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September 15th 2014, 07:00 PM
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CocoMonkey
Bard He/Him United States
Please Cindy, say the whole name each time. 
177: Anarchy Halloween Party Author: Joshriot Release Date: October 31, 2003
"...people have been saying that you suck."


It's fun when authors modify the initial loading screen.

"Anarchy Halloween Party" is another brief Halloween DMOD whipped up in a very short amount of time. But before we talk about that, let's talk about anarchy itself. What does that even mean?

The word 'anarchy' has had negative connotations of lawlessness and disorder for centuries, but at least in the ideal, that isn't the way it's meant by its proponents. Anarchists oppose not order, but authoritative government. They feel that people who are governed are not free, and that order is better brought to society by voluntary cooperation. Anarchy as actually practiced has even involved voting. The problems with this ideal are obvious, and I'm sure as Hell not an anarchist, but I do think it's worth acknowledging that the traditional concept of anarchy is distinct from the common usage as "a state of chaos and disorder."

The use of the word in this DMOD has little to do with government and everything to do with f***ing s*** up. This use of the term goes along with punk and hardcore music, and can probably be traced back to the 1971 punk album Anarchy in the UK by the Sex Pistols. The title screen features a totally incomprehensible track that my wife recognized as 90s hardcore band Aus-Rotten.


I know YOU are, but what am I?

This DMOD is divided into a few different (very short) sections. First, Dink walks through a "haunted house." The halloweeny graphics are pretty cool and set a fun atmosphere, and each room has its own little concept going on, like a room where all the pieces of furniture float one by one into the fireplace. At the end of the house, Dink comes across the guys who apparently run it, and there's a really unfunny fabulous joke. Dink calls the guys "toilet drinking queers." I would be just fine not ever seeing another joke of this type in a DMOD, to be honest.

Dink is employed to scare the visitors to the premises. First, there's a minigame where you've got to pop out of a coffin and scare people as they walk by. The people have to be past a certain point when you pop out for you to scare them - the game is picky about this. You've got to scare ten people in a row without making any mistakes. It took me several tries.


A successful scare.

Finally, you're told to wander around in the woods and scare people. Dink's costume in this segment is pretty great. I love how crazy-looking it is. You can't actually follow the instructions you're given, though. Instead, counterintuitively, what you actually have to do is go around killing everybody. When you kill someone, a word or two will pop up in the top right corner of the screen, saying something like "chaos" or "violence rules."


I laughed at this guy who thinks it's part of the show - until you start on him.

The last person you have to kill is out of your reach. You have to go into your inventory and equip a magic marked "graham crackers" (???) and kill her that way. Then, you're told to "kill bob," the guy who instructed you to go scare people. The problem is that attacking Bob does nothing. At this point, I was pretty convinced that there was no ending to the game, and I wasn't alone in coming to this conclusion, judging from the reviews. But then I found DuckLord's walkthrough, which tells you that you have to punch the torch behind Bob. This triggers a very short ending and a bitmap promoting a project called "Anarchy Hobo Party" that was never finished.


Nope.

I don't really have much to say in conclusion, but I would like to note that the majority of the scripts are in a subdirectory within the /story folder. I had no idea that Dink would even let you do this.

178: Agathian Sea Traders Author: Martijn van Sliedregt Release Date: November 18, 2003
"SIR, THERE ARE PIRATES HERE, COME QUICK!"

"Agathian Sea Traders" is a game where you buy various commodities, travel to other ports, and sell your goods, hopefully making a profit. This is especially difficult because traveling itself costs you 100 gold. All of this is done by clicking buttons.


This is what the interface looks like. There's no animation in this game.

It reminds me of a game I played on a graphing calculator in high school called "Drug Wars," where you traveled between locations buying and selling drugs in a similar fashion. It didn't have any graphics, but some graphing calculator games were surprisingly advanced. I think it would've been possible to make a passable version of Dink Smallwood for the TI-89. Damn, I could write a whole essay about graphing calculator games. But I digress.

I always find it interesting to see DMODs going for a different type of game, particularly one controlled by the mouse, but there's very little to do in "Agathian Sea Traders," and even somebody who enjoys this kind of game is bound to get bored quickly. Martijn says he made this DMOD in 18 hours - while that's kind of impressive, I wish he'd spent a bit more time. Other games of this type tend to have a number of events that will occur and maybe some backstory, but there's almost none of that here. The only event that can happen here is that there's a very small (just over 1%) chance that pirates will show up during your travel and take all your goods (though not, curiously, your gold). This event consists of a bitmap with nothing but text. It must be frustrating to have this happen. I guess it has the effect of adding risk to hoarding supplies and traveling too frequently, but the 100 gold travel cost kind of already does this.

Each port has its own MIDI. That's a nice touch, but I would have liked for, say, the location to light up on the map as well. The game doesn't have any way of letting you know prices are higher or lower than they were before, so it would be impossible to really play this without taking lots of notes. Making money is very difficult here, as the sell costs are usually quite low, and this game lacks the mechanics you usually see in this sort of game where there will be either too much or too little of a certain commodity on a certain market, enabling you to buy at unusually low and sell at unusually high prices. At any rate, there's no objective to achieve. The only ending that exists is the one you get for running out of money. The losing graphic is kind of amusing, but there isn't much motivation to play when there's nothing to work toward.


You'll probably see this before too long.