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I'm called Tim. I've been playing Dink since it came out, when I was a young, dumb kid.

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118: Milderr!! 3: End of Questing Author: Sharp (Anna-Leena) Release Date: April 8, 2002

"Watch the madman burn!!"
"He burns!"
"He burns!"

I'll say that Milderr!! 3 is the best game in the trilogy. Things seemed to make a bit more sense here, and it had better structure than its predecessors. This was still an awfully weird one, though.

The maps aren't very good. There's a place where you're expected to walk on water without being told this is the way to proceed, or being given any indication of why this works. As ever, there isn't much combat because Milder lacks an attack animation, although there is one battle against a dragon that can be impossible if you didn't think to bring several elixirs from the early game. A visit to Terris includes some "invisible walls." There was a spot where I got stuck behind the hardness line of some trees. In terms of mechanics, this is a substandard DMOD, but not terrible.

Sharp's DMODs do have an odd sort of personality going for them, though - it's what made me strangely enjoy "Forest of Dangers" despite the fact that there was practically nothing to it. The dialogue in "Milder 3" (Shut up, that's what I'm going to call it) is more mature than the author's previous mods without losing that bizarre flavor that I can't quite seem to explain. These mods have a tone that's unlike any other DMOD I've played. I'd almost call it nihilistic, but that doesn't quite fit.

Milder's character is stronger in the third mod, and seems to be a valid interpretation (though not the ONLY valid interpretation) of what we know about him from the original game. He cares about himself above all else; though he may be attached to someone else and attempt to help them, if the opportunity passes, he doesn't worry about it too much. Some of the morally questionable things that Milder does in this DMOD are in a grey enough area that I could see Dink doing them, like when he passes the blame for killing a "bonca god" to a guy who had tried to screw Milder over anyway, resulting in his death by burning. Others are on a whole new level of ****ed up. When Milder helps out a village that has lost its witches, they reward him by sacrificing three people in order to add their strength to his own. The sacrifices include a woman, who volunteers eagerly; a knight, who volunteers reluctantly; and a little girl, who begs not to be killed. Milder is completely fine with this. I just... I don't even know what to say.

Everything is like that, in Sharp's world of Milder's adventures. There's no such thing as loyalty or moral consideration, nothing that will hold up to the slightest test. Milder spends most of the DMOD looking for Lyna, but when he finds out that she's dead (from Dink, who seems awfully happy about it despite the fact that he's become her husband), he doesn't sweat it: "Oh, that was no big deal. I never liked her anyways. Never." If Milder volunteers to help somebody, the odds are good that he screws them over in short order, but he gets almost as good as he gives. Every time you think you've achieved something, it doesn't work out well for long, and the plot steadfastly refuses to keep going in one direction. You're told you have to kill an evil dragon, but it turns out that the dragon was supposedly good. You're told that you have to work with Sharp instead of killing her, but that doesn't happen, and then it turns out that she really is evil and is killed anyway. Milder, for his part, takes it all pretty much in his stride. I'm the one who's left reeling.

There's a dark kind of humor about it all. As dark as this is, it's never all that serious. I laughed out loud several times at some witty dialogue. For example, Milder asks a bar owner why the place looks so crappy:

"It's not crappy!"
"Oh, now I see."
"Sure, it just began to look like a palace."

I also enjoyed a sassy fountain that refuses to heal you.

While it's still kind of weak in terms of gameplay and doesn't tell a grand story either, I found this tale of depravity quite interesting, and far superior to the earlier installments. I don't think anyone else could recreate this bizarre, slightly unsettling feeling if they tried.

119: Quest of Glandor (Unfinished) Authors: John M. Hagen, Christiaan Janssen Release Date: April 17, 2002

"hint to player: not finished"

REPUTATION NOTE: This DMOD is one of the incredibly select group to have a score lower than 1.0 (0.5) on the Dink Network!

I've disagreed before with the community that certain DMODs should be rated highly. I've yet to disagree that something should be rated below 1.0. This isn't an exception, but unlike the other very bad DMODs, this one doesn't seem to fail due to a lack of talent or ambition.

I have to give it one of these on general principle alone.

**********This DMOD, "Quest of Glandor,"***********
 ********Has been awarded the prestigious*********
  ****DINK FOREVER MEMORIAL AWARD OF BADNESS*****
   **********On this day May 22, 2014***********

It's hard to stay motivated when making a DMOD. They're a lot of work, and even in the best of times, not all that many people were going to play them. None of us are making The Stanley Parable here. Your determination to make something and finish it has to be pretty much its own reward. It's understandable that a lot of projects run out of steam, and you can't blame authors for wanting to get a version of what exists of their abandoned project out there so that their work hasn't gone to waste. Hell, the community has benefited from this practice. Think of the great unfinished mods out there - Dink's Doppelganger, Crosslink, Back from the Grave. But you know, there's a point at which it's just insulting. "Quest of Glandor" is past that point.

The only thing the DMOD really contains is a bonca who tells you that he would be a really awesome boss if he were finished. I have to admit that it's kind of entertaining to watch the bonca and Dink (actually Glandor I guess, but I'll get to that) talk about which MIDI the fight would use and so on. After a minute or so, though, he sets you free to explore the "rest of the demo."

I wasn't sure what he meant at first, as there only seemed to be three screens, but eventually I found that there's a way to get out. I regretted it, as the rest of the screens contain absolutely nothing of interest. They're dull and unfinished.

If you want to know anything at all about the plans the authors had for "Quest of Glandor," you have to look in the DMOD's folder. There, you will find an awful lot of text about the story. Here's a little sample.

2000 yrs after dink
technology has come and gone, after a war fought for 500 years, nearly all civilization was lost. Magic, also long since gone, has been wiped from history by an organization known as the Illune. Members of the illune immediately set up order after the war, burning books with historical documentation and the banning of writing and reading. In (twisted) hopes that without literacy, technology will never live again. Life is hard in the wastelands. monsters (now intelligent, engineered by a mysterious organization) are more abundant that humans. Monster overlords rule the human population. Breeding them so that their monster kin have food. And food in ready supply do the divisions have.

Apparently the DMOD was to start with Glandor, the protagonist, escaping from the torture of a cruel but stupid tyrant. Most of the story was pretty melodramatic, but there were also elements like Glandor saying "WAZZZZZUUUP" to people and a quest for a porno mag. What fun, but it's all irrelevant because there's practically no connection between the text and what you get if you press the play button on DFArc.

To take this and release it as a DMOD is insulting. I don't mean to be overly dramatic, but I really do feel insulted here. One of the text files says that anyone is free to finish their project - a proposition I've never seen anybody get really excited about, but it's especially ridiculous here because they didn't even really START their project. Another text file says that they spent "a few months" on it, which proves to me that the project, despite its high ambitions, was never serious in the first place.

Next: Cloud Castle.