The Dink Network

Dinky Dimensions 1: FIAT

Here we have an extremely detailed screenshot of Dink trying to shake hands with Mr. Fire Pillbug. Gladiator minigame. From the COTPATD project. The temple of air. From the COTPATD project.
December 20th, 2001
v0.99j
Score : 8.9 good
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I like to steal a line from a review redink1 (FIAT author) wrote for another great dmod. FIAT is a D-Mod you're going to love and hate at the same time. Many new and modified monsters and spells are well suited for the game plot. You do need to use different elemental weapons (or magic) on different elemental monsters. Although redink1 did try very hard to save the space on the inventory item list, it can still get crowded very soon. Unless you spent a lot of time to kill, you always find you don't have enough gold. Half of the time you get nothing from killing a monster (not just pillbugs). The plot starts out very nice, but soon it becomes clueless. Many times in order to finish a task, you need to go back to another isle. Most of the time, you don't really where and what you should find.
Most of NPC's have chat options, but as far as I can remember they are just gossips. Some of the conversations should be changed after certain points though. Map design is nicely done, but the interior of most rooms are pretty empty. The most interesting but also the worst parts are the dungeons. You need to do different things to get the blocks to open. Lit a missle. Extinguish a fire... But you need to do it many times and you don't need any new techniques. And if something bad happened... I'm not just talking about Dink died. The whole game crashed or exited to desktop very often. I don't know why, but FIAT is by far the most unstable dmod I have ever played. (In fact it happened so many times that I did not finish the final dungeon. I just decided I had enough the dungeon fight and then cheated my way to see FIAT.) Since all secrets are clueless, I bet most of people can probably get very few secrets. You can access the secret AFTER you beat the game. It's fine to do it this way, but I don't like it. The game is very difficult. Air knight (the first boss) is the most difficult one (besides FIAT). With water axe and water magic, I even don't know if the fire knight has any special skill before I killed him. FIAT really breaks lots new grounds in many ways and should deserve a great score, but any repeating tasks and system crashes prevent it from being excellent.