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314: Forest of Doom Author: ToKu Release Date: May 31, 2010
"Our Warhammer is gone. We are doomed if we do not find it."
"Forest of Doom" is a fairly big D-Mod that clearly has a lot of effort behind it, but I couldn't get into it at all and gave up fairly quickly. I'm sorry. I've made a pretty serious effort overall to get through each D-Mod, but I took a few cracks at this one and realized that if I forced myself through it, I was going to have a very frustrating time. Again, I feel I must point out that I never promised I'd beat all of 'em. Sorry.
The story and many gameplay elements are taken from the "adventure gamebook" The Forest of Doom by Ian Livingstone, originally released in 1983. A digitized and automated version of the book is available on Steam, if you're interested. Gamebooks are books which provide a sort of adventure game for the reader. You make decisions by turning to different pages as directed (like in the Choose Your Own Adventure series), combat and other matters of chance are typically handled by dice, and you keep track of conditions and inventory with a piece of paper and a pencil. From what I've heard, The Forest of Doom is full of the sort of trial-and-error traps that I find so annoying in gamebooks, and succeeding is a matter of having very good luck.
The traps may be annoying in a gamebook, but they are somewhat tolerable because you know that's the sort of thing you're getting into. Anyway, if something puts you out TOO much, in a gamebook it's only a matter of deciding to ignore your misfortune if you feel like cheating. When these same kinds of traps are shifted to a D-Mod, they progress from annoying to infuriating. "Forest of Doom" is full of places where you can decide to take some kind of action - say, sitting on a chair when Dink says, "Ah, a chair. I need a rest." You have no way of knowing what the outcome of these decisions will be - putting on this bracelet raises your defense, but putting on that ring leaves you with permanently slow movement. Sitting in the chair I mentioned lowers your stats, by the way, because that's a thing that sitting for a moment does. It seems like the bad outcomes outweigh the good, so you're probably better off avoiding these events when you're given a choice.
No! You fool!
There is a shop with a long list of items that can rescue you from some bad situations if you happen to have them, but there's no way to know which ones you're going to need, and buying the lot of them would be prohibitively expensive.
A list of the special items you can acquire in "Forest of Doom."
The story involves a dwarven kingdom that has lost a special warhammer that's incredibly important for some reason. To win, you have to find both parts of the warhammer - handle and head - and return them to the King. The dialogue is mostly stiff and seems like it should be coming from an dispassionate narrator rather than from Dink's mouth. The D-Mod just kind of casts you out into the forest without giving you any idea of what you should be doing apart from the "get the hammer parts" directive, and I never got close to finding either part (then again, I gave up about half an hour in). Just as bad a problem as your cluelessness is the fact that the enemies are too hard. Spiders pop out of what appear to be ordinary trees and damage you as you're just walking through the forest, and those are the easiest enemies around. I could hardly damage the great majority of enemies at all without cheating. Although you can get around this problem by cheating, that isn't much fun, and the unbalanced enemies contributed greatly to my overall frustration. You can't get around this problem by grinding, because enemies don't come back after being killed. The author says that he dislikes the idea of grinding because "getting too strong too soon goes against the story." I have problems with this statement and they begin with the fact that I'm playing a damn RPG.
There are also some lovely bugs for you to enjoy. Stat potions have a new collecting animation that looks pretty, but it takes a while, and the defense potion awards you its bonus before the animation is done. This means that you can collect the potion, leave the screen, and return to collect it again as many times as you like if you hurry. At the start you're boxed into a relatively small area with a message that causes Dink to turn around, but it IS possible to get out, and once you do, it isn't possible to get back in. I did manage to get to the entrance to the Dwarf Kingdom, and you're asked to enter a code using the number pad and the End key, but these did nothing. Therefore, even if I had stuck it out, winning without cheating would have been impossible for me.
Not that I know what "parole for 16" means anyway.
This D-Mod contains a huge number of new graphics. In addition to some graphics from packs on the Dink Network, there are a lot of graphics that have never been used in a D-Mod before. These are apparently taken from some website rather than made by the author, but they're new to Dink. The new graphics are the same sort of isometric-perspective 3D graphics as the Dink graphics. Some of them fit in very well, but many don't because the colors used are so different from anything else in the game.
Actually, the author adds so many new enemies that he couldn't find sequence numbers for them all in the dink.ini file. He works around this by loading the graphics when you walk onto certain screens; unfortunately, this adds loading times to those screens that can get pretty horrendous - I'm talking about waiting more than ten seconds during a screen transition here.
Bats!
Most of the buildings don't fit in Dink's world due to garish colors that are outside the Dink palette.
I'd have more examples of the graphics, but for some reason, some of them just wouldn't show up in my screenshots. In the game, I could see a pack of wild dogs or a rock monster, but in my screenshots they're invisible and Dink is fighting the air. It's too bad - this happened to some of the best new graphics. I guess those dogs were actually vampire dogs, which explains why they're so hard to hurt. Some of these graphics really look good, so it might be worth checking the D-Mod out for that reason alone.
"Our Warhammer is gone. We are doomed if we do not find it."
"Forest of Doom" is a fairly big D-Mod that clearly has a lot of effort behind it, but I couldn't get into it at all and gave up fairly quickly. I'm sorry. I've made a pretty serious effort overall to get through each D-Mod, but I took a few cracks at this one and realized that if I forced myself through it, I was going to have a very frustrating time. Again, I feel I must point out that I never promised I'd beat all of 'em. Sorry.
The story and many gameplay elements are taken from the "adventure gamebook" The Forest of Doom by Ian Livingstone, originally released in 1983. A digitized and automated version of the book is available on Steam, if you're interested. Gamebooks are books which provide a sort of adventure game for the reader. You make decisions by turning to different pages as directed (like in the Choose Your Own Adventure series), combat and other matters of chance are typically handled by dice, and you keep track of conditions and inventory with a piece of paper and a pencil. From what I've heard, The Forest of Doom is full of the sort of trial-and-error traps that I find so annoying in gamebooks, and succeeding is a matter of having very good luck.
The traps may be annoying in a gamebook, but they are somewhat tolerable because you know that's the sort of thing you're getting into. Anyway, if something puts you out TOO much, in a gamebook it's only a matter of deciding to ignore your misfortune if you feel like cheating. When these same kinds of traps are shifted to a D-Mod, they progress from annoying to infuriating. "Forest of Doom" is full of places where you can decide to take some kind of action - say, sitting on a chair when Dink says, "Ah, a chair. I need a rest." You have no way of knowing what the outcome of these decisions will be - putting on this bracelet raises your defense, but putting on that ring leaves you with permanently slow movement. Sitting in the chair I mentioned lowers your stats, by the way, because that's a thing that sitting for a moment does. It seems like the bad outcomes outweigh the good, so you're probably better off avoiding these events when you're given a choice.
No! You fool!
There is a shop with a long list of items that can rescue you from some bad situations if you happen to have them, but there's no way to know which ones you're going to need, and buying the lot of them would be prohibitively expensive.
A list of the special items you can acquire in "Forest of Doom."
The story involves a dwarven kingdom that has lost a special warhammer that's incredibly important for some reason. To win, you have to find both parts of the warhammer - handle and head - and return them to the King. The dialogue is mostly stiff and seems like it should be coming from an dispassionate narrator rather than from Dink's mouth. The D-Mod just kind of casts you out into the forest without giving you any idea of what you should be doing apart from the "get the hammer parts" directive, and I never got close to finding either part (then again, I gave up about half an hour in). Just as bad a problem as your cluelessness is the fact that the enemies are too hard. Spiders pop out of what appear to be ordinary trees and damage you as you're just walking through the forest, and those are the easiest enemies around. I could hardly damage the great majority of enemies at all without cheating. Although you can get around this problem by cheating, that isn't much fun, and the unbalanced enemies contributed greatly to my overall frustration. You can't get around this problem by grinding, because enemies don't come back after being killed. The author says that he dislikes the idea of grinding because "getting too strong too soon goes against the story." I have problems with this statement and they begin with the fact that I'm playing a damn RPG.
There are also some lovely bugs for you to enjoy. Stat potions have a new collecting animation that looks pretty, but it takes a while, and the defense potion awards you its bonus before the animation is done. This means that you can collect the potion, leave the screen, and return to collect it again as many times as you like if you hurry. At the start you're boxed into a relatively small area with a message that causes Dink to turn around, but it IS possible to get out, and once you do, it isn't possible to get back in. I did manage to get to the entrance to the Dwarf Kingdom, and you're asked to enter a code using the number pad and the End key, but these did nothing. Therefore, even if I had stuck it out, winning without cheating would have been impossible for me.
Not that I know what "parole for 16" means anyway.
This D-Mod contains a huge number of new graphics. In addition to some graphics from packs on the Dink Network, there are a lot of graphics that have never been used in a D-Mod before. These are apparently taken from some website rather than made by the author, but they're new to Dink. The new graphics are the same sort of isometric-perspective 3D graphics as the Dink graphics. Some of them fit in very well, but many don't because the colors used are so different from anything else in the game.
Actually, the author adds so many new enemies that he couldn't find sequence numbers for them all in the dink.ini file. He works around this by loading the graphics when you walk onto certain screens; unfortunately, this adds loading times to those screens that can get pretty horrendous - I'm talking about waiting more than ten seconds during a screen transition here.
Bats!
Most of the buildings don't fit in Dink's world due to garish colors that are outside the Dink palette.
I'd have more examples of the graphics, but for some reason, some of them just wouldn't show up in my screenshots. In the game, I could see a pack of wild dogs or a rock monster, but in my screenshots they're invisible and Dink is fighting the air. It's too bad - this happened to some of the best new graphics. I guess those dogs were actually vampire dogs, which explains why they're so hard to hurt. Some of these graphics really look good, so it might be worth checking the D-Mod out for that reason alone.
