Reply to Re: Crazy Old Tim Plays all the DMODs of 2001
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100: The Legend of the Duck Authors: Chris McNeely, Ted Shutes Release Date: May 24, 2001
ONE! HUNDRED! DMODS!
But before I talk about that, let's talk about Legend of the Duck. I had a pretty okay time with it, but as I've discussed before, that has a lot to do with my mood, and my life is sad enough that this feels like an accomplishment.
This is the only DMOD credited to Ted Shutes, but in fact, his work on this is just another bugfixing patch like his patches for 9 gems 2, Friends Beyond 2 and 3, and Birth of an Empire; the only difference here is that the patch has been merged into the main release of the DMOD itself with the author's permission. Aside from map problems (which Ted never did work on), this mod was pretty bug-free in my experience, and we have Ted to thank for that.
"The Legend of the Duck" grabbed me right away. Well, not right away - it had one of the dullest title screens ever, although at least it was classy - but close. The mod is apparently a story Dink tells to some younger cousins, and it opens with Dink... meeting a duck.
When I saw Dink flip the Hell out over meeting a "Duck of Legend" that's never explained, I knew right away that I would be on board with this story. "Okay, sign me up," I said out loud, because I do things like that. Swear to God.
You see, this one doesn't have the best maps or gameplay, but with me, personality goes a long, long way. I kept laughing out loud at this game's outrageous personality. Everyone in it is so quick to react enthusiastically (whether in a positive or a negative way) that it just knocks me out. There are some memorable interactions with inanimate objects as well. For example, you start with no inventory until you encounter a "Well of wishes."
Dink: "I wish I had some weapons."
Well: "Use your fists, moron."
Dink: "I NOW REMEMBER HOW TO PUNCH THINGS!"
I was dying. Later, another well you find is less accommodating. Dink will even sass back at the player. This DMOD got on my good side and stayed there... for a while.
Anyway, the titular duck is actually a human who's been changed into a duck and wants help getting back to normal. Dink agrees to go way, way the hell out of his way to help this guy for... some reason. So follows a surprisingly long quest in which Dink mostly goes around asking people for help, and those people mostly tell him they can't help but he should try a certain other person. Almost every time, that person can't help either, but you STILL HAVE TO GO ASK. It's mostly a giant fetch quest where you rarely manage to fetch anything, to be honest with you, although I still found it quite amusing to a point.
That point is the snowy land (a good example of how just using the middle of the road tiles looks pretty odd). If you play this one, it might not be a bad idea to simply declare yourself the winner when you get there, because nothing satisfying lies ahead of you. The fetch quests get way more time-consuming, and combat finally becomes important, which doesn't end up being a good thing. There's a big tedious samey castle area where you have to undo a series of screenlocks by fighting boncas and slimes (there's a boss, but you don't have to fight him - and you shouldn't, he's absurdly hard anyway) and a bigger, even more tedious cave where you have to get nasty key parts from the insides of boncas, attempt to use them, go back and have them repaired, and yada yada. If you don't do things in the right order, you'll be on a long march back to where you just came from.
This DMOD suffers from an unnecessarily large map. It's not as bad as it might have been because there's always a road to guide you (and you should stick to it, you won't find anything by exploring), but it's still more walking than I would have liked to have done. There's no way it should have taken me two and a half hours to finish this with the amount of content it actually has. Oh man, and I almost forgot - at one point it demands a thousand gold out of you for no good reason. Grinding that up from pillbugs took a while. I managed to finish without cheating, but the whole thing just about ran out of the good will that the silly dialogue had earned from me.
On top of everything, after all of that you come to the most anti-climactic, "screw you" ending yet. Duckman is returned to normal, and he and the magician who made him that way tell Dink they've got no reward for him, he leaves, and they have a good laugh at his expense. At this point, the DMOD seems to conveniently forget about its framing device. My guesses are 1) that Dink is taking out his frustration about this experience out on his cousins by telling them a lame story with a crappy resolution, and 2) that for this, they will later strangle him in his sleep.
Even so, I think this is underrated. I'd give it a seven. Wait a minute, did I accidentally write a review?
---
Where was I? Right.
ONE! HUNDRED! DMODS!
Hard to believe it's already been over six months since I started doing this. In that time, things have picked up quite a bit around here. It had been several months since the last DMOD release back in August, but now we've had two in the same month, and more seem to be on the way this year. Redink1 even came out of hiding for a bit. I don't want to presume I had something to do with this, but I did at least make one of those DMODs.
I decided to make a DMOD while I was working on this, and although at times it felt like the development of "Malachi the Jerk" was going to go on forever, those four months now seem like a blip in comparison to the scope of this project. I've still got a long way to go. Two hundred DMODs will put us in late 2004 (Cast Awakening Part 1, if I counted correctly); Three hundred will take us all the way to late 2009. That's a lot, and it's true that they mostly try to do the same thing. It's easy for my grip on this to shift. At times, it can be hard to believe that I'm spending my time hitting yet more pillbugs, that I'm looking at these same tiles yet again, and the pendulum of my judgment can swing in a rather harsh direction. Still, I enjoy it. It means something to me.
I've never had a lot of purpose to my life. To be honest with all of you, I'm here on the Dink Network to chase ghosts. When I was 12, I thought - for the final time in my life - that I was great, that I could do anything. Soon, I felt I'd brought shame on myself by making crap like "2001: A Dink Oddysey." It sounds dumb because it is, but every time I thought about Dink Smallwood, I thought mainly about how much I regretted being regarded the worst in the world at something instead of remembering the good times that I had. At this point, that reputation seems to exist only in my own head, which won't let it go. But then, that's what I'm like.
In 2009, I tried to kill myself. I'm still alive because the garage I attempted to fill with carbon monoxide had a tiny, hidden window that I never found until just a few months ago. I couldn't handle all of the pressure that I felt, pressure that I'd mostly manufactured. Since then, I admit that I've been drifting, floating through life, although I remain fixed in one spot in reality. I've never been good at finding a purpose. Call it pathetic if you want, but I am glad whenever I can feel useful. If my words have entertained or educated, I'm glad. I try hard to write well. As similar as going through so many DMODs can seem, I try to put a slightly different spin on each writeup so that I'm not just writing the same thing over and over. I feel like I owe it to you, my readers, and also to the DMODs themselves.
All those DMODs. Each is a piece of someone I've never met. The best moments are those when I feel I have connected with another human being through their work. The worst DMODs are those where I can't feel anything like that. Although I appreciate those mods that go out of their way to do something very different, the inherent similarity of the great majority of them produces an interesting effect. Like a control group in a scientific experiment, the things that stay the same make the things that change more relevant; they give a little window into the person who left them there. Not one of us will last forever. A few of the authors of these DMODs are already gone, but when I play them I feel like they're here with me, telling me jokes, challenging me.
Thank you for reading. In an effort to provide some variety, I will be starting a new project very soon - a screenshot and text based Let's Play of Dink Smallwood, but with an unpredictable twist. I hope you'll read that as well.
ONE! HUNDRED! DMODS!
But before I talk about that, let's talk about Legend of the Duck. I had a pretty okay time with it, but as I've discussed before, that has a lot to do with my mood, and my life is sad enough that this feels like an accomplishment.
This is the only DMOD credited to Ted Shutes, but in fact, his work on this is just another bugfixing patch like his patches for 9 gems 2, Friends Beyond 2 and 3, and Birth of an Empire; the only difference here is that the patch has been merged into the main release of the DMOD itself with the author's permission. Aside from map problems (which Ted never did work on), this mod was pretty bug-free in my experience, and we have Ted to thank for that.
"The Legend of the Duck" grabbed me right away. Well, not right away - it had one of the dullest title screens ever, although at least it was classy - but close. The mod is apparently a story Dink tells to some younger cousins, and it opens with Dink... meeting a duck.
When I saw Dink flip the Hell out over meeting a "Duck of Legend" that's never explained, I knew right away that I would be on board with this story. "Okay, sign me up," I said out loud, because I do things like that. Swear to God.
You see, this one doesn't have the best maps or gameplay, but with me, personality goes a long, long way. I kept laughing out loud at this game's outrageous personality. Everyone in it is so quick to react enthusiastically (whether in a positive or a negative way) that it just knocks me out. There are some memorable interactions with inanimate objects as well. For example, you start with no inventory until you encounter a "Well of wishes."
Dink: "I wish I had some weapons."
Well: "Use your fists, moron."
Dink: "I NOW REMEMBER HOW TO PUNCH THINGS!"
I was dying. Later, another well you find is less accommodating. Dink will even sass back at the player. This DMOD got on my good side and stayed there... for a while.
Anyway, the titular duck is actually a human who's been changed into a duck and wants help getting back to normal. Dink agrees to go way, way the hell out of his way to help this guy for... some reason. So follows a surprisingly long quest in which Dink mostly goes around asking people for help, and those people mostly tell him they can't help but he should try a certain other person. Almost every time, that person can't help either, but you STILL HAVE TO GO ASK. It's mostly a giant fetch quest where you rarely manage to fetch anything, to be honest with you, although I still found it quite amusing to a point.
That point is the snowy land (a good example of how just using the middle of the road tiles looks pretty odd). If you play this one, it might not be a bad idea to simply declare yourself the winner when you get there, because nothing satisfying lies ahead of you. The fetch quests get way more time-consuming, and combat finally becomes important, which doesn't end up being a good thing. There's a big tedious samey castle area where you have to undo a series of screenlocks by fighting boncas and slimes (there's a boss, but you don't have to fight him - and you shouldn't, he's absurdly hard anyway) and a bigger, even more tedious cave where you have to get nasty key parts from the insides of boncas, attempt to use them, go back and have them repaired, and yada yada. If you don't do things in the right order, you'll be on a long march back to where you just came from.
This DMOD suffers from an unnecessarily large map. It's not as bad as it might have been because there's always a road to guide you (and you should stick to it, you won't find anything by exploring), but it's still more walking than I would have liked to have done. There's no way it should have taken me two and a half hours to finish this with the amount of content it actually has. Oh man, and I almost forgot - at one point it demands a thousand gold out of you for no good reason. Grinding that up from pillbugs took a while. I managed to finish without cheating, but the whole thing just about ran out of the good will that the silly dialogue had earned from me.
On top of everything, after all of that you come to the most anti-climactic, "screw you" ending yet. Duckman is returned to normal, and he and the magician who made him that way tell Dink they've got no reward for him, he leaves, and they have a good laugh at his expense. At this point, the DMOD seems to conveniently forget about its framing device. My guesses are 1) that Dink is taking out his frustration about this experience out on his cousins by telling them a lame story with a crappy resolution, and 2) that for this, they will later strangle him in his sleep.
Even so, I think this is underrated. I'd give it a seven. Wait a minute, did I accidentally write a review?
---
Where was I? Right.
ONE! HUNDRED! DMODS!
Hard to believe it's already been over six months since I started doing this. In that time, things have picked up quite a bit around here. It had been several months since the last DMOD release back in August, but now we've had two in the same month, and more seem to be on the way this year. Redink1 even came out of hiding for a bit. I don't want to presume I had something to do with this, but I did at least make one of those DMODs.
I decided to make a DMOD while I was working on this, and although at times it felt like the development of "Malachi the Jerk" was going to go on forever, those four months now seem like a blip in comparison to the scope of this project. I've still got a long way to go. Two hundred DMODs will put us in late 2004 (Cast Awakening Part 1, if I counted correctly); Three hundred will take us all the way to late 2009. That's a lot, and it's true that they mostly try to do the same thing. It's easy for my grip on this to shift. At times, it can be hard to believe that I'm spending my time hitting yet more pillbugs, that I'm looking at these same tiles yet again, and the pendulum of my judgment can swing in a rather harsh direction. Still, I enjoy it. It means something to me.
I've never had a lot of purpose to my life. To be honest with all of you, I'm here on the Dink Network to chase ghosts. When I was 12, I thought - for the final time in my life - that I was great, that I could do anything. Soon, I felt I'd brought shame on myself by making crap like "2001: A Dink Oddysey." It sounds dumb because it is, but every time I thought about Dink Smallwood, I thought mainly about how much I regretted being regarded the worst in the world at something instead of remembering the good times that I had. At this point, that reputation seems to exist only in my own head, which won't let it go. But then, that's what I'm like.
In 2009, I tried to kill myself. I'm still alive because the garage I attempted to fill with carbon monoxide had a tiny, hidden window that I never found until just a few months ago. I couldn't handle all of the pressure that I felt, pressure that I'd mostly manufactured. Since then, I admit that I've been drifting, floating through life, although I remain fixed in one spot in reality. I've never been good at finding a purpose. Call it pathetic if you want, but I am glad whenever I can feel useful. If my words have entertained or educated, I'm glad. I try hard to write well. As similar as going through so many DMODs can seem, I try to put a slightly different spin on each writeup so that I'm not just writing the same thing over and over. I feel like I owe it to you, my readers, and also to the DMODs themselves.
All those DMODs. Each is a piece of someone I've never met. The best moments are those when I feel I have connected with another human being through their work. The worst DMODs are those where I can't feel anything like that. Although I appreciate those mods that go out of their way to do something very different, the inherent similarity of the great majority of them produces an interesting effect. Like a control group in a scientific experiment, the things that stay the same make the things that change more relevant; they give a little window into the person who left them there. Not one of us will last forever. A few of the authors of these DMODs are already gone, but when I play them I feel like they're here with me, telling me jokes, challenging me.
Thank you for reading. In an effort to provide some variety, I will be starting a new project very soon - a screenshot and text based Let's Play of Dink Smallwood, but with an unpredictable twist. I hope you'll read that as well.
