The Dink Network

Blood Scorpions

August 1st, 2004
v1.00
Score : 7.7 good
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When I first played this game, I didn't like it much. Playing it through again, though, it seems okay, if a bit too scripted.

Style: 8
The music sucked: nothing short of annoying except for the area around the Scorpion Palace and the final sequence. Although many objects are scripted, the people were kinda lame. The guy in the museum amused me, but the others just acted boring and repeated themselves/each other. Over and over. The map, although well decorated, looked a little ugly in places, I guess because of the weird road tiles. I think that the only graphic I hadn't seen before was Dink weilding a spiked club, which looked quite good. Overall, the game had a... patronizing style. If ever you forgot something about the extremely simple plot, it would be repeated over and over, and, just in case, there was a library, for the extremely senile. Everything was carefully scripted, so that you knew exactly what to do, except at one or two points where your choices were limited anyway since you could never go back to old areas. If "mood is an author's attitude towards his subjects", Simeon thinks that Dink is a moron.

Gameplay: 9
No where near as bad as I had remembered. The fighting was a little repetitive, but it didn't really have the time to get boring. The final sequence was a whole lotta fun. The puzzles and such were somewhat lame... nowhere near being on the level of Once in a Lifetime or World of DinkC, but never actually bad.

Story: 6
The story was quite simple. You train to be a "guardian of the ancients"-- i.e., a guy who guards town of the ancients, and just when you complete your training, the town gets overrun by scorpions. So then they boot you out of town and tell you to go kill some scorpions. You wander about until you reach another town where you have to kill some scorpions, and then you go to the Scorpion Temple where you kill some scorpions to recover some orbs to protect the town. I didn't always like the plots to WoDC or OiaL, but at least they were amusing and creative. The story here is at least a tad lame.

Overall: 7.7
Maybe worth downloading, but no where near as creative as Simeon's other work. It has some of the same humor though.