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.
079: Stone of Balance Author: Simon Klaebe Release Date: December 2, 2000
REPUTATION NOTE: This DMOD is one of the select group with a score of 9.0 or better (9.4) on The Dink Network.
I remember when "Stone of Balance" came out. It was made available for download in parts on a less than fantastic server, and with everybody trying to download it at once (most people still having 56K modems at this point), I remember people having a really hard time downloading this. The server crashed at one point and for a while, only a few had a complete copy. That is, unless I'm confusing it with something else, which is certainly possible. I am sure that it was hotly anticipated, having been announced quite a long time in advance.
I was mostly out the door of the Dink community at this point, but I did play a little bit of SOB back in the day. I was going to write that I hadn't, but when I saw Dink saying, " They did a bad, bad thing," I knew that I had. I don't think I ever got out of the first section back then, though.
I've never called these things I'm writing "reviews," and there's a good reason for that. I'm writing in a quite literal way about the experiences I have playing these mods, and what they're like for me. Reviews, while obviously being based on the reviewer's subjective opinion, do generally represent an effort to be somewhat objective in evaluating the content of the subject. I'm not really doing that. As I've commented before, my experience can involve a lot of things, down to even my mood at the time. I wanted to establish that so that you understand that when I said I had a better time for the most part with Friends Beyond 3, I'm not actually saying it's better than this one. SOB is definitely a more impressive effort, I did have a good time with it, and if I were reviewing it I'd probably give it a score in line with its current average. But redink1 said "Stone of Balance is a D-Mod you're going to love and hate at the same time," and so it was for me.
I probably shouldn't compare this DMOD to Friends Beyond 3 for a number of reasons, the most important being that the two mods represent two very different approaches to building a game world and a story. Whereas FB3 has a pair of large, open worlds that you move back and forth through, accomplishing various tasks in an order that is sometimes up to you, SOB is a series of scenarios presented in a linear fashion. As I said in my review of Friends Beyond 3, each approach has its strengths, and Stone of Balance is certainly a model for the strengths of the second approach. Moving the player through the story in a linear fashion enables the game to put you on a path with many twists and turns. Everything changes for Dink several times during the story, which can be quite thrilling.
"Stone of Balance" is actually like a collection of different quest-sized DMODs that each have a different theme. It's all unified by Dink's search for the fragments of the Stone of Balance (or, once again, the Chaos Emeralds). It's kind of like the plot of 9 Gems of Life, where Dink is magically sent to each location to retrieve a crystal, except that this game is much better in every imaginable way and actually completes its story. SOB keeps things interesting by repeatedly changing up its formula, though.
You're probably still waiting for me to justify what I said about Friends Beyond 3. Here's what I mean: while I played FB3, my train of thought sounded like this: "Oh, here's another cool thing to do. Gosh, this is fun." In this one, it was more like, "Wow, all this is really impressive... Oh hell, what am I supposed to do now? I've been looking for nearly forty minutes, that's clearly a hint I saw but when I do what they seem to be insinuating it doesn't seem to work. dang it, I'll check the walkthrough again... You're friggin' kidding me, I have to walk all the way back THERE? Oh, and I've permanently missed out on THAT. Great."
Yes, "Stone of Balance" can be a frustrating experience in several different ways. The actual combat gets really tough in places, but I didn't mind that so much. What bugged me was how many times I'd get stuck, and stuck hard. Now, there's a lot of imagination to the various puzzles here, which is good, but I can't help but feel a lot of the time like you'd have to be a goddang mind reader to figure out what Simon was getting at. Fortunately, a thorough walkthrough is included, which is something I recommend all authors do if you think it's remotely possible to get stuck in your DMOD. It reminds me of Phantasy Star II for the Genesis - it's a cool game, but without a guide, it'd be a terrible hassle to muddle your way through, which is why they included one with the original retail release. I think that the inclusion of a guide can in fact affect the quality of a game overall.
Even with the guide, though, I had problems. When using a walkthrough to help me complete a game, I usually just play the game normally and explore for myself, only referring to the guide when I get really confused or stuck. I do NOT recommend playing Stone of Balance that way; I wish I'd stuck to that guide a lot closer than I did for the length of it. Unless you do some mind-reading on the level of that expected of you by that dang Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy text adventure, you're definitely going to end up having permanently missed important things - things like, say, the Hellfire spell, which I restarted an hour in to go back and get. I'm glad I did, because without it the early game would have been stupid hard. Whenever I tried to work things out for myself, I felt like I was getting punished for it. Things like this happen with great frequency in this DMOD.
Those are the reasons why I I'm not sure I'd say this one is a personal favorite of mine, although I wouldn't dispute that this is one of the great DMODs (and believe me, if I thought I should, I would). The quality here is certainly top notch, it's just that there's some design philosophy going on that I'm not thrilled about, and this is totally subjective. If you, unlike me, enjoy getting stuck and potentially missing things, this might be exactly your bag. I just thought I'd get all (well, almost all) of my complaining out of the way up front so I could focus on the many interesting features of this DMOD.
Skull commented that this is the biggest DMOD ever made, and that certainly may be so. My time record of 8:42 from Friends Beyond 3 certainly didn't stand for long, as I spent exactly an hour longer on this one, a mark I'm not sure anything could top given the limitations we're dealing with here (though I only tied my highest-level record of 15). Whereas it's a valid complaint about FB3 that its thousand-plus screens are a bit empty, Simon worked hard to pack SOB's 768 as full as possible - not of sprites, mind you, although this mod does have some nice decoration, but of things to do. Each segment of the game is really packed with events and locations of note.
My favorite thing about Stone of Balance was the imaginative scenario concepts. From a land where all speech must be sung by decree of a queen with a singing jewel to a balls-out insane land of ovary trees and bouncing boob enemies, Simon clearly felt constrained neither by the usual tropes nor by the limits of the Dink Smallwood graphics that most mods work within. "Stone of Balance" is filled with high-quality new, original graphics to a degree that completely blows away anything that came before. I particularly like the desert area with its cactuses and tumbleweeds. And although it's based on recolored sprites, the land of Midas is a sight to behold.
There are also several impressive technical feats going on here. The biggest one is how bugfree the mod is. It's hard enough making a big DMOD that works properly, let alone one as complicated as this. Through many patches (the final release incorporates patch 14b), Stone of Balance has been polished to a striking level of professionalism, which I must applaud. The only major bug I came across was that, if you use the mud item in the desert area, the periodic text that follows can sometimes interrupt a cutscene at a time that will cause a freeze. Apart from that, I experienced no real problems. This DMOD also contains the most impressive magic spell I've yet seen, "translocation." This enables Dink to move to any place on the screen. Now, this is pretty much the same effect achieved by the "Warp to a different spot on the screen" option from the Ultimate Cheat, but to actually work something like that into the design of your DMOD just floors me. The whole reason we feel like we've kept the whole experience from falling apart in the first place is that we've carefully controlled where the player can go, and here's something that lets the player go anywhere. It must have taken very careful design to make the parts of the game where you're able to use this spell stable. There are some spots where you can get stuck this way, but since they're all places you'd definitely be saying "haha, watch me break the game" by trying to warp there, I don't see this as a problem.
Oh, and then there are the riddles. When I saw that screen, I shouted "No ducking way!" out loud. Actual letter-by-letter input! When considering this as a developer, I had personally written this off as basically impossible. Showed me! Of course, this makes the riddles very difficult to solve, or maybe I'm just stupid.
"Stone of Balance" solves the typical problem epics have of the protagonist becoming too powerful in an interesting way. As you enter the later segments, something will happen to badly handicap you, whether it's having all your stuff taken away or having gold become worthless and get replaced by silver coins. It's all justified in the story and works with the episodic feel of the segments. This is smart design.
The story goes back and forth between something you're inclined to take seriously and something you definitely shouldn't. I think that it mostly ended up in the latter category, which is fine, but a few elements in the former demand attention. There's a theme here of questioning to what degree the end justifies the means. Dink, I probably don't have to tell you, is out to save the world from an evil power that threatens utter destruction. When that's your purpose, what is it moral to do toward that end? Anything at all? Well, if you use enough imagination, you could probably come up with something bad enough that you'd rather just let the world end, but let's lower the stakes - how about murdering a few innocent people? You'd have to conclude, logically, that you'd be ethically bound to do that if that's what it took, right?
That raises the question of what's really required, of course, and whether there's a better way. Dink only seems to care about this to a certain point, frankly. In the desert section you end up with quite a bit of blood on your hands, but the really disturbing part comes later. In the "land of reverence," where a sinister church holds absolute power, Dink must bring a sacrifice. There are actually a couple of different things you can do here, and at first I ended up murdering a woman in front of her daughter. Now, this method doesn't work out very well for you either. What you're really supposed to do, though, is still pretty dang bad, involving brutally beating her. Call me crazy, but if I were that little girl I don't think I'd forgive Dink even if he did save the world. What does it mean to be a hero? Maybe more games should take a look at this.
On that zany note, I'd like to talk about this game's sense of humor. As a certain forum denizen would have it, it's very "rude and crude." To be fair, you're warned up front about this, in a screen that explodes with a rather nice effect. Lucky me, I can never again say I haven't seen Dink pissing, holding his dick out, having sex with 13 women at once, or killing a masturbating old man. Yeah, my feelings are kind of mixed about this. There's quite a few moments in the DMOD that I found very funny, from the complaining about having to sing in rhyme all the time in the first part, to the way NPCs often fail to put up with Dink's RPG-protagonist bullshoot. There's an ornery Dink Smallwood-type feel to a lot of the game, which is good. Mr. Klaebe is nearly as clever as he thinks he is, and believe me, that's high praise.
All the crass humor got to be a bit much for me, though, particularly the sexual fixation. I mean, the way practically all the ladies are raring to go with "sex god" Dink was sort of funny at first, but it wears thin quickly, and holy crap, does it get reused a lot here. You know, I was planning to make a certain joke about Dink's focus on getting off and his subsequent ten-second coitus, but to the author's credit, he already made it.
Still, it really comes to a head in the crazy sex-themed segment near the end. Dink comes across a colony of nude women who plan to use a segment of the Stone of Balance as a "fertility crystal" to get pregnant without men's help. Dink must have sex with 13 women at once to impregnate them instead, and in order to manage this he has to gather ingredients for a Viagra potion. Now, you might think I'm a prude, but this kind of storyline makes me cringe when it's used in a porno comic, let alone a video game. The women Dink's supposed to knock up are treated as... no, even cattle are animate... as furniture. I'm not offended, because this stuff is obviously not to be taken seriously, but it was kind of gross and off-putting, and I could've done without it. Oh, and that's not to mention what Dink has to do to make the potion itself. Unspeakable things. Although I will say that if Simon drew the woman-creatures in this segment, I give him a big salute for the art quality.
It's certainly a challenge to the end. A lot of DMODs have a real pushover for a final boss, but the one in this DMOD is crazy hard. It's a Seth-type boss that makes a bunch of annoying regular enemies for you to fight. I had to try about a dozen times before I finally won, but I did beat this whole DMOD without cheating. I guess that final boss would have been easier if I'd gone for those "immunity potions" the guide mentioned. By the way, while I'm comparing Friends Beyond 3 to Stone of Balance, I noticed an odd coincidence: both have a second-to-last boss that consists of three Dink clones.
Stone of Balance is a mod that set some new standards for what you could do with DMODs and proved once again how far you can go with the engine if you're able to put in enough work. You may question what I said earlier about it not being one of my favorites, but I look at it like this: if I were going to list the greatest DMODs, I'd include this one without a doubt, but if I someday wanted to have a great time revisiting DMODs, I wouldn't be in a hurry to pick this one due to some things that kind of bothered me while I was playing it. I might end up picking it anyway, but I wouldn't be in a hurry to.
REPUTATION NOTE: This DMOD is one of the select group with a score of 9.0 or better (9.4) on The Dink Network.
I remember when "Stone of Balance" came out. It was made available for download in parts on a less than fantastic server, and with everybody trying to download it at once (most people still having 56K modems at this point), I remember people having a really hard time downloading this. The server crashed at one point and for a while, only a few had a complete copy. That is, unless I'm confusing it with something else, which is certainly possible. I am sure that it was hotly anticipated, having been announced quite a long time in advance.
I was mostly out the door of the Dink community at this point, but I did play a little bit of SOB back in the day. I was going to write that I hadn't, but when I saw Dink saying, "
I've never called these things I'm writing "reviews," and there's a good reason for that. I'm writing in a quite literal way about the experiences I have playing these mods, and what they're like for me. Reviews, while obviously being based on the reviewer's subjective opinion, do generally represent an effort to be somewhat objective in evaluating the content of the subject. I'm not really doing that. As I've commented before, my experience can involve a lot of things, down to even my mood at the time. I wanted to establish that so that you understand that when I said I had a better time for the most part with Friends Beyond 3, I'm not actually saying it's better than this one. SOB is definitely a more impressive effort, I did have a good time with it, and if I were reviewing it I'd probably give it a score in line with its current average. But redink1 said "Stone of Balance is a D-Mod you're going to love and hate at the same time," and so it was for me.
I probably shouldn't compare this DMOD to Friends Beyond 3 for a number of reasons, the most important being that the two mods represent two very different approaches to building a game world and a story. Whereas FB3 has a pair of large, open worlds that you move back and forth through, accomplishing various tasks in an order that is sometimes up to you, SOB is a series of scenarios presented in a linear fashion. As I said in my review of Friends Beyond 3, each approach has its strengths, and Stone of Balance is certainly a model for the strengths of the second approach. Moving the player through the story in a linear fashion enables the game to put you on a path with many twists and turns. Everything changes for Dink several times during the story, which can be quite thrilling.
"Stone of Balance" is actually like a collection of different quest-sized DMODs that each have a different theme. It's all unified by Dink's search for the fragments of the Stone of Balance (or, once again, the Chaos Emeralds). It's kind of like the plot of 9 Gems of Life, where Dink is magically sent to each location to retrieve a crystal, except that this game is much better in every imaginable way and actually completes its story. SOB keeps things interesting by repeatedly changing up its formula, though.
You're probably still waiting for me to justify what I said about Friends Beyond 3. Here's what I mean: while I played FB3, my train of thought sounded like this: "Oh, here's another cool thing to do. Gosh, this is fun." In this one, it was more like, "Wow, all this is really impressive... Oh hell, what am I supposed to do now? I've been looking for nearly forty minutes, that's clearly a hint I saw but when I do what they seem to be insinuating it doesn't seem to work. dang it, I'll check the walkthrough again... You're friggin' kidding me, I have to walk all the way back THERE? Oh, and I've permanently missed out on THAT. Great."
Yes, "Stone of Balance" can be a frustrating experience in several different ways. The actual combat gets really tough in places, but I didn't mind that so much. What bugged me was how many times I'd get stuck, and stuck hard. Now, there's a lot of imagination to the various puzzles here, which is good, but I can't help but feel a lot of the time like you'd have to be a goddang mind reader to figure out what Simon was getting at. Fortunately, a thorough walkthrough is included, which is something I recommend all authors do if you think it's remotely possible to get stuck in your DMOD. It reminds me of Phantasy Star II for the Genesis - it's a cool game, but without a guide, it'd be a terrible hassle to muddle your way through, which is why they included one with the original retail release. I think that the inclusion of a guide can in fact affect the quality of a game overall.
Even with the guide, though, I had problems. When using a walkthrough to help me complete a game, I usually just play the game normally and explore for myself, only referring to the guide when I get really confused or stuck. I do NOT recommend playing Stone of Balance that way; I wish I'd stuck to that guide a lot closer than I did for the length of it. Unless you do some mind-reading on the level of that expected of you by that dang Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy text adventure, you're definitely going to end up having permanently missed important things - things like, say, the Hellfire spell, which I restarted an hour in to go back and get. I'm glad I did, because without it the early game would have been stupid hard. Whenever I tried to work things out for myself, I felt like I was getting punished for it. Things like this happen with great frequency in this DMOD.
Those are the reasons why I I'm not sure I'd say this one is a personal favorite of mine, although I wouldn't dispute that this is one of the great DMODs (and believe me, if I thought I should, I would). The quality here is certainly top notch, it's just that there's some design philosophy going on that I'm not thrilled about, and this is totally subjective. If you, unlike me, enjoy getting stuck and potentially missing things, this might be exactly your bag. I just thought I'd get all (well, almost all) of my complaining out of the way up front so I could focus on the many interesting features of this DMOD.
Skull commented that this is the biggest DMOD ever made, and that certainly may be so. My time record of 8:42 from Friends Beyond 3 certainly didn't stand for long, as I spent exactly an hour longer on this one, a mark I'm not sure anything could top given the limitations we're dealing with here (though I only tied my highest-level record of 15). Whereas it's a valid complaint about FB3 that its thousand-plus screens are a bit empty, Simon worked hard to pack SOB's 768 as full as possible - not of sprites, mind you, although this mod does have some nice decoration, but of things to do. Each segment of the game is really packed with events and locations of note.
My favorite thing about Stone of Balance was the imaginative scenario concepts. From a land where all speech must be sung by decree of a queen with a singing jewel to a balls-out insane land of ovary trees and bouncing boob enemies, Simon clearly felt constrained neither by the usual tropes nor by the limits of the Dink Smallwood graphics that most mods work within. "Stone of Balance" is filled with high-quality new, original graphics to a degree that completely blows away anything that came before. I particularly like the desert area with its cactuses and tumbleweeds. And although it's based on recolored sprites, the land of Midas is a sight to behold.
There are also several impressive technical feats going on here. The biggest one is how bugfree the mod is. It's hard enough making a big DMOD that works properly, let alone one as complicated as this. Through many patches (the final release incorporates patch 14b), Stone of Balance has been polished to a striking level of professionalism, which I must applaud. The only major bug I came across was that, if you use the mud item in the desert area, the periodic text that follows can sometimes interrupt a cutscene at a time that will cause a freeze. Apart from that, I experienced no real problems. This DMOD also contains the most impressive magic spell I've yet seen, "translocation." This enables Dink to move to any place on the screen. Now, this is pretty much the same effect achieved by the "Warp to a different spot on the screen" option from the Ultimate Cheat, but to actually work something like that into the design of your DMOD just floors me. The whole reason we feel like we've kept the whole experience from falling apart in the first place is that we've carefully controlled where the player can go, and here's something that lets the player go anywhere. It must have taken very careful design to make the parts of the game where you're able to use this spell stable. There are some spots where you can get stuck this way, but since they're all places you'd definitely be saying "haha, watch me break the game" by trying to warp there, I don't see this as a problem.
Oh, and then there are the riddles. When I saw that screen, I shouted "No ducking way!" out loud. Actual letter-by-letter input! When considering this as a developer, I had personally written this off as basically impossible. Showed me! Of course, this makes the riddles very difficult to solve, or maybe I'm just stupid.
"Stone of Balance" solves the typical problem epics have of the protagonist becoming too powerful in an interesting way. As you enter the later segments, something will happen to badly handicap you, whether it's having all your stuff taken away or having gold become worthless and get replaced by silver coins. It's all justified in the story and works with the episodic feel of the segments. This is smart design.
The story goes back and forth between something you're inclined to take seriously and something you definitely shouldn't. I think that it mostly ended up in the latter category, which is fine, but a few elements in the former demand attention. There's a theme here of questioning to what degree the end justifies the means. Dink, I probably don't have to tell you, is out to save the world from an evil power that threatens utter destruction. When that's your purpose, what is it moral to do toward that end? Anything at all? Well, if you use enough imagination, you could probably come up with something bad enough that you'd rather just let the world end, but let's lower the stakes - how about murdering a few innocent people? You'd have to conclude, logically, that you'd be ethically bound to do that if that's what it took, right?
That raises the question of what's really required, of course, and whether there's a better way. Dink only seems to care about this to a certain point, frankly. In the desert section you end up with quite a bit of blood on your hands, but the really disturbing part comes later. In the "land of reverence," where a sinister church holds absolute power, Dink must bring a sacrifice. There are actually a couple of different things you can do here, and at first I ended up murdering a woman in front of her daughter. Now, this method doesn't work out very well for you either. What you're really supposed to do, though, is still pretty dang bad, involving brutally beating her. Call me crazy, but if I were that little girl I don't think I'd forgive Dink even if he did save the world. What does it mean to be a hero? Maybe more games should take a look at this.
On that zany note, I'd like to talk about this game's sense of humor. As a certain forum denizen would have it, it's very "rude and crude." To be fair, you're warned up front about this, in a screen that explodes with a rather nice effect. Lucky me, I can never again say I haven't seen Dink pissing, holding his dick out, having sex with 13 women at once, or killing a masturbating old man. Yeah, my feelings are kind of mixed about this. There's quite a few moments in the DMOD that I found very funny, from the complaining about having to sing in rhyme all the time in the first part, to the way NPCs often fail to put up with Dink's RPG-protagonist bullshoot. There's an ornery Dink Smallwood-type feel to a lot of the game, which is good. Mr. Klaebe is nearly as clever as he thinks he is, and believe me, that's high praise.
All the crass humor got to be a bit much for me, though, particularly the sexual fixation. I mean, the way practically all the ladies are raring to go with "sex god" Dink was sort of funny at first, but it wears thin quickly, and holy crap, does it get reused a lot here. You know, I was planning to make a certain joke about Dink's focus on getting off and his subsequent ten-second coitus, but to the author's credit, he already made it.
Still, it really comes to a head in the crazy sex-themed segment near the end. Dink comes across a colony of nude women who plan to use a segment of the Stone of Balance as a "fertility crystal" to get pregnant without men's help. Dink must have sex with 13 women at once to impregnate them instead, and in order to manage this he has to gather ingredients for a Viagra potion. Now, you might think I'm a prude, but this kind of storyline makes me cringe when it's used in a porno comic, let alone a video game. The women Dink's supposed to knock up are treated as... no, even cattle are animate... as furniture. I'm not offended, because this stuff is obviously not to be taken seriously, but it was kind of gross and off-putting, and I could've done without it. Oh, and that's not to mention what Dink has to do to make the potion itself. Unspeakable things. Although I will say that if Simon drew the woman-creatures in this segment, I give him a big salute for the art quality.
It's certainly a challenge to the end. A lot of DMODs have a real pushover for a final boss, but the one in this DMOD is crazy hard. It's a Seth-type boss that makes a bunch of annoying regular enemies for you to fight. I had to try about a dozen times before I finally won, but I did beat this whole DMOD without cheating. I guess that final boss would have been easier if I'd gone for those "immunity potions" the guide mentioned. By the way, while I'm comparing Friends Beyond 3 to Stone of Balance, I noticed an odd coincidence: both have a second-to-last boss that consists of three Dink clones.
Stone of Balance is a mod that set some new standards for what you could do with DMODs and proved once again how far you can go with the engine if you're able to put in enough work. You may question what I said earlier about it not being one of my favorites, but I look at it like this: if I were going to list the greatest DMODs, I'd include this one without a doubt, but if I someday wanted to have a great time revisiting DMODs, I wouldn't be in a hurry to pick this one due to some things that kind of bothered me while I was playing it. I might end up picking it anyway, but I wouldn't be in a hurry to.
