Reply to Re: Crazy Old Tim plays all the DMODs of 2000
If you don't have an account, just leave the password field blank.
By popular demand, here are a few more.
070: The 9 Gems of Life 2 Authors: Jveenhof, Wolfblitz Release Date: July 8, 2000
"9 Gems 2" is one of the few DMODs to have a modification made for it by somebody else. In 2002 (version 2.3 was released on April 11), Ted Shutes released a modification for this Dink Module, fixing many of the showstopping bugs it had. I tried out the original version, and this was something it badly needed. While its predecessor was certainly very buggy, and there were places you could get permanently stuck, it wasn't so bad that it was hard to get through. This game, on the other hand, is so buggy that I'm not sure it's even possible to finish. Luckily Ted, while not a fan of "9 Gems 2," took the time to fix it enough to make it playable. He said that he "almost despaired at making this dmod stable."
So many DMODs never have their bugs properly fixed, and Ted, a veteran programmer, was the only one to really go back and do this. He also did much-needed work improving the DinkC Reference. Sadly, he died on October 11, 2006 at the age of 56. That might sound old enough to some of you, but my dad is 56. I feel ill just thinking about it.
Anyway, if you want to play "9 Gems 2," install this on top of it. TRUST me, the original is unplayable. I don't know why Jveenhof and Wolfblitz released it like that.
You might recall that I was a surprisingly big fan of the original "9 Gems" (if you don't, just scroll up). It was lazy, sloppy, buggy, and bizarre, but dang it, it was fun. It had lots of personality and a good quest structure. This, on the other hand, is the most pathetic followup I've ever seen. This is a TERRIBLE DMOD. I don't have to qualify that statement in any way, I assure you.
The plot starts off, for some reason, with an old person telling his granddaughter a story about Dink and the 9 gems of life. From there we pick up after the end of the last game. One thing cool this DMOD does is character portraits, which I think is a first. Look at that MS Paint eyepatch! Hilarious.
Link is kidnapped by pirates to be sold into slavery, and you have to fight a goblin. It's a pretty annoying fight due to high defense, but if you think that's bad, you ain't seen nothin' yet. Ted Shutes opined that it was impossible to beat this mod without cheating, and I decided to put that to the test. Was he right? Stay tuned.
Soon, Dink calls on Martridge to teleport him back (if he could do this, why didn't he do it earlier?). Martridge also has a hilarious portrait. From there, Dink is sent to a cave to recover the fifth gem, and this is where this DMOD goes sailing right off the rails.
The cave is a giant, awful maze where everything looks the same and it's hard to tell where you're going because of the teleports all over the place. I'll admit that this isn't THAT bad and that my reactions to the end of the mod are coloring what I say here, but it definitely isn't good. The cave is chock full of purple boncas, and this mod has neglected to fix the INI bug from the original game where the purple boncas can't actually hurt you with their attack, so they flagellate you pointlessly with their big purple rods, boring you to tears.
One kind of cool thing here is the magic. certain rooms award you a magic spell. It's all one magic item, and you select between the spells you've gotten with M (or in my case, the equivalent button on the gamepad). There's the standard fireball, a spell that temporarily boosts attack by 10, a spell that gives you temporary herb boots speed, and a heal spell, although the latter is pretty useless, charging up forever and then healing you something like 3 HP.
There's a warp somewhere in the cave that, with no warning, sends you to a fire-filled room of instant death. I don't know how many times I'd have to bludgeon myself in the temple with the Rod of Greater Stupidity before I'd think randomly killing the player for no reason was a good idea, especially with no save point nearby.
It gets even worse when you get out of the cave. You have to fight a purple bonca that has 200 HP and 10 defense (I guarantee your attack at this point is under 10 when you're not using the strength spell). After grinding my way through that, I sure hated this game... only to find there are THREE MORE of them, each on their own screen. They can't really attack you, true, but their touch damage is very high, so you can really only take two hits. This might be the single worst stretch of play I've seen in any DMOD. I mean, look at this nonsense. I've never had less fun playing Dink Smallwood. All told, this took me like forty minutes!
Whatever, I don't care anymore. Dink gets the fifth gem of life (remember them?). Then, there's a adventure-gamey segment on the pirate ship as Link. It's short and simple, but I liked it and it single-handedly saved this disappointment from the Award of Badness. There's even a fantastic joke.
"Where'd you get that wooden leg?"
"I was thrown into a school of sharks!"
"Where'd you get that hook?"
"I was swordfighting and me enemy cut off me hand."
"Where'd you get that eyepatch?"
"A seagull dropping fell in me eye."
"You lost your eye from that?"
"It was my first day with the hook."
The change to Link (and to a maiden he disguises himself as briefly) isn't complete, by the way - you still have the "non costumed dink" fist, and if you equip it and punch, you turn into Dink for the duration of the punch. This is pretty funny to watch.
After that, though, you must suffer the crowning moment of this DMOD's failure to be fun or even playable: the last boss. Ted Shutes is right, you can't win without cheating. He's got 300 HP and his defense is higher than your attack even with the strength spell on! He also does enough touch damage to kill you in one hit. He seems to heal himself at random, but I looked at the script and somehow, I doubt the line, "&sp_hitpoints += 20;" actually does anything at all, since no variable by that name seems to be initiated anywhere. You simply can't win. I cheated, raising Dink's stats by 10, which was good enough because they didn't account for your magic being high enough to cast the strength spell before the last one has worn off, and you can just keep on raising your attack.
Once you've cheated your way through that, it comes to a sudden end, and you're left there shocked, wondering, "what in the Hell did I just play?" It would be extremely short if those battles weren't drawn out so much. This should not exist. I am seriously left wondering if this was released as a prank. I mean, there's cases where the author didn't know what they were doing, and then there's stuff like this, where there's simply no way they could have thought they'd done it right. I have no way of explaining this DMOD at all. I'm really disappointed after the fun I had with the first part.
071: Friends Beyond 2: Branches of Destiny Author: Wesley McElwee Release Date: July 8, 2000
Believe it or not, my own Crossroads trailer won Download of the Month against these July DMODs. I can't say I'm surprised in regards to 9gems2, but this one should have won.
Ted Shutes made a patch for this mod in 2002 as well. In additon to fixing the bugs, however, this patch goes a little farther and does some rewriting, making my choice tougher. It's not hard to say, "I should go with the less buggy version," but writing is more subjective. Going over Ted's description of what he changed, some of the changes sound to be very much for the best - FB2 was a DMOD with many interesting choices to make, but all but one path led you inevitably to a bad ending, which hardly seems fair. On the other hand, Ted didn't seem to understand why anybody would want a challenging time, which I don't really agree with.
I ended up playing quite a bit of the original version as well as the patched version because I didn't copy the patch correctly on my first try (the original mod has .d files, so the .c files in the patch won't overwrite them). As such, I can say with confidence that Ted's version is better and you should play it. In fact, I'm just going to do this with all his patches from now on. If nothing else, it's much less buggy, and the bugs it gets rid of are real showstoppers. In the original version, making the "wrong" decisions won't just lead to a bad ending, they'll lead to a broken game as well.
"Friends Beyond 2" (check out that title screen. I guess that WAS Dink in Between the Shadows) is a very interesting DMOD that tries some new things. As such, I'd love to give it a really enthusiastic writeup (especially with all the sour grapes I've been handing out lately). Unfortunately, it's got some major problems that make it a frustrating experience.
FB2 finds Dink in a new land threatened by the evil mage girl from the original (it turns out her name is Tenjin - yes, the first one was so thin on plot we never even learned her name). Dink has the opportunity to make some decisions that will lead him down alternate paths. This is the first time this sort of thing has really been done in a DMOD, so that's pretty exciting. The main choice involves going to one of two different locations which will result in a "fighter" path or a "magic" path. In the original version, the magic path always lead to a bad ending, but in this one, either path is valid.
There's actually a different branch early on. There are two mines you can enter and save someone from a monster, but if you save the wrong person, you end up on a rather short path to a bad ending. The Chevy Chase Show? How could she be so heartless?!
The different paths come to the same ending area, but apart from that their content is entirely exclusive. Each path has a LOT of content to itself - enough to make up its own Quest-sized DMOD, easily. I was pretty impressed by this, since DMODs (and heck, games in general) are usually too afraid to hide anything back from us on a single playthrough. This is like two DMODs in one. What's more, the two paths form different sides of one coherent story. The "Fighter" Dink finds himself in an underground human village; threatened by the cold from the surface, they need to go deeper, but they risk war with the monsters who live there. As "magician" Dink, you go to the monster village and learn that the monsters are themselves in hiding from the humans, who have nearly wiped them out. On both paths, you learn that the sides are on the brink of war, and in helping the group you've found yourself among, you prevent it. It's a long way from the barely-there story in FB1, I can tell you!
Actually, the writing here is pretty solid. Though the dialogue is a bit simplistic, it deals with some potent themes. Dink wonders what the point is in trying to be a hero when someone he cares about always dies, and he learns that trying has its own value. You can see the motivations on both sides of the conflict, and even Tenjin herself has a tragic past that motivates her evil actions.
Another cool thing in this DMOD is the final area, where you fight a bunch of bosses around a little hub. Which bosses you fight depends upon how far along in the story you are when you choose to go there.
That's all quite nifty, so what's wrong? Well, first of all, this is one of the worst cases of Big Empty Map Syndrome I've ever come across. Nearly every screen Dink allows for is used, but many are just empty grass screens with a couple of trees and/or rocks. It's easy to spend a lot of time wandering around lost before you get your bearings, and it's not fun. It all looks the same. Some screens are pretty much totally empty (this sort of state is why I'm having leprochaun detail the maps for Malachi the Jerk). Also, some spots look... odd.
Now, there are some neat puzzles. One involves these amusing faces on the map, and another has a cave where each room you enter performs a mathematical operation upon a number. You have to go through the right rooms to get the number to a certain value.
Unfortunately, even Ted's version still has some nasty bugs. There's a place where you have to fight a bunch of really tough monsters without the ability to heal or save... I gave it an honest shot, but it turned out that one of the fights was complete and total bullshoot (tough bonca with just a tiny corner of the screen to fight in), and I lost. When I loaded my save, the whole segment would no longer work at all, and I was forced to cheat with the console and advance &story.
Furthermore, the balancing is not good. I don't know how Ted's playtest must have gone that he thought the fights were now pushovers; they are actually extremely difficult later on. Some fall under the same "Oh God, will this ever end" category as 9 Gems 2 - by the way, this DMOD also loves those purple boncas, and also hasn't taken the time to fix the bug where their attack doesn't work (it's not that hard to fix!), but at least this one seems to have made it so they almost never attack. Anyway, what really drags this DMOD down for me is the final boss. My stats were 68 attack with the light sword, 11 defense and 52 magic, with 140 HP. Even with those, I couldn't even beat her FIRST form... out of FOUR. I can't imagine what I might have done differently so this would have been possible. I had no choice but to cheat a LOT. The magic form ends up weaker even with Ted's attempts to balance it - even the hellfire spam you get ends up not being terribly useful against the end boss. It's all a real frustrating shame.
If you REALLY want to win without cheating (best of luck to you) save up lots and lots of gold before you go to the final hall. This won't be easy, because most enemies drop tiny amounts of gold, and when I say lots, I mean it has to be several tens of thousands to make any difference.
After you defeat Tenjin, there is a shockingly long ending. This DMOD isn't the first to have some neat cutscenes, but even ambitious mods like POTA have always had pretty short endings thus far. Hell, remember the "ending" of the original game? Yikes. You tend to just run out of development steam at that point and just put the minimal effort into getting it done, but not here. Dink visits everyone he met in the game (on both paths, oddly enough) and even some people from FB1. There's some fairly heavy discussion about the nature of evil - an intelligent goblin opines to Dink, "Everyone needs something to believe in. Some people just choose the wrong things." I actually felt kind of satisfied despite what an aggravating mess my actual play experience had been toward the end.
I would say that this game is worth experiencing, but be prepared to have no qualms at all about cheating. Unfortunately, this is another one in the "really interesting, but pointedly flawed" bunch.
072: Dink X Trivia Author: Jveenhof Release Date: August 7, 2000
I remember this one. I played it when it came out and had a nice chuckle.
This is an extremely simple trivia game created to promote a new website at the time called "Dink X Productions." It really could have used some polish. There's no scoring system or anything, and no graphics. Some of the questions are quite obscure, being about little-known fansites, and others are unknowable to anybody who wasn't around at the time. I got a perfect on the "DMODs" category, obviously, even though some questions were subjective ("which DMOD is considered the funniest?"). There's a question about me ("which DMOD author is known as Coconut Monkey?") in the "People" category.
Generally, the mod just says "Correct" if you get a question right and "Wrong" if you get it wrong, although there are a few comments for certain wrong answers, like Jveenhof proclaiming, "C'mon me and Tal are like God and Satan" if you suggest they collaborated on his website. There are no reactions to doing well or poorly, however, which really seems like the least you could have done to make this kind of entertaining. At least the MIDI selections are fantastic.
The only point of this is a bit of nostalgia. Anybody who wasn't around at the time will be totally lost, especially by mentions of lost DMODs (Spawn, Dink Logan) and ones that never really existed at all (The Fountain of Youth).
Finally, this monumental task is a bit closer to being done. Take that, people I just invented in my imagination who said I'd never get back to this. Now there's just... 268 left? Oh my, that's a lot of DMODs. If you want to keep me at this forever, release more of them. Anything released before I finish is officially part of the project.
In the future, would you rather see shorter, more frequent updates (Hell, I could do one at a time), or longer, rarer ones?
070: The 9 Gems of Life 2 Authors: Jveenhof, Wolfblitz Release Date: July 8, 2000
"9 Gems 2" is one of the few DMODs to have a modification made for it by somebody else. In 2002 (version 2.3 was released on April 11), Ted Shutes released a modification for this Dink Module, fixing many of the showstopping bugs it had. I tried out the original version, and this was something it badly needed. While its predecessor was certainly very buggy, and there were places you could get permanently stuck, it wasn't so bad that it was hard to get through. This game, on the other hand, is so buggy that I'm not sure it's even possible to finish. Luckily Ted, while not a fan of "9 Gems 2," took the time to fix it enough to make it playable. He said that he "almost despaired at making this dmod stable."
So many DMODs never have their bugs properly fixed, and Ted, a veteran programmer, was the only one to really go back and do this. He also did much-needed work improving the DinkC Reference. Sadly, he died on October 11, 2006 at the age of 56. That might sound old enough to some of you, but my dad is 56. I feel ill just thinking about it.
Anyway, if you want to play "9 Gems 2," install this on top of it. TRUST me, the original is unplayable. I don't know why Jveenhof and Wolfblitz released it like that.
You might recall that I was a surprisingly big fan of the original "9 Gems" (if you don't, just scroll up). It was lazy, sloppy, buggy, and bizarre, but dang it, it was fun. It had lots of personality and a good quest structure. This, on the other hand, is the most pathetic followup I've ever seen. This is a TERRIBLE DMOD. I don't have to qualify that statement in any way, I assure you.
The plot starts off, for some reason, with an old person telling his granddaughter a story about Dink and the 9 gems of life. From there we pick up after the end of the last game. One thing cool this DMOD does is character portraits, which I think is a first. Look at that MS Paint eyepatch! Hilarious.
Link is kidnapped by pirates to be sold into slavery, and you have to fight a goblin. It's a pretty annoying fight due to high defense, but if you think that's bad, you ain't seen nothin' yet. Ted Shutes opined that it was impossible to beat this mod without cheating, and I decided to put that to the test. Was he right? Stay tuned.
Soon, Dink calls on Martridge to teleport him back (if he could do this, why didn't he do it earlier?). Martridge also has a hilarious portrait. From there, Dink is sent to a cave to recover the fifth gem, and this is where this DMOD goes sailing right off the rails.
The cave is a giant, awful maze where everything looks the same and it's hard to tell where you're going because of the teleports all over the place. I'll admit that this isn't THAT bad and that my reactions to the end of the mod are coloring what I say here, but it definitely isn't good. The cave is chock full of purple boncas, and this mod has neglected to fix the INI bug from the original game where the purple boncas can't actually hurt you with their attack, so they flagellate you pointlessly with their big purple rods, boring you to tears.
One kind of cool thing here is the magic. certain rooms award you a magic spell. It's all one magic item, and you select between the spells you've gotten with M (or in my case, the equivalent button on the gamepad). There's the standard fireball, a spell that temporarily boosts attack by 10, a spell that gives you temporary herb boots speed, and a heal spell, although the latter is pretty useless, charging up forever and then healing you something like 3 HP.
There's a warp somewhere in the cave that, with no warning, sends you to a fire-filled room of instant death. I don't know how many times I'd have to bludgeon myself in the temple with the Rod of Greater Stupidity before I'd think randomly killing the player for no reason was a good idea, especially with no save point nearby.
It gets even worse when you get out of the cave. You have to fight a purple bonca that has 200 HP and 10 defense (I guarantee your attack at this point is under 10 when you're not using the strength spell). After grinding my way through that, I sure hated this game... only to find there are THREE MORE of them, each on their own screen. They can't really attack you, true, but their touch damage is very high, so you can really only take two hits. This might be the single worst stretch of play I've seen in any DMOD. I mean, look at this nonsense. I've never had less fun playing Dink Smallwood. All told, this took me like forty minutes!
Whatever, I don't care anymore. Dink gets the fifth gem of life (remember them?). Then, there's a adventure-gamey segment on the pirate ship as Link. It's short and simple, but I liked it and it single-handedly saved this disappointment from the Award of Badness. There's even a fantastic joke.
"Where'd you get that wooden leg?"
"I was thrown into a school of sharks!"
"Where'd you get that hook?"
"I was swordfighting and me enemy cut off me hand."
"Where'd you get that eyepatch?"
"A seagull dropping fell in me eye."
"You lost your eye from that?"
"It was my first day with the hook."
The change to Link (and to a maiden he disguises himself as briefly) isn't complete, by the way - you still have the "non costumed dink" fist, and if you equip it and punch, you turn into Dink for the duration of the punch. This is pretty funny to watch.
After that, though, you must suffer the crowning moment of this DMOD's failure to be fun or even playable: the last boss. Ted Shutes is right, you can't win without cheating. He's got 300 HP and his defense is higher than your attack even with the strength spell on! He also does enough touch damage to kill you in one hit. He seems to heal himself at random, but I looked at the script and somehow, I doubt the line, "&sp_hitpoints += 20;" actually does anything at all, since no variable by that name seems to be initiated anywhere. You simply can't win. I cheated, raising Dink's stats by 10, which was good enough because they didn't account for your magic being high enough to cast the strength spell before the last one has worn off, and you can just keep on raising your attack.
Once you've cheated your way through that, it comes to a sudden end, and you're left there shocked, wondering, "what in the Hell did I just play?" It would be extremely short if those battles weren't drawn out so much. This should not exist. I am seriously left wondering if this was released as a prank. I mean, there's cases where the author didn't know what they were doing, and then there's stuff like this, where there's simply no way they could have thought they'd done it right. I have no way of explaining this DMOD at all. I'm really disappointed after the fun I had with the first part.
071: Friends Beyond 2: Branches of Destiny Author: Wesley McElwee Release Date: July 8, 2000
Believe it or not, my own Crossroads trailer won Download of the Month against these July DMODs. I can't say I'm surprised in regards to 9gems2, but this one should have won.
Ted Shutes made a patch for this mod in 2002 as well. In additon to fixing the bugs, however, this patch goes a little farther and does some rewriting, making my choice tougher. It's not hard to say, "I should go with the less buggy version," but writing is more subjective. Going over Ted's description of what he changed, some of the changes sound to be very much for the best - FB2 was a DMOD with many interesting choices to make, but all but one path led you inevitably to a bad ending, which hardly seems fair. On the other hand, Ted didn't seem to understand why anybody would want a challenging time, which I don't really agree with.
I ended up playing quite a bit of the original version as well as the patched version because I didn't copy the patch correctly on my first try (the original mod has .d files, so the .c files in the patch won't overwrite them). As such, I can say with confidence that Ted's version is better and you should play it. In fact, I'm just going to do this with all his patches from now on. If nothing else, it's much less buggy, and the bugs it gets rid of are real showstoppers. In the original version, making the "wrong" decisions won't just lead to a bad ending, they'll lead to a broken game as well.
"Friends Beyond 2" (check out that title screen. I guess that WAS Dink in Between the Shadows) is a very interesting DMOD that tries some new things. As such, I'd love to give it a really enthusiastic writeup (especially with all the sour grapes I've been handing out lately). Unfortunately, it's got some major problems that make it a frustrating experience.
FB2 finds Dink in a new land threatened by the evil mage girl from the original (it turns out her name is Tenjin - yes, the first one was so thin on plot we never even learned her name). Dink has the opportunity to make some decisions that will lead him down alternate paths. This is the first time this sort of thing has really been done in a DMOD, so that's pretty exciting. The main choice involves going to one of two different locations which will result in a "fighter" path or a "magic" path. In the original version, the magic path always lead to a bad ending, but in this one, either path is valid.
There's actually a different branch early on. There are two mines you can enter and save someone from a monster, but if you save the wrong person, you end up on a rather short path to a bad ending. The Chevy Chase Show? How could she be so heartless?!
The different paths come to the same ending area, but apart from that their content is entirely exclusive. Each path has a LOT of content to itself - enough to make up its own Quest-sized DMOD, easily. I was pretty impressed by this, since DMODs (and heck, games in general) are usually too afraid to hide anything back from us on a single playthrough. This is like two DMODs in one. What's more, the two paths form different sides of one coherent story. The "Fighter" Dink finds himself in an underground human village; threatened by the cold from the surface, they need to go deeper, but they risk war with the monsters who live there. As "magician" Dink, you go to the monster village and learn that the monsters are themselves in hiding from the humans, who have nearly wiped them out. On both paths, you learn that the sides are on the brink of war, and in helping the group you've found yourself among, you prevent it. It's a long way from the barely-there story in FB1, I can tell you!
Actually, the writing here is pretty solid. Though the dialogue is a bit simplistic, it deals with some potent themes. Dink wonders what the point is in trying to be a hero when someone he cares about always dies, and he learns that trying has its own value. You can see the motivations on both sides of the conflict, and even Tenjin herself has a tragic past that motivates her evil actions.
Another cool thing in this DMOD is the final area, where you fight a bunch of bosses around a little hub. Which bosses you fight depends upon how far along in the story you are when you choose to go there.
That's all quite nifty, so what's wrong? Well, first of all, this is one of the worst cases of Big Empty Map Syndrome I've ever come across. Nearly every screen Dink allows for is used, but many are just empty grass screens with a couple of trees and/or rocks. It's easy to spend a lot of time wandering around lost before you get your bearings, and it's not fun. It all looks the same. Some screens are pretty much totally empty (this sort of state is why I'm having leprochaun detail the maps for Malachi the Jerk). Also, some spots look... odd.
Now, there are some neat puzzles. One involves these amusing faces on the map, and another has a cave where each room you enter performs a mathematical operation upon a number. You have to go through the right rooms to get the number to a certain value.
Unfortunately, even Ted's version still has some nasty bugs. There's a place where you have to fight a bunch of really tough monsters without the ability to heal or save... I gave it an honest shot, but it turned out that one of the fights was complete and total bullshoot (tough bonca with just a tiny corner of the screen to fight in), and I lost. When I loaded my save, the whole segment would no longer work at all, and I was forced to cheat with the console and advance &story.
Furthermore, the balancing is not good. I don't know how Ted's playtest must have gone that he thought the fights were now pushovers; they are actually extremely difficult later on. Some fall under the same "Oh God, will this ever end" category as 9 Gems 2 - by the way, this DMOD also loves those purple boncas, and also hasn't taken the time to fix the bug where their attack doesn't work (it's not that hard to fix!), but at least this one seems to have made it so they almost never attack. Anyway, what really drags this DMOD down for me is the final boss. My stats were 68 attack with the light sword, 11 defense and 52 magic, with 140 HP. Even with those, I couldn't even beat her FIRST form... out of FOUR. I can't imagine what I might have done differently so this would have been possible. I had no choice but to cheat a LOT. The magic form ends up weaker even with Ted's attempts to balance it - even the hellfire spam you get ends up not being terribly useful against the end boss. It's all a real frustrating shame.
If you REALLY want to win without cheating (best of luck to you) save up lots and lots of gold before you go to the final hall. This won't be easy, because most enemies drop tiny amounts of gold, and when I say lots, I mean it has to be several tens of thousands to make any difference.
After you defeat Tenjin, there is a shockingly long ending. This DMOD isn't the first to have some neat cutscenes, but even ambitious mods like POTA have always had pretty short endings thus far. Hell, remember the "ending" of the original game? Yikes. You tend to just run out of development steam at that point and just put the minimal effort into getting it done, but not here. Dink visits everyone he met in the game (on both paths, oddly enough) and even some people from FB1. There's some fairly heavy discussion about the nature of evil - an intelligent goblin opines to Dink, "Everyone needs something to believe in. Some people just choose the wrong things." I actually felt kind of satisfied despite what an aggravating mess my actual play experience had been toward the end.
I would say that this game is worth experiencing, but be prepared to have no qualms at all about cheating. Unfortunately, this is another one in the "really interesting, but pointedly flawed" bunch.
072: Dink X Trivia Author: Jveenhof Release Date: August 7, 2000
I remember this one. I played it when it came out and had a nice chuckle.
This is an extremely simple trivia game created to promote a new website at the time called "Dink X Productions." It really could have used some polish. There's no scoring system or anything, and no graphics. Some of the questions are quite obscure, being about little-known fansites, and others are unknowable to anybody who wasn't around at the time. I got a perfect on the "DMODs" category, obviously, even though some questions were subjective ("which DMOD is considered the funniest?"). There's a question about me ("which DMOD author is known as Coconut Monkey?") in the "People" category.
Generally, the mod just says "Correct" if you get a question right and "Wrong" if you get it wrong, although there are a few comments for certain wrong answers, like Jveenhof proclaiming, "C'mon me and Tal are like God and Satan" if you suggest they collaborated on his website. There are no reactions to doing well or poorly, however, which really seems like the least you could have done to make this kind of entertaining. At least the MIDI selections are fantastic.
The only point of this is a bit of nostalgia. Anybody who wasn't around at the time will be totally lost, especially by mentions of lost DMODs (Spawn, Dink Logan) and ones that never really existed at all (The Fountain of Youth).
Finally, this monumental task is a bit closer to being done. Take that, people I just invented in my imagination who said I'd never get back to this. Now there's just... 268 left? Oh my, that's a lot of DMODs. If you want to keep me at this forever, release more of them. Anything released before I finish is officially part of the project.
In the future, would you rather see shorter, more frequent updates (Hell, I could do one at a time), or longer, rarer ones?
