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August 15th 2014, 10:37 PM
custom_coco.gif
CocoMonkey
Bard He/Him United States
Please Cindy, say the whole name each time. 
147: Glenn's First DMOD Author: Glenn Ergo Release Date: March 17, 2003
"hey boss im gonna kill you"

REPUTATION NOTE: This DMOD is part of the incredibly select group to have a rating of less than 1.0 (0.8) on The Dink Network.

Oh, dear me. You'd think that Mike Dingwell's example would have proven that a title like that can't be a good sign. At least this one isn't Glenn's only DMOD, so unlike Dingwell's, this title at least contains no unnecessary information.

That doesn't mean the DMOD is any better, of course.

*********This DMOD, "Glenn's First DMOD,"**********
 ********Has been awarded the prestigious*********
  ****DINK FOREVER MEMORIAL AWARD OF BADNESS*****
   **********On this day August 15, 2014********



Dink is so frustrated about this DMOD that he says this every single time you enter this screen.

This is a typical F-class DMOD. There aren't many screens, some dialogues fail to freeze you, there's no plot to speak of, and nothing happens upon defeating the boss. Like "Dink Forever," this is shockingly an updated release. Here is the changelog, which is more entertaining than the mod itself:

bugs fixed
when you talk to the girl in the house the game not crash

other changes
a few more scrips
edited some of the skripts
i have put stone`s around the hole world
tree new midis


I'll certainly cut the young Norwegian author a bit of slack for his English, but I am impressed by his ability to misspell "scripts" two different ways in two consecutive lines. The stones seem to be Glenn's response to the typical "invisible walls" complaint. They do manage to suggest a boundary, which is nice, but they look strange and have quite a few hardness gaps.

As for the girl in the house, while the game does manage to avoid crashing there, there's another error on that screen. This has the distinction of being a mistake I haven't seen anybody else make yet.


This house has got worse problems than 'litleness.'

See those grass tiles? Those are actually tiles stamped from the unused sections of the tile sets. When you do this, the tiles will display as whatever was on the previous screen. You can even observe this here, since there are two warps to this screen in the DMOD.


Liar! If you're so poor, how could you afford to redecorate the abyss around your house?

Congratulations, Glenn, on discovering a new way to suck that 146 DMODs had all managed to avoid. Incidentally, this girl tells you to go southwest to the boss, who is actually located to the northeast. I used to mix up east and west when I was younger, but I've never seen anybody mix up north and south before. Mind you, I don't see any compasses around, so she could just be mistaken.

The boss doesn't really fight you. With the "walking around NPC" brain, the only way he can damage you is if you walk into him on purpose. A simple misplaced bracket prevents the DMOD from having an ending. It's too bad, because we miss out on this scintillating exchange:

Boss: aaaawwww you sonuwabitch you killed me
Dink: you gaddamed right ahahahaha loser
Boss: i will have a revange

Maybe the unnamed boss's revange from beyond the grave is explored in one of Glenn's six other DMODs, but I doubt it. Gaddam it.

148: Dink's Father 2: The Kidnapping Author: Mads Baardsgaard (Lancemads) Release Date: April 1, 2003
"I have arranged this get-drunk festival"

It's hard to believe this wasn't a bad April Fools' joke.

**********This DMOD, "Dink's Father 2,"************
 ********Has been awarded the prestigious*********
  ****DINK FOREVER MEMORIAL AWARD OF BADNESS*****
   **********On this day August 15, 2014********


Yes, this is even worse than the original. While it is larger, more organized, and more functional than pretty much everything I've given the Award of Badness to so far, I'm putting my foot down. There comes a point where a DMOD is so embarrassingly lazy and sloppy that it deserves no consideration whatever.

I doubt I'm going to upset anybody by trashing this thing. Its highest rating is a 3.4 from Glenn (yes, that Glenn), who describes it as "A Bad D-Mod."

I'm running out of tolerance for this kind of thing. This DMOD might have a (nonsense) plot and a (shaky, broken) structure, but it gets to me a lot more than something like "Glenn's First DMOD," which exists only for the purpose of releasing something and is therefore easy to laugh at. This, on the other hand, is a prime example of somebody really trying to make a game, but not caring enough to make it even remotely acceptable (or even possible to finish!). It's also harder to take this from a mod that isn't the author's first and has a reasonable amount of time between it and the author's previous release.

"The Kidnapping" takes place just ten days after the original "Dink's Father," and we are expected to believe that in that amount of time, several new, permanent stone structures have been erected in the town of Brooksville. That might seem like a small thing to complain about, but there's just no reason at all that the author couldn't have used a more believable amount of time instead. Dink goes out to get food for his dad, and he is suddenly overtaken by a spell of domination. Dink is forced to steal food from a neighbor, who soon kidnaps Dink's father in retaliation. The source of this spell is never explained or even hinted at; it happens because plot. Actually, it's possible that the author did it, because he is a character in the DMOD who informs you that he is omnipotent.


You're not helping your case there, man.

The mod isn't completely without positive qualities. There are a couple of lines that are mildly amusing. When Dink, unaware of what he's done while dominated, returns home with the stolen food, his dad remarks on what a great son he is, "Never stealing and such." The MIDI choices are quite odd ("Hotel California" for wandering around town?) but they're at least pleasant to listen to.


Tiling and hardness are a couple of the many ways in which "Dink's Father 2" fails.

The real reason this DMOD is so terrible is that it's a broken wreck. It wouldn't have been a good DMOD with more testing, but it would at least have been inoffensive. Several scripts have a broken talk procedure, and one of these procedures was supposed to advance you through the story, so beating the game is impossible. This happens near the end, and I didn't feel like fixing it, so I never saw the ending of this one. It's a mess even before you get there, though. For example, there's a place where you're supposed to pay a guard in order to proceed, but you can walk right through him - assuming he even shows up, which he sometimes does not. If you don't pay him, though, it's impossible to continue the game because other events will not trigger. Progression involves pure trial and error if you're not following the walkthrough, as the dialogue options you need will never come up until you've done something else with no logical connection whatsoever (this is a problem that the original "Dink's Father" had as well). Combat is never required, and some pillbugs you encounter early on will simply disappear when you kill them, awarding no experience and producing no corpse.

Probably the best thing in the DMOD was caused by an error on the author's part. There's a character in the game who is drunk - Dink asks him if he's drunk, he replies by slurring the word 'drunk,' and Dink is appalled. It's not interesting at all on its own, but for some reason, the script for this guy is attached to all the sprites on several screens in a certain part of the map. All of the tree stumps, tufts of grass and so forth immediately turn into drunk guys.


Dink: Lord of the Barflies.

At first I thought that the author was operating under the mistaken notion that releasing this trilogy was a good idea - that's the sort of delusion I was under when I released the Dink Forever trilogy and things like it. I was therefore surprised to find this in the readme file:

This is the second part of the Dink`s father triology (I don`t know why I make a triology,
it just sound so good I realize now that making a triology a your first DMODS is stupid.
But now I`ve started, and there is no way back.


Even Lancemads had figured out it was a bad idea. As hard as it is to wrap my head around, he seems to have thought that he was under some kind of obligation to finish a trilogy once he'd started it. Clearly, he didn't bother looking through the archives.