The Dink Network

Rise of the Rebels

Yay, recess! From the COTPATD project.
January 31st, 2024
v1.00
Score : 2.5 horrible
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yeoldetoast
Peasant They/Them Australia
LOOK UPON MY DEFORMED FACE! 
Christopher Nolan is renowned for upending various established plot devices and narrative structures to create compelling filmography. Similarly, in the case of "Rise of the Rebels", the author Cybermonkey goes one step further by completely ignoring these elements to give to us something truly memorable, but not for the reasons you might think.

Starting off, I could not get the title screen to appear due to it not having a palette applied to it properly and being placed in a fastfile which requires paletting. After extracting the included fastfile, the title screen looks like a screenshot from Shenmue or a similar 3D game from the era. Unfortunately once you've seen this, you've already taken in the best of what Rebels has to offer and suggest anyone interested just stop at that point. There are no new graphics included, and the existing ones have been used poorly. Each screen is very obviously the default tile zero grass screen with just enough tiling applied to provide a border, along with the absolute bare minimum of decorative sprites placed with the intention to disguise the fact.

Dink starts off in his house and then has to go to a nearby school very conveniently placed on the next screen. These two buildings are the only ones on the starting island despite there being a class full of students, one of which has the appearance of Dink's mother. Despite all of the students being given names, absolutely no character development occurs, and for whatever reason Dink just blindly decides to depart with them to another island to overthrow the government to achieve "independency" despite there being no evidence of any government presence on the starting island at all.

The large island upon which the government apparently resides is as poorly mapped as the initial one, and after traversing several screens with a few lethargic knights, one finds themselves in a castle where you're supposed to kill the governor or whoever, represented by the default king sprite, who comically moves around the screen without animation and no attack except for touch damage, not unlike the bonus room in The Quest for Cheese full of inanimate objects. Once Dink has eagerly defeated the governor, despite having reservations about the whole thing just a few screens ago, you're mysteriously thrown into a pit with one of the other classmates. It appears you're supposed to kill her for some unexplained reason, but as you're never unfrozen, unless you cheat you'll never get to see the intended ending. Even then, the dialogue is in die() which means that only the first line triggers, and you never get to find out that Dink's eventual demise was because he "couldn't get out of a pit".

Overall, Rise of the Rebels is an unplayable mess that shouldn't be touched by anyone. As for the underlying reason for creating this, the only assumption I could come to as per the author's name is that it's intended to be an allegory for Hong Kong or Taiwan, or maybe Northern Ireland. Rise of the Rebels lacks the charm and most of the comedy of other bad d-mods and instead falls completely flat to the point where it isn't worth giving any extra thought to.
January 12th, 2003
v1.00
Score : 6.0 fair
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Binirit
Peasant She/Her
 
Storyline: You have to defeat the government that lives on another island.

Map and graphics: The map looks nice with enough details. There are no new graphics. The title screen when installing the game looks very good, but the title screen when loading the game itself looks real bad: it has a blurred upper part that is no image at all.

Music: The music is very good and goes well with the situation.

Good: The scene in the school is done very nicely. When hitting the barrel in Dink’s room, Dink’s reaction is funny. The self-destruct mechanism is a nice touch.

Not so good: The bridge is a warp instead of a bridge you can walk over. There is no way to leave the castle since the warp does not work. There is no introduction to this story, so you do not know what you are doing until you talk to one of the guys in school. There is no zeal to this D-mod; you play it al right, but it does not give you any sense of adventure or the wish to see what is going to happen next.

Overall: A very easy D-mod.

Fit for: If you want to play an easy D-mod and do not mind the lack of gameplay.
February 25th, 2002
v1.00
Score : 5.9 fair
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Simeon
Peasant He/Him Netherlands
Any fool can use a computer. Many do. 
Plot: The people on the island where Dink lives are forming a resistance against the government on the other island. Dink joins them. He goes to the other island to kill the government there.

Difficulty: It's a very short and easy D-Mod to play. The map is tiny so you'll never get stuck.

Graphics: Nothing special, just trees, grass etc. Everything looks fine but the author hasn't done anything to make it beautiful.

Sound: Also nothing special, a few midi's, but they don't add something to the D-Mod.

New weapons/magic: No new ones. All you have is fireball magic and a sword.

Bugs: I haven't found any but I'm not suprised by that, it's so small and there's no 'advanced' coding done.

Other: There's a Continue button (when you start the D-Mod) but there's not a savemachine in the game. The author has also used a different font than most of the D-Mods.

Overall: It's too small to be a really good D-Mod and there's nothing special done. The D-Mod is not bad but I'd only recommend this one if you want to play everything Dink related. A very small D-Mod which doesn't offer anything new, that's a good way to describe this one.