Reply to Re: Crazy Old Tim Plays All the DMODs of 2007
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Just a heads up: I'm going to be covering one fewer DMOD in 2007 than I said I was. I had something on my list that turned out to be a "development DMOD" with nothing to do in terms of gameplay. I don't think I'd have much to say about Survival that you couldn't read in its description.
256: Bill & Kill 1: *SIGH* Author: Skull Release Date: April 22, 2007
"Arh... I think I'll just kill myself!"
REPUTATION NOTE: This DMOD is part of the incredibly select group to have a rating of less than 1.0 (0.4) on The Dink Network.
"The March of Army" promised a fourth "Honor of the Cast" installment, but it never came out. Instead, we get this, released the same day as HOC3 under a different author name. Skull, a big fan of "Cloud Castle 2: Scarab," decided to call himself Jameil for some reason. Unlike the "Honor of the Cast" DMODs, this series is still credited to "Jameil" on the site.
Let's take a glance at the description:
The game with fight. Believe me!! This game is NOT for those who doesn't have a long patience. I did try 13 times before I got past the second screen. It took me (if I remember right) 543 tries to finish it.
This is gonna suuuuuuck. At least the appropriate reaction is built right into the title.
I mean, what else is there to say? It's named "*SIGH*" because that's what you do when you realize you've been trolled by this stupid DMOD.
So much for the minor progress Skull had made; this might be his worst DMOD yet. Actually, I'm sure it is. You can blame something like "Honor of the Cast: Slimes" on immaturity, impatience and incompetence; THIS load of crap could only be made by somebody who deliberately wants players to suffer.
Our protagonist Bill, the winner of the 2007 Dink Smallwood Lookalike Contest (OK, so I made that up), is out to steal the treasure of a bonca pirate named x6x (good luck pronouncing that). This story is only told on a loading screen that didn't even display when I played the game. Even back when computers were slow enough that it would display, I can't imagine you had enough time to read it.
There's nothing here but hordes of knights who are so strong that one hit will kill poor Bill several times over. Thanks to the ability to make enemies hit each other, it probably isn't impossible to win (I got past the first screen legitimately, for a giggle), but I wasn't about to waste my time. I cheated my way through. There are so many knights that, at 120 experience points each, I got to level 13 by killing them all with the Ultimate Cheat. Level 13!
*SIGH*
There are a few save points along the way. Their script has been altered to require you to wait around several seconds after you choose to save, just to annoy you a little more.
When you finally get to x6x, he declares, "This will be an interesting battle!" There is no battle. After a fade, x6x is dead. Bill tries to claim his treasure, but the treasure chest is locked, so he commits suicide instead. There's an alternate ending in the script where you get the gold, but there's no way to actually see it ingame. The scripts also contain fragments from "Cloud Castle." At least the map is free of CC screens this time.
Hooray!
There's no excuse for releasing something like this as your fifth DMOD, and Skull knew it. He clearly was not even trying at this point. He changed names to try and avoid the blame, but I can't understand why he'd make this at all. My guess is that he was getting his jollies off of people's disgust and disappointment.
I doubt anybody's ever beaten this legitimately. As Dan "The Man" Walma wrote in response to the author's claim that he'd beaten it himself:
I'm pretty sure he is lying like a cow does under the bitter moonlight of January... when the sun shines too slow in the day, and the touch of death lurks in frigid shadows. "Moo", says the cow to the moon, "Moo"... if only he could make an 'en' sound, then at least he could voice his discontent to the heartless glow. He tries to stand up on undernourished legs, but its last vestiges of body heat melted the snow under its craggy, matted belly, and he's frozen to the ground. Lying there, unable to get up under any effort, hoping that someone invents a gentle, cow-proof flamethrower in the next 3 minutes.
That sums up the experience of playing "Bill & Kill" better than I ever could.
On the bright side, this experience is making me feel a lot better about my August 1998 releases. At least I stopped after a month or so.
257: The Legend of the Dink: The Beginning Author: GOKUSSJ6 Release Date: May 21, 2007
"And I f*** pigs! Now I'm really pissed off!"
GOKUSSJ6 is a Polish fellow with a name that takes me back to bygone days when kids seemed to think it was cool to name themselves after a character from Dragon Ball Z and append "SSJ" and some crazy number. "SSJ" stands for "Super Saiya-jin," despite the fact that "Saiyan," a perfectly reasonable English translation, is used in the official localizations of the series and in any halfway sane fan translations. I saw a "SoN GoHaN SSJ9" once. Ah, those bygone days. This is the first of five DMODs from Mr. Goku, all in 2007.
"The Legend of the Dink" ("the" Dink? Is Dink a title now?) is almost as generic as a DMOD can get, starting with Dink getting sent on a mission by King Daniel and ending with a battle against Seth in a different body. Seth, of course, rants in an out-of-character fashion about how Dink only destroyed his body, but not his spirit. Not only is this a lame plot, it's tired. It's been done over and over again.
The only thing that makes this one stand out at all is the letter the King reads to Dink at the start. It's from Seth, under some pseudonym I've already forgotten, and it accuses Dink of what I'm going to call "animal husbandry" (see the header quote if you are confused about what I mean). It was such an obnoxiously stupid joke that I couldn't help but laugh a little.
All you really do in "Legend" is walk from left to right. The town you start in is laid out on a thin horizontal strip. It opens out onto a rather large box-shaped area, but you won't find anything of consequence by exploring around. The map is pretty plain, and when you reach the end of it, the entire right side of the map just cuts off with an invisible wall.
Enjoy this rather odd shelf of bloody objects. It's the most interesting sight in the DMOD.
When you get to Seth, he'll probably destroy you instantly. You could do an awful lot of grinding to beat him, but you're better off finding the secret area. If you walk straight through what looks like a solid treeline at a certain spot, you'll find some powerups. There's no hint leading the player to this; I found out by looking in the editor. Anyway, with the powerups and one elixir from the healing shop, I was able to beat "Seth" at level 2. Killing him doesn't seem to do any good, though, as his soul just escapes again.
It must smell pretty bad in there.
258: Adventures of Dink Smallwood Part 2: The Song of an Ancient Wind (Demo) Author: Lunacre Release Date: May 21, 2007
"Help! The spirits of dead bodies are attacking us!"
This one has an even longer title than the first installment. Good grief.
I had to go back to the 2005 topic and re-read my own writeup in order to remember what AODS Part 1 was about, but it came back to me. Dink went to a town called Rakuna and fought Firamin, the "Ancient of Fire." This time out, he's taking on Aramin, the Ancient of Air. Of course, since this is just a demo, you never actually fight him. It's quite substantial for a demo, though. I ended up spending almost an hour and a half on it.
"Adventures of Dink Smallwood Part 2" begins with a long, mostly silent intro in which Dink decides to just "go for a walk" but ends up walking for thousands of miles and witnessing all kinds of horrible things, all set to whimsical music. I found the contrast kind of amusing. The cutscenes are good throughout the DMOD. Characters move expressively, stopping and turning in a natural way. It reminds me of JRPGs from the SNES/Genesis era.
A nice, relaxing walk. Ah.
At the end of his walk, Dink finds himself trapped on a strange island haunted by ghosts. The ghosts are controlled by a being known as the Spirit King. You start near a small town whose mayor is almost too hospitable to Dink. Amazingly enough, Dink's old neighbor Ethel also lives there.
Hey, what? You can't prove I killed Quackers! As far as you know, I'm as innocent as the driven snow!
Most of the DMOD is spent underground, fighting ghosts. The ghosts are represented by new graphics that look okay, although I've seen better versions.
You ghosts need to come up with more things to say. It's just hard to feel appropriately terrified by such repetitive haunting.
It gets a little tedious fighting screen after screen of the same two types of ghost. There's also an error at the start of this area: you see the entrance blocked off by a big rock and Dink makes a point of saying he'll have to find another way out, but if you leave the screen and return, the rock is gone and you can leave just fine. Anyway, the next section is a little more interesting. Weaponized ghosts fall from the top of the screen, and you have to balance avoiding the ghosts with making it to the end of this section in the allotted time.
When I said, "I wish it would rain spirits," this wasn't what I meant.
When you reach the Spirit King, after plenty of ominous buildup and some minibosses, he reveals his true form: a duck. But this isn't a "Slaughterhouse"-style fakeout: Ducky is a mean fighter.
This is the meanest poultry Smallwood has ever faced.
The Spirit King boss is very easy, and I don't understand why everyone keeps saying that it's hard... whoops, sorry. For a second there, I thought that I was Skull. What I meant to say is that it's basically impossible. The duck moves too fast, does too much touch damage, and is always filling the room with projectiles. Realizing I couldn't win, I went back to the start and got a weapon I had missed, but that only provided an increase of 2 attack. I tried three more times to beat the Spirit King, but finally gave up and cheated up some better stats. I might have kept trying if it weren't for the fact that there isn't a save point anywhere near the boss, and each loss means spending at least several minutes getting back.
When Dink beats the Spirit King, the defeated duck gives Dink an extremely long, expository speech. He tells Dink that he is descended from the Ancients. He tells him that he isn't actually behind the spirits attacking the island. He drops hints about Dink's father and tells Dink to believe in himself and follow his heart. And all the time I can't stop snickering, because these heartfelt words are all coming to me from a headless duck with blood spraying from its neck-hole. What the Hell?
You'd probably think that a boss like that would mark the ending of a demo, but it doesn't. In the next section, Dink is trapped in a haunted village. There's a riddle that tells Dink how to find his way out. It seems like a clever puzzle, but the riddle itself is quite easy to figure out. It speaks of a "green one covered in red and pain" and you can find a tree coated in blood. Okay, but how do you get to it? This is why I got stuck. I scoured the topics about the game, but nobody seemed to have the answer. Eventually, I figured it out myself.
...WHAT?
Oh, come ON.
Yeah, I dunno if I missed something in the riddle, but it seems odd to require the player to examine something that's usually just decoration. Oh well.
So you find your way out of the town, but even that's not the end. The mayor of the first town turns out to be Aramin, and there's a whole section of Dink escaping from his prison. Dink gets out of his cell by constructing an atomic bomb from things he finds lying around. Sure.
Ooh, I love it when they do this. Okay, so "Adventures of Dink Smallwood Part 2" officially takes place in or around Chad.
After escaping, Dink is transported to a snowy land. You wander around a bit there and find another village... and THAT'S where the demo ends. Whew!
There's an alternate ending early on. When you talk to the mayor, the game asks you if you've played "Adventures of Dink Smallwood Part 1." If you say no, it tells you to go play it and kills the game! Then, it asks you if you've beaten it. Again, an answer of "no" ends the game, but you can also select whether you got the good ending or the bad one where Dink joins forces with Firamin. That gets Dink thrown in prison. The game tells you to press ALT+F4 to exit, and there's a long pause... but then the voice of the author shows up. Lunacre admits that he needs Dink, and gives him ridiculous stats to help him escape! I think I like this ending more than the real one.
These are record non-cheating stats. Not even Dinkzilla was this buff.
This one might be a bit overrated. It drags on a bit, and the Spirit King is definitely too hard. I'm not alone on this - I saw several people state that they cheated to get past him even though they didn't want to. It's not a bad effort, though - heck, as of this point it was probably the second-best mod of 2007.
Here's a bit of insider trivia for you. I was shocked when I opened up the story folder for this one and found it full of compiled ".d" files. It was once very common - almost standard practice - to do this to your scripts to prevent people from peeking, but over time, fewer and fewer authors saw any point in doing so. This is the first time I've seen .d scripts since "Quest for the Gems" in May of 2005!
259: Bill & Kill 2: The Unknown Boy Author: Skull Release Date: May 23, 2007
"Yep! We came to kill you!"
REPUTATION NOTE: This DMOD is part of the incredibly select group to have a rating of less than 1.0 (0.3) on The Dink Network.
This title screen makes this DMOD look more exciting than it actually is. It's a screenshot; the map screen used to set it up is still in the DMOD, unused.
Mooo. The cow waves its legs pointlessly, but it can't change its fate. Mooooo.
Again, Skull released this as "Jameil." At this point, Redink1 decided he'd had enough of the charade (read this, it's a hoot).
As for the DMOD, it's the same sort of thing as the first one: A bunch of similar screens full of enemies that are too hard to beat. In this case, they're toned down to the point where I could believe people have legitimately done it, but why would you want to put all that effort into playing this? I didn't hesitate to cheat. This time, the enemies are odd, doll-sized children rather than knights.
Careful, Bill. Kids are dirty fighters.
Notice the white backgrounds? they've all been tiled with the "empty" tile, so they'll display whatever the previous background was - nothing, if you've loaded a game.
There's an actual boss in this one. After you beat him (I cheated again, of course) there's a strange ending in which a couple of old people stumble upon the aftermath of Bill's rampage and say they'll never find him, that he will remain "the unknown boy," hence the title. They say some other things, too, but it's nonsense.
Bill cussed a swear too! These rapscallion adventurers.
It's easy to understand a young person showing up and making some bad DMODs, but as time passes, continuing to release things like this to universal dislike becomes a stranger and stranger thing to do. I find myself coming up with convoluted explanations. Maybe Skull made these mods so poorly under a different name so that "his" DMODs would look better by comparison? But that doesn't make any sense, because the only thing he laid claim to at this point was "Adventures with Jani," a blatant "A Knight's Tale" ripoff. Of course, the truth is simpler: he just wanted to piss people off, a noble and storied motive for many a creative endeavor. Honestly, I think people were more confused than mad.
256: Bill & Kill 1: *SIGH* Author: Skull Release Date: April 22, 2007
"Arh... I think I'll just kill myself!"
REPUTATION NOTE: This DMOD is part of the incredibly select group to have a rating of less than 1.0 (0.4) on The Dink Network.
"The March of Army" promised a fourth "Honor of the Cast" installment, but it never came out. Instead, we get this, released the same day as HOC3 under a different author name. Skull, a big fan of "Cloud Castle 2: Scarab," decided to call himself Jameil for some reason. Unlike the "Honor of the Cast" DMODs, this series is still credited to "Jameil" on the site.
Let's take a glance at the description:
The game with fight. Believe me!! This game is NOT for those who doesn't have a long patience. I did try 13 times before I got past the second screen. It took me (if I remember right) 543 tries to finish it.
This is gonna suuuuuuck. At least the appropriate reaction is built right into the title.
I mean, what else is there to say? It's named "*SIGH*" because that's what you do when you realize you've been trolled by this stupid DMOD.
********This DMOD, "Bill & Kill 1: *SIGH*,"******** ********Has been awarded the prestigious********* ****DINK FOREVER MEMORIAL AWARD OF BADNESS***** ********On this day December 6, 2014*********
So much for the minor progress Skull had made; this might be his worst DMOD yet. Actually, I'm sure it is. You can blame something like "Honor of the Cast: Slimes" on immaturity, impatience and incompetence; THIS load of crap could only be made by somebody who deliberately wants players to suffer.
Our protagonist Bill, the winner of the 2007 Dink Smallwood Lookalike Contest (OK, so I made that up), is out to steal the treasure of a bonca pirate named x6x (good luck pronouncing that). This story is only told on a loading screen that didn't even display when I played the game. Even back when computers were slow enough that it would display, I can't imagine you had enough time to read it.
There's nothing here but hordes of knights who are so strong that one hit will kill poor Bill several times over. Thanks to the ability to make enemies hit each other, it probably isn't impossible to win (I got past the first screen legitimately, for a giggle), but I wasn't about to waste my time. I cheated my way through. There are so many knights that, at 120 experience points each, I got to level 13 by killing them all with the Ultimate Cheat. Level 13!
*SIGH*
There are a few save points along the way. Their script has been altered to require you to wait around several seconds after you choose to save, just to annoy you a little more.
When you finally get to x6x, he declares, "This will be an interesting battle!" There is no battle. After a fade, x6x is dead. Bill tries to claim his treasure, but the treasure chest is locked, so he commits suicide instead. There's an alternate ending in the script where you get the gold, but there's no way to actually see it ingame. The scripts also contain fragments from "Cloud Castle." At least the map is free of CC screens this time.
Hooray!
There's no excuse for releasing something like this as your fifth DMOD, and Skull knew it. He clearly was not even trying at this point. He changed names to try and avoid the blame, but I can't understand why he'd make this at all. My guess is that he was getting his jollies off of people's disgust and disappointment.
I doubt anybody's ever beaten this legitimately. As Dan "The Man" Walma wrote in response to the author's claim that he'd beaten it himself:
I'm pretty sure he is lying like a cow does under the bitter moonlight of January... when the sun shines too slow in the day, and the touch of death lurks in frigid shadows. "Moo", says the cow to the moon, "Moo"... if only he could make an 'en' sound, then at least he could voice his discontent to the heartless glow. He tries to stand up on undernourished legs, but its last vestiges of body heat melted the snow under its craggy, matted belly, and he's frozen to the ground. Lying there, unable to get up under any effort, hoping that someone invents a gentle, cow-proof flamethrower in the next 3 minutes.
That sums up the experience of playing "Bill & Kill" better than I ever could.
On the bright side, this experience is making me feel a lot better about my August 1998 releases. At least I stopped after a month or so.
257: The Legend of the Dink: The Beginning Author: GOKUSSJ6 Release Date: May 21, 2007
"And I f*** pigs! Now I'm really pissed off!"
GOKUSSJ6 is a Polish fellow with a name that takes me back to bygone days when kids seemed to think it was cool to name themselves after a character from Dragon Ball Z and append "SSJ" and some crazy number. "SSJ" stands for "Super Saiya-jin," despite the fact that "Saiyan," a perfectly reasonable English translation, is used in the official localizations of the series and in any halfway sane fan translations. I saw a "SoN GoHaN SSJ9" once. Ah, those bygone days. This is the first of five DMODs from Mr. Goku, all in 2007.
"The Legend of the Dink" ("the" Dink? Is Dink a title now?) is almost as generic as a DMOD can get, starting with Dink getting sent on a mission by King Daniel and ending with a battle against Seth in a different body. Seth, of course, rants in an out-of-character fashion about how Dink only destroyed his body, but not his spirit. Not only is this a lame plot, it's tired. It's been done over and over again.
The only thing that makes this one stand out at all is the letter the King reads to Dink at the start. It's from Seth, under some pseudonym I've already forgotten, and it accuses Dink of what I'm going to call "animal husbandry" (see the header quote if you are confused about what I mean). It was such an obnoxiously stupid joke that I couldn't help but laugh a little.
All you really do in "Legend" is walk from left to right. The town you start in is laid out on a thin horizontal strip. It opens out onto a rather large box-shaped area, but you won't find anything of consequence by exploring around. The map is pretty plain, and when you reach the end of it, the entire right side of the map just cuts off with an invisible wall.
Enjoy this rather odd shelf of bloody objects. It's the most interesting sight in the DMOD.
When you get to Seth, he'll probably destroy you instantly. You could do an awful lot of grinding to beat him, but you're better off finding the secret area. If you walk straight through what looks like a solid treeline at a certain spot, you'll find some powerups. There's no hint leading the player to this; I found out by looking in the editor. Anyway, with the powerups and one elixir from the healing shop, I was able to beat "Seth" at level 2. Killing him doesn't seem to do any good, though, as his soul just escapes again.
It must smell pretty bad in there.
258: Adventures of Dink Smallwood Part 2: The Song of an Ancient Wind (Demo) Author: Lunacre Release Date: May 21, 2007
"Help! The spirits of dead bodies are attacking us!"
This one has an even longer title than the first installment. Good grief.
I had to go back to the 2005 topic and re-read my own writeup in order to remember what AODS Part 1 was about, but it came back to me. Dink went to a town called Rakuna and fought Firamin, the "Ancient of Fire." This time out, he's taking on Aramin, the Ancient of Air. Of course, since this is just a demo, you never actually fight him. It's quite substantial for a demo, though. I ended up spending almost an hour and a half on it.
"Adventures of Dink Smallwood Part 2" begins with a long, mostly silent intro in which Dink decides to just "go for a walk" but ends up walking for thousands of miles and witnessing all kinds of horrible things, all set to whimsical music. I found the contrast kind of amusing. The cutscenes are good throughout the DMOD. Characters move expressively, stopping and turning in a natural way. It reminds me of JRPGs from the SNES/Genesis era.
A nice, relaxing walk. Ah.
At the end of his walk, Dink finds himself trapped on a strange island haunted by ghosts. The ghosts are controlled by a being known as the Spirit King. You start near a small town whose mayor is almost too hospitable to Dink. Amazingly enough, Dink's old neighbor Ethel also lives there.
Hey, what? You can't prove I killed Quackers! As far as you know, I'm as innocent as the driven snow!
Most of the DMOD is spent underground, fighting ghosts. The ghosts are represented by new graphics that look okay, although I've seen better versions.
You ghosts need to come up with more things to say. It's just hard to feel appropriately terrified by such repetitive haunting.
It gets a little tedious fighting screen after screen of the same two types of ghost. There's also an error at the start of this area: you see the entrance blocked off by a big rock and Dink makes a point of saying he'll have to find another way out, but if you leave the screen and return, the rock is gone and you can leave just fine. Anyway, the next section is a little more interesting. Weaponized ghosts fall from the top of the screen, and you have to balance avoiding the ghosts with making it to the end of this section in the allotted time.
When I said, "I wish it would rain spirits," this wasn't what I meant.
When you reach the Spirit King, after plenty of ominous buildup and some minibosses, he reveals his true form: a duck. But this isn't a "Slaughterhouse"-style fakeout: Ducky is a mean fighter.
This is the meanest poultry Smallwood has ever faced.
The Spirit King boss is very easy, and I don't understand why everyone keeps saying that it's hard... whoops, sorry. For a second there, I thought that I was Skull. What I meant to say is that it's basically impossible. The duck moves too fast, does too much touch damage, and is always filling the room with projectiles. Realizing I couldn't win, I went back to the start and got a weapon I had missed, but that only provided an increase of 2 attack. I tried three more times to beat the Spirit King, but finally gave up and cheated up some better stats. I might have kept trying if it weren't for the fact that there isn't a save point anywhere near the boss, and each loss means spending at least several minutes getting back.
When Dink beats the Spirit King, the defeated duck gives Dink an extremely long, expository speech. He tells Dink that he is descended from the Ancients. He tells him that he isn't actually behind the spirits attacking the island. He drops hints about Dink's father and tells Dink to believe in himself and follow his heart. And all the time I can't stop snickering, because these heartfelt words are all coming to me from a headless duck with blood spraying from its neck-hole. What the Hell?
You'd probably think that a boss like that would mark the ending of a demo, but it doesn't. In the next section, Dink is trapped in a haunted village. There's a riddle that tells Dink how to find his way out. It seems like a clever puzzle, but the riddle itself is quite easy to figure out. It speaks of a "green one covered in red and pain" and you can find a tree coated in blood. Okay, but how do you get to it? This is why I got stuck. I scoured the topics about the game, but nobody seemed to have the answer. Eventually, I figured it out myself.
...WHAT?
Oh, come ON.
Yeah, I dunno if I missed something in the riddle, but it seems odd to require the player to examine something that's usually just decoration. Oh well.
So you find your way out of the town, but even that's not the end. The mayor of the first town turns out to be Aramin, and there's a whole section of Dink escaping from his prison. Dink gets out of his cell by constructing an atomic bomb from things he finds lying around. Sure.
Ooh, I love it when they do this. Okay, so "Adventures of Dink Smallwood Part 2" officially takes place in or around Chad.
After escaping, Dink is transported to a snowy land. You wander around a bit there and find another village... and THAT'S where the demo ends. Whew!
There's an alternate ending early on. When you talk to the mayor, the game asks you if you've played "Adventures of Dink Smallwood Part 1." If you say no, it tells you to go play it and kills the game! Then, it asks you if you've beaten it. Again, an answer of "no" ends the game, but you can also select whether you got the good ending or the bad one where Dink joins forces with Firamin. That gets Dink thrown in prison. The game tells you to press ALT+F4 to exit, and there's a long pause... but then the voice of the author shows up. Lunacre admits that he needs Dink, and gives him ridiculous stats to help him escape! I think I like this ending more than the real one.
These are record non-cheating stats. Not even Dinkzilla was this buff.
This one might be a bit overrated. It drags on a bit, and the Spirit King is definitely too hard. I'm not alone on this - I saw several people state that they cheated to get past him even though they didn't want to. It's not a bad effort, though - heck, as of this point it was probably the second-best mod of 2007.
Here's a bit of insider trivia for you. I was shocked when I opened up the story folder for this one and found it full of compiled ".d" files. It was once very common - almost standard practice - to do this to your scripts to prevent people from peeking, but over time, fewer and fewer authors saw any point in doing so. This is the first time I've seen .d scripts since "Quest for the Gems" in May of 2005!
259: Bill & Kill 2: The Unknown Boy Author: Skull Release Date: May 23, 2007
"Yep! We came to kill you!"
REPUTATION NOTE: This DMOD is part of the incredibly select group to have a rating of less than 1.0 (0.3) on The Dink Network.
This title screen makes this DMOD look more exciting than it actually is. It's a screenshot; the map screen used to set it up is still in the DMOD, unused.
Mooo. The cow waves its legs pointlessly, but it can't change its fate. Mooooo.
****This DMOD, "Bill & Kill 2: The Unknown Boy,"*** ********Has been awarded the prestigious********* ****DINK FOREVER MEMORIAL AWARD OF BADNESS***** ********On this day December 8, 2014*********
Again, Skull released this as "Jameil." At this point, Redink1 decided he'd had enough of the charade (read this, it's a hoot).
As for the DMOD, it's the same sort of thing as the first one: A bunch of similar screens full of enemies that are too hard to beat. In this case, they're toned down to the point where I could believe people have legitimately done it, but why would you want to put all that effort into playing this? I didn't hesitate to cheat. This time, the enemies are odd, doll-sized children rather than knights.
Careful, Bill. Kids are dirty fighters.
Notice the white backgrounds? they've all been tiled with the "empty" tile, so they'll display whatever the previous background was - nothing, if you've loaded a game.
There's an actual boss in this one. After you beat him (I cheated again, of course) there's a strange ending in which a couple of old people stumble upon the aftermath of Bill's rampage and say they'll never find him, that he will remain "the unknown boy," hence the title. They say some other things, too, but it's nonsense.
Bill cussed a swear too! These rapscallion adventurers.
It's easy to understand a young person showing up and making some bad DMODs, but as time passes, continuing to release things like this to universal dislike becomes a stranger and stranger thing to do. I find myself coming up with convoluted explanations. Maybe Skull made these mods so poorly under a different name so that "his" DMODs would look better by comparison? But that doesn't make any sense, because the only thing he laid claim to at this point was "Adventures with Jani," a blatant "A Knight's Tale" ripoff. Of course, the truth is simpler: he just wanted to piss people off, a noble and storied motive for many a creative endeavor. Honestly, I think people were more confused than mad.
