest thing around to a plot, but it's incoherent and never really goes anywhere. It's just a flimsy excuse to mess around and claim to have an IMPORTANT QUEST.
No, see, she's doing it for the exposure.
It's a pretty primitive DMOD. An insane amount of tree sprites are pasted everywhere instead of the usual tree background, making this the worst nightmare of anybody who insists on burning down all the trees whenever possible. Some things that ought to be hard, like shelves, are not. There's an event that should be one-time, but will play again if you return to its screen. The tables that warp you out of buildings aren't invisible. I also don't understand why the usual 10 save slots have been reduced to three here.
Maybe when she said "they are coming" she meant the trees. Good grief.
A handful of the trees actually obscure piles of gold. There's an NPC who offers to sell stat increases for large sums, which might fool you into thinking there's a substantial game to play here. It almost got me. When I got to the boncas that are the only required battles and found them pretty tough, I considered going back to grind. On a hunch, I pressed forward instead. There's a fakeout where it seems like you're going to fight Dink's butler gone rouge as a boss, but instead there's just another silly scene with the storyteller, the critic and the authors. No boss fight at all. Dink also seems to get killed in the end. Maybe this is a belated Failure DMOD.
Ya rly. Wow, is that meme this old? I guess it's even older than that, actually.
If you get anything out of this one, it'll be a laugh or two. My favorite part was a knight's hilariously stupid response to Dink saying that his mother was terrible in bed.
Yes, I laughed at this.
245: Island of Hell Author: Laughlan Fahey Release Date: December 17, 2006
"BYE"
Oh, 2006. You were so close!
I have no explanation for this DMOD's 3.8 (Tolerable) rating. Maybe people just got tired of giving out richly-deserved sub-1.0 scores. This is about as bad as it gets.
Maybe they just liked the title screen.
I guess the mapping could be worse. There are tiling problems, but they're not as bad as in "Apex," and the maps otherwise look... tolerable. The emphasis is on "look," though. Hardness and depth que errors are everywhere. You can walk right through trees, savebots, houses, you name it.
Also, the first screen looks like this.
The only scripted NPCs in this DMOD are shops that use scripts directly from the original game (one of these scripts has been modified, but the dialogue remains the same). There's a farmer guy who doesn't respond to you all (no script). The only thing to really do is burn down a certain tree and find a tunnel full of many, many boncas. If you happen to find this before preparing yourself at the shops, you'll probably die. After getting past all of the boncas, there are some pillbugs and a giant boss bonca. When you start fighting the big bonca, the game ends.
I checked the script; in the attack procedure, kill_game is called. Wow, a boss with the power to destroy reality itself. I guess that's one way to make an enemy difficult.
It should be possible to beat the boss if you stay well clear and patiently throw fireballs. Remember, though, if it even tries to swing at you - it doesn't have to hit - the game ends. I certainly wasn't going to bother.
If you do win, you're rewarded with a short message from the author. These are the only new lines of text in the entire DMOD.
At least Laughlan had the excuse of being just ten years old. I believe this makes them the youngest DMOD author to date.
246: The Scary Beast Author: Glenn Ergo Release Date: December 29, 2006
"Dink! You must help me at once!"
This is Glenn's last DMOD and his second-worst rated (1.2). He gave it a big update in July of 2009. The update features these eye-popping release notes:
- Mapped the whole D-Mod properly.
- Made this into an actual D-Mod.
This gave me some hope that what I was about to play was something different and better than what all those reviewers gave such low scores.
Sigh.
Glenn, unlike Laughlan, is devoid of excuses. He never made a good DMOD, but previous releases had shown improvement, at least. What did he think he was doing releasing THIS over three years later? What did he think he was doing implying he had somehow improved it more than two years after that? I really can't imagine.
When you start the game, you're unceremoniously dumped into some kind of field. There's no intro and no music. There's no music in the DMOD at all, actually. So you wander around, and eventually you find this girl.
Oh no! Is it a SCARY beast? By the way, where do you live? Ain't no houses 'round here.
She asks Dink to kill some kind of beast. Well, okay. So you wander around some more - the map looks fine, but has no distinguishing features at all - and find a rock. Okay, maybe let's try pushing it. Dink says that he's not strong enough. Back to the girl, who tells you to go punch "the special tree." There's no way of knowing what that means, so you go around punching each of the many trees on the map. Finally, you find one that displays a number when you hit it.
Hit it 20 times and your strength goes up. Yay?
Now Dink can access the lair of the SCARY beast, which is a bonca. A totally ordinary bonca, except that it has 150 hit points. So you kill it and return to Ms. Damsel in Distress, who calls you her hero and promises "something special" in return. Then the game ends. That's it. Honestly. I saved you the trouble of playing it, because there's practically nothing more you could learn about it by doing so, unless you're enthralled by exchanges like this one:
Ms. D-in-D: Did you kill it yet?
Dink: No, I have not.
Glenn certainly didn't kill it with this outing, unless what he was trying to kill was my enthusiasm. I think this is his worst DMOD. At least you could laugh at "Glenn's First D-Mod."
--
There's another year in the can. The end was a bit of a letdown, but overall, I was impressed again by 2006's DMODs. I feel like the standard has been raised to a new level over the past few years. My favorites were all in the Failure Contest, but I really don't feel like splitting hairs to try and rank them. Actually, that contest was almost all aces. Great stuff. On to 2007.
"They are coming..."
I don't know much about Lunacre's collaborator here. Judging from Hezzu's representation by the maiden sprite ingame, she must be female. Maybe the crazy humor in the mod is her contribution, because I don't remember Lunacre's other DMODs being quite this wacky.
"Call to Greatness" is a joke DMOD that nearly tricked me into thinking it was something with serious gameplay. There's really no coherent plot, just a series of jokey twists. The f-word is used a lot.
This f-word. Just so there's no confusion.
There's a character called "The Storyteller" who is set up like she's going to be a narrator character, but she (I'm assuming? It's the androgynous old person sprite and they're called a witch at one point) never gets to say much. Every time she shows up, she ends up exploding while shouting, "NOOOOOO!" with an accompanying voice clip. Most of the time, there's a character called "the critic" (this one is definitely a girl) who shows up, declares that the storyteller has violated some rule of DMOD storytelling, and banishes her repeatedly to Hell.
There are more odd characters in this one. Dink has a "pet" wizard he calls Fluffy (he angrily insists that this is not his name, but he's never called anything else to my recollection) and a stone giant butler named James. In the intro, Dink is warned by his little-girl janitor of some unspecified threat that is coming to kill everybody. This is the closest thing around to a plot, but it's incoherent and never really goes anywhere. It's just a flimsy excuse to mess around and claim to have an IMPORTANT QUEST.
No, see, she's doing it for the exposure.
It's a pretty primitive DMOD. An insane amount of tree sprites are pasted everywhere instead of the usual tree background, making this the worst nightmare of anybody who insists on burning down all the trees whenever possible. Some things that ought to be hard, like shelves, are not. There's an event that should be one-time, but will play again if you return to its screen. The tables that warp you out of buildings aren't invisible. I also don't understand why the usual 10 save slots have been reduced to three here.
Maybe when she said "they are coming" she meant the trees. Good grief.
A handful of the trees actually obscure piles of gold. There's an NPC who offers to sell stat increases for large sums, which might fool you into thinking there's a substantial game to play here. It almost got me. When I got to the boncas that are the only required battles and found them pretty tough, I considered going back to grind. On a hunch, I pressed forward instead. There's a fakeout where it seems like you're going to fight Dink's butler gone rouge as a boss, but instead there's just another silly scene with the storyteller, the critic and the authors. No boss fight at all. Dink also seems to get killed in the end. Maybe this is a belated Failure DMOD.
Ya rly. Wow, is that meme this old? I guess it's even older than that, actually.
If you get anything out of this one, it'll be a laugh or two. My favorite part was a knight's hilariously stupid response to Dink saying that his mother was terrible in bed.
Yes, I laughed at this.
245: Island of Hell Author: Laughlan Fahey Release Date: December 17, 2006
"BYE"
Oh, 2006. You were so close!
***********This DMOD, "Island of Hell,"************ ********Has been awarded the prestigious********* ****DINK FOREVER MEMORIAL AWARD OF BADNESS***** ********On this day December 1, 2014*********
I have no explanation for this DMOD's 3.8 (Tolerable) rating. Maybe people just got tired of giving out richly-deserved sub-1.0 scores. This is about as bad as it gets.
Maybe they just liked the title screen.
I guess the mapping could be worse. There are tiling problems, but they're not as bad as in "Apex," and the maps otherwise look... tolerable. The emphasis is on "look," though. Hardness and depth que errors are everywhere. You can walk right through trees, savebots, houses, you name it.
Also, the first screen looks like this.
The only scripted NPCs in this DMOD are shops that use scripts directly from the original game (one of these scripts has been modified, but the dialogue remains the same). There's a farmer guy who doesn't respond to you all (no script). The only thing to really do is burn down a certain tree and find a tunnel full of many, many boncas. If you happen to find this before preparing yourself at the shops, you'll probably die. After getting past all of the boncas, there are some pillbugs and a giant boss bonca. When you start fighting the big bonca, the game ends.
I checked the script; in the attack procedure, kill_game is called. Wow, a boss with the power to destroy reality itself. I guess that's one way to make an enemy difficult.
It should be possible to beat the boss if you stay well clear and patiently throw fireballs. Remember, though, if it even tries to swing at you - it doesn't have to hit - the game ends. I certainly wasn't going to bother.
If you do win, you're rewarded with a short message from the author. These are the only new lines of text in the entire DMOD.
At least Laughlan had the excuse of being just ten years old. I believe this makes them the youngest DMOD author to date.
246: The Scary Beast Author: Glenn Ergo Release Date: December 29, 2006
"Dink! You must help me at once!"
This is Glenn's last DMOD and his second-worst rated (1.2). He gave it a big update in July of 2009. The update features these eye-popping release notes:
- Mapped the whole D-Mod properly.
- Made this into an actual D-Mod.
This gave me some hope that what I was about to play was something different and better than what all those reviewers gave such low scores.
Sigh.
***********This DMOD, "The Scary Beast,"*********** ********Has been awarded the prestigious********* ****DINK FOREVER MEMORIAL AWARD OF BADNESS***** ********On this day December 1, 2014*********
Glenn, unlike Laughlan, is devoid of excuses. He never made a good DMOD, but previous releases had shown improvement, at least. What did he think he was doing releasing THIS over three years later? What did he think he was doing implying he had somehow improved it more than two years after that? I really can't imagine.
When you start the game, you're unceremoniously dumped into some kind of field. There's no intro and no music. There's no music in the DMOD at all, actually. So you wander around, and eventually you find this girl.
Oh no! Is it a SCARY beast? By the way, where do you live? Ain't no houses 'round here.
She asks Dink to kill some kind of beast. Well, okay. So you wander around some more - the map looks fine, but has no distinguishing features at all - and find a rock. Okay, maybe let's try pushing it. Dink says that he's not strong enough. Back to the girl, who tells you to go punch "the special tree." There's no way of knowing what that means, so you go around punching each of the many trees on the map. Finally, you find one that displays a number when you hit it.
Hit it 20 times and your strength goes up. Yay?
Now Dink can access the lair of the SCARY beast, which is a bonca. A totally ordinary bonca, except that it has 150 hit points. So you kill it and return to Ms. Damsel in Distress, who calls you her hero and promises "something special" in return. Then the game ends. That's it. Honestly. I saved you the trouble of playing it, because there's practically nothing more you could learn about it by doing so, unless you're enthralled by exchanges like this one:
Ms. D-in-D: Did you kill it yet?
Dink: No, I have not.
Glenn certainly didn't kill it with this outing, unless what he was trying to kill was my enthusiasm. I think this is his worst DMOD. At least you could laugh at "Glenn's First D-Mod."
--
There's another year in the can. The end was a bit of a letdown, but overall, I was impressed again by 2006's DMODs. I feel like the standard has been raised to a new level over the past few years. My favorites were all in the Failure Contest, but I really don't feel like splitting hairs to try and rank them. Actually, that contest was almost all aces. Great stuff. On to 2007.
