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--Crazy Old Tim Plays All the D-Mods--
Directory
1998 | HTML version
1999 | HTML version
2000 | HTML version
2001 | Article version
2002 | Article version
2003
2004
2005
2006
2007
2008-2009
2010
After a 2-year rebound, D-Mod production finally slowed down for what seems so far to be for good in 2011. But let's take a moment to remember that at this point, Dink Smallwood was over thirteen years old! D-Mod making slowed down at this point, but it didn't stop, and that is crazy. We're beyond "impressive" at this point. How have D-Mods remained an ongoing event? Contests have helped. Of the remaining 28 mods, 12 of them (~43%) are contest entries.
Since there have been relatively few D-Mods released since the end of 2010, it makes sense to take 'em all on at once. Scratcher and Sparrowhawk are probably sick of the sticky/unsticky carousel anyway. There is still time for you to get your new D-Mod written up if you hurry, but when that D-Mods remaining count hits zero, COTPATD Inc. is closing its doors for good.
There are some interesting-looking D-Mods in the last few years. I'm looking forward to playing them. And of course, I'll get the chance to talk a lot about myself soon. Lord knows I enjoy that.
===2011===
I've got nine D-Mods on my list with a 2011 release. Five of them - more than half! - are entries in the "Carnage Contest," which seems like a very different sort of theme than the ones we've had so far. "Power of Blood" and "The Blacksmith's Trail" are very highly regarded if ratings are anything to go by. But first, let's look at a D-Mod that seems to have given a breath of fresh air to the community by doing something totally new and different.
325: Broken Windows Author: Sparrowhawk Release Date: January 12, 2011
"Oh, Windows is so full of security holes, you know,"
REPUTATION NOTE: This D-Mod is one of the select group with a score of 9.0 or better (9.0) on The Dink Network.
I shouldn't be surprised that the author of "Bug Mania" continued to take Dink in interesting new directions that nobody had thought of before, and to show off impressive technical skill to boot. In "Broken Windows," Dink's ancient world breaks apart and he finds himself stranded in the nearly as ancient world of Windows XP (heh heh).
And to think it all started with an actual broken window.
Even the introduction set in Dink's regular world is impressive. The opening cutscene is really smooth. It uses lots of sound effects to tell a little story, and Dink moves and plays a special animation at the same time as he's kicked out of the pub. The animation frames are carefully controlled using sp_pframe so that the animation lines up perfectly with the movement (and also to alter the animation by not playing all of the frames in the usual order). There's a lot of movement in general in scenes in this D-Mod, something that most authors (especially including me, sadly) avoid whenever possible to reduce work. When the screen goes black and dink pops up out of the nothingness, the motion is very convincing.
Anyway, the game "crashes" to a rather convincing blue screen of death and Windows must restart, but Dink finds himself marooned in the OS. The object is to find your way back home, but really the whole thing is an excuse to show off neat scripting applications and tell computer jokes. Dink proclaims that the start button is a good place to start and laughs loudly. He jokes about the name of just about every folder in the C:/ drive. CCleaner summons a bunch of cleaning women to sweep the desktop clean. "Drivers" makes driving sound effects. Starting World of Warcraft results in Dink never being seen again. Firefox is a literal fox with fire powers.
Haha look, it's a "fire wall."
Not just worms. There's also aquatic sheep, explosive grannies, mole bombs, concrete donkey...
There are several things you can do that serve no purpose but messing around. You can change the MIDI by going to "My Music." (Actually, on my first run I couldn't hear any MIDIs, but that had nothing to do with the D-Mod. I've been having a problem lately where FreeDink refuses to play MIDIs anymore, and won't play them again until I restart my whole computer.) You can open Paint, select colors, and draw with the airbrush by walking Dink around the window. You can type a little document in Microsoft Word. In "My Pictures," you can see a few silly pics of people cosplaying as Dink Smallwood.
You have to type pretty slowly or it'll miss some letters. Still, what fun.
Watch out, ducky!
The Firefox boss is pretty tough, and took me a couple of tries. It alternates between throwing fireballs at you and attempting to lunge and bite you. If you didn't get the fireball back during the intro segment, I'd say you're pretty much screwed here. With it, it was manageable, but kept me on my toes. That's fine - it's the only actual challenge between you and the ending, so it might as well put up a fight.
At least it isn't a Mozilla.
There's an aborted attempt at a solitaire game. It's too bad that it wasn't finished; having a solitaire game in the Dink engine would be amazing and the most impressive thing in a D-Mod that impresses all over. I can understand not wanting to deal with the enormous headache of getting it to work, though. You can feel Sparrowhawk's grief and pain if you go through the scripts:
I know that feeling. DinkC hates you for trying to make it work the way the documentation claims it will. It really starts to feel personal after a while.
After you mess around for a while and beat the dread Firefox, you gain access to the directory list, where again, Dink has a lot of little jokes to make about the names. For example, DAEMON tools summons an actual daemon (or demon). When you've seen everything, you select the Dink Smallwood folder (not Dink Smallwood HD, which Dink imagines stands for "Hero Dink") and Dink picks up where he left off, being his incorrigible, rascally self in the setting he's so familiar with. Ah.
"Broken Windows" is a short D-Mod, but a lot of time has been put into the details. Not only is there a lot to do, but care has been taken to make sure little things look or feel right, like folders being highlighted when you "select" them by walking over them. "Dink explores Windows" is a neat idea, sure, but anybody could have had the idea. What's really neat about this D-Mod is the execution.
326: The Dink Wars (Demo) Author: Thor Release Date: January 16, 2011
"This areas still under construction so dont expect too much."
Whoa, the God of Thunder released a D-Mod! Well, part of one, anyway... Hmm. I hope my computer doesn't get wiped out by lightning while I try to write this. For that matter, I hope I don't get wiped out by lightning while I try to write this.
Once again, this really feels more like an unfinished D-Mod than a demo that stops at a place that makes sense, but at least this one has a point where you can definitely say you've reached the end and "won." Not that I managed to make it there without cheating. I don't really recommend anybody else try to either. After an easy start, the enemies quickly become far too tough and strong for you to handle. Furthermore, the boncas in the dark forest section won't drop hearts, and the gold they drop can't be collected.
Seriously! 326 D-Mods, and I'm still coming across new bugs I've never seen before.
"Dink Wars," which might also be called "Kendo" since that's the name of its folder and the only word in its dmod.diz, has a serviceable plot that doesn't stand out from others like it in any way. Dink is at home with his wife and eerie tiny-Dink-clone sons. Dink's wife tells him to go get firewood. Once he does, he comes home to find his wife murdered and his sons kidnapped by the winner of the 14th annual Generic Villain Competition (he calls himself "The Dark Lord," for crying out loud). Boy, the life expectancy of Dink family members is abysmal. At least he has kids in this one. How come so few D-Mods have made Dink a father? Are we to believe he fires blanks? Or has Martridge given him some kind of magical contraceptive? Now that would be a public service.
I know you do, baby. You're only human.
There isn't too much to do after that discovery. You can rescue a guy named Andrew Coward (A. Coward, get it?) from a bonca, but you don't have to. Eventually you'll reach an area called "the pits" (too easy), where there are loads of monsters and screenlocks for the masochistic, but this section might not even work. When I beat the enemies with my cheat-boosted stats, the screen wouldn't unlock. Only by directly unlocking the screen could I reach the sign telling you that the demo was over.
There is an interesting screen at the end where you have to be careful about hitting barrels that may be explosive in order to progress.
There are more problems. Tiling is bad, especially in caves and on water. There are a lot of hardness errors on both indoor and outdoor screens. There's no music. Events that freeze you for a long time are repeated every time you enter certain screens. There's a couple of big chunks of dialogue lifted directly from Pulp Fiction and peppered with misspellings. Some NPCs leave you frozen, forcing you to quit and load a game. The hedge maze toward the end is quite ugly. One positive element is that some of the interior screens looked good and had interesting ideas for decoration. I also liked that a few pieces of decoration yielded different dialogue after the kidnapping took place.
Look, it's a post office! That's neat. I'm permanently frozen in this screenshot, though.
Honestly, I didn't find much to enjoy here. "Dink Wars" isn't one of the worst D-Mods, but I've seen more promise in others that were worse. Sometimes I think a D-Mod might be cool if certain issues were fixed, but I feel like this one would just go from mediocre and broken to mediocre and well-built.
--The Carnage D-Mod Contest--
On February 9, 2011, the Carnage Contest was announced. The basic rule was really simple: have lots of carnage (that is, people dying violently) in your D-Mod. This theme was apparently the brainchild of the bloodthirsty MsDink. You might call it the polar opposite of the previous contest; then again, you could still enter a non-combat D-Mod. There's nothing that says the player character has to be involved in the carnage.
There was an extra requirement that some authors may have found difficult to meet.
4. Must have at least one new thing incorporated whether it is weapons, magic, sprites, fighting system. Anything new - use your imagination!
5. The one thing in point 4 (minimum of one) needs to be new to Dink OR previously developed by someone else, but not used in any actual dmod yet.
Ah, but there's an out for those who can't come up with something new themselves. I think it's good to encourage people to use the dev files on the site, and there are certainly still some of them that have never been used. However, it might be tough for an author to know what's been used and what hasn't. I used quite a few graphics packs in "Malachi the Jerk," but I don't think any of them had never been used before except for VonZeppelin's Dink Toupee. Anyway, I'll keep an eye out for new things in the entries.
The deadline for the contest was April 12th. I'm not sure exactly when the five entries were released because there was no news post about it! It is ever a frustrating task to catalog the history of this place. I think it was April 13th, though, and that's what I'm going with.
327: The End of Snoresville Author: Merder Release Date: April 13, 2011
"this town is to be dinkolished. *evil laughter*"
This D-Mod came in last place, and it's not hard to see why - it's terrible. Even so, it really shows the potential of the theme when even a D-Mod as bad as this one had me grinning at one point.
It's been a while (DinkDoodler's work in 2009) since I've seen a D-Mod with this kind of disregard for how a D-Mod is supposed to be put together. The screens have no borders, they're mostly empty seas of cobblestone, and hardness is a joke. Seriously, there isn't a single bit of hardness that serves its intended purpose. The houses have an inadequate hardbox that doesn't prevent you from walking "into" them, and in the two spots where there are supposed to be tile-based borders, you can slip right past them. This D-Mod would be a sure DFMAOB recipient if it didn't contain one extremely cool idea. I'll get to that.
The premise is about as simple as it can get: Dink comes to a town so boring, they named it Snoresville. I can't disagree, from getting a look at it. All the people there moan constantly about how boring it is and how they wish something interesting would happen. Knowing what I was there to do, I have to hand it to Merder - that is a pretty amazing setup.
Ooooh, they're BEGGIN' for it. Slaughter time!
It would be nice, though, if each NPC had something to say rather than everything being pulled at random from two short lists.
Unfortunately, the anticipation is the best part. Actually killing the townsfolk is rather boring because they hardly do anything in response. They make screaming or grunting noises when you hit them (the little girl sounds like a loudly squeaking mouse), but they don't run away, fight back or have anything to say. You'd think they'd panic or at least complain. Actually, given the setup it might be funnier if they were apathetic or even glad that something interesting was finally happening in their town. Dink, for his part, emotionlessly counts off the deaths. "And that's no 18," he says. "And that's no 19."
You also have to destroy the houses, which amusingly bleed when you punch them. The regular punch doesn't really do the trick, though. You have to use a "magic punch" spell that you find. I used it on the people, too - it comes out a lot faster than the normal punch. Dink excitedly says, "I can hear bones crunching!" as you wreck the houses.
Incidentally, you've got to check out MsDink's review, in which her impressive thirst for carnage is laid bare for all to see. "I did like how you can kill the houses but as a contest entry for carnage, they didn't bleed enough (minimal splutters whereas I had wished for some arterial gushes!)..." "...I felt this dmod idea could have had more impact with blood spurting mightily from the dying houses as they gasped their last." Wow! That does sound exciting! I wish she had made this D-Mod instead.
Here's what redeemed this D-Mod for me: on one screen, there's a stairway leading down. If you go down there at the start, there's a big empty crater:
Totally snoresville, man.
But as you kill, it fills up with blood! Yes, the implication is that rivers of blood are flowing to this spot like a shower drain and filling up an underground lake with the stuff. There are three different levels you can see the lake at, not including empty. This. is. Amazing! What a great idea! Bravo!
*hideous, evil cackling*
There is one person who fights back. After you've killed all the people and houses (yes, killed the houses), a knight in armor shows up. She (we're told it's a woman) doesn't believe it's Dink who killed everybody at first, but when she realizes he's the culprit, she's understandably pissed off. You're given the option to taunt her into using potions and make the fight harder, but even if you do, she's a cinch. After that, you pay one last visit to the blood lake. It turns out that, by filling the lake with blood, you've summoned a demon's spirit, who possesses Dink... but the joke's on it, because there are already no fewer than ten spirits/voices in there already, including a cameo appearance by Mr. SBV from "The Green Voice in My Head." It's not a bad ending.
New stuff: I'm pretty sure the blood lake graphics are new. While I've seen a bunch of "magic punch" attacks before, this is the first one meant to kill buildings with.
Carnage rating: 3 out of 5 Dead Dragon Carcasses. It'd be lower because of the unsatisfying killing, but that blood lake is brilliant.
Directory
1998 | HTML version
1999 | HTML version
2000 | HTML version
2001 | Article version
2002 | Article version
2003
2004
2005
2006
2007
2008-2009
2010
After a 2-year rebound, D-Mod production finally slowed down for what seems so far to be for good in 2011. But let's take a moment to remember that at this point, Dink Smallwood was over thirteen years old! D-Mod making slowed down at this point, but it didn't stop, and that is crazy. We're beyond "impressive" at this point. How have D-Mods remained an ongoing event? Contests have helped. Of the remaining 28 mods, 12 of them (~43%) are contest entries.
Since there have been relatively few D-Mods released since the end of 2010, it makes sense to take 'em all on at once. Scratcher and Sparrowhawk are probably sick of the sticky/unsticky carousel anyway. There is still time for you to get your new D-Mod written up if you hurry, but when that D-Mods remaining count hits zero, COTPATD Inc. is closing its doors for good.
There are some interesting-looking D-Mods in the last few years. I'm looking forward to playing them. And of course, I'll get the chance to talk a lot about myself soon. Lord knows I enjoy that.
===2011===
I've got nine D-Mods on my list with a 2011 release. Five of them - more than half! - are entries in the "Carnage Contest," which seems like a very different sort of theme than the ones we've had so far. "Power of Blood" and "The Blacksmith's Trail" are very highly regarded if ratings are anything to go by. But first, let's look at a D-Mod that seems to have given a breath of fresh air to the community by doing something totally new and different.
325: Broken Windows Author: Sparrowhawk Release Date: January 12, 2011
"Oh, Windows is so full of security holes, you know,"
REPUTATION NOTE: This D-Mod is one of the select group with a score of 9.0 or better (9.0) on The Dink Network.
I shouldn't be surprised that the author of "Bug Mania" continued to take Dink in interesting new directions that nobody had thought of before, and to show off impressive technical skill to boot. In "Broken Windows," Dink's ancient world breaks apart and he finds himself stranded in the nearly as ancient world of Windows XP (heh heh).
And to think it all started with an actual broken window.
Even the introduction set in Dink's regular world is impressive. The opening cutscene is really smooth. It uses lots of sound effects to tell a little story, and Dink moves and plays a special animation at the same time as he's kicked out of the pub. The animation frames are carefully controlled using sp_pframe so that the animation lines up perfectly with the movement (and also to alter the animation by not playing all of the frames in the usual order). There's a lot of movement in general in scenes in this D-Mod, something that most authors (especially including me, sadly) avoid whenever possible to reduce work. When the screen goes black and dink pops up out of the nothingness, the motion is very convincing.
Anyway, the game "crashes" to a rather convincing blue screen of death and Windows must restart, but Dink finds himself marooned in the OS. The object is to find your way back home, but really the whole thing is an excuse to show off neat scripting applications and tell computer jokes. Dink proclaims that the start button is a good place to start and laughs loudly. He jokes about the name of just about every folder in the C:/ drive. CCleaner summons a bunch of cleaning women to sweep the desktop clean. "Drivers" makes driving sound effects. Starting World of Warcraft results in Dink never being seen again. Firefox is a literal fox with fire powers.
Haha look, it's a "fire wall."
Not just worms. There's also aquatic sheep, explosive grannies, mole bombs, concrete donkey...
There are several things you can do that serve no purpose but messing around. You can change the MIDI by going to "My Music." (Actually, on my first run I couldn't hear any MIDIs, but that had nothing to do with the D-Mod. I've been having a problem lately where FreeDink refuses to play MIDIs anymore, and won't play them again until I restart my whole computer.) You can open Paint, select colors, and draw with the airbrush by walking Dink around the window. You can type a little document in Microsoft Word. In "My Pictures," you can see a few silly pics of people cosplaying as Dink Smallwood.
You have to type pretty slowly or it'll miss some letters. Still, what fun.
Watch out, ducky!
The Firefox boss is pretty tough, and took me a couple of tries. It alternates between throwing fireballs at you and attempting to lunge and bite you. If you didn't get the fireball back during the intro segment, I'd say you're pretty much screwed here. With it, it was manageable, but kept me on my toes. That's fine - it's the only actual challenge between you and the ending, so it might as well put up a fight.
At least it isn't a Mozilla.
There's an aborted attempt at a solitaire game. It's too bad that it wasn't finished; having a solitaire game in the Dink engine would be amazing and the most impressive thing in a D-Mod that impresses all over. I can understand not wanting to deal with the enormous headache of getting it to work, though. You can feel Sparrowhawk's grief and pain if you go through the scripts:
//Using &return here doesn't work! It works usually, it's worked up until now (D-Mod almost finished), //and it just stops working! Out of the blue! Why? WHY? Aaaaaaaarrrrghh
I know that feeling. DinkC hates you for trying to make it work the way the documentation claims it will. It really starts to feel personal after a while.
After you mess around for a while and beat the dread Firefox, you gain access to the directory list, where again, Dink has a lot of little jokes to make about the names. For example, DAEMON tools summons an actual daemon (or demon). When you've seen everything, you select the Dink Smallwood folder (not Dink Smallwood HD, which Dink imagines stands for "Hero Dink") and Dink picks up where he left off, being his incorrigible, rascally self in the setting he's so familiar with. Ah.
"Broken Windows" is a short D-Mod, but a lot of time has been put into the details. Not only is there a lot to do, but care has been taken to make sure little things look or feel right, like folders being highlighted when you "select" them by walking over them. "Dink explores Windows" is a neat idea, sure, but anybody could have had the idea. What's really neat about this D-Mod is the execution.
326: The Dink Wars (Demo) Author: Thor Release Date: January 16, 2011
"This areas still under construction so dont expect too much."
Whoa, the God of Thunder released a D-Mod! Well, part of one, anyway... Hmm. I hope my computer doesn't get wiped out by lightning while I try to write this. For that matter, I hope I don't get wiped out by lightning while I try to write this.
Once again, this really feels more like an unfinished D-Mod than a demo that stops at a place that makes sense, but at least this one has a point where you can definitely say you've reached the end and "won." Not that I managed to make it there without cheating. I don't really recommend anybody else try to either. After an easy start, the enemies quickly become far too tough and strong for you to handle. Furthermore, the boncas in the dark forest section won't drop hearts, and the gold they drop can't be collected.
Seriously! 326 D-Mods, and I'm still coming across new bugs I've never seen before.
"Dink Wars," which might also be called "Kendo" since that's the name of its folder and the only word in its dmod.diz, has a serviceable plot that doesn't stand out from others like it in any way. Dink is at home with his wife and eerie tiny-Dink-clone sons. Dink's wife tells him to go get firewood. Once he does, he comes home to find his wife murdered and his sons kidnapped by the winner of the 14th annual Generic Villain Competition (he calls himself "The Dark Lord," for crying out loud). Boy, the life expectancy of Dink family members is abysmal. At least he has kids in this one. How come so few D-Mods have made Dink a father? Are we to believe he fires blanks? Or has Martridge given him some kind of magical contraceptive? Now that would be a public service.
I know you do, baby. You're only human.
There isn't too much to do after that discovery. You can rescue a guy named Andrew Coward (A. Coward, get it?) from a bonca, but you don't have to. Eventually you'll reach an area called "the pits" (too easy), where there are loads of monsters and screenlocks for the masochistic, but this section might not even work. When I beat the enemies with my cheat-boosted stats, the screen wouldn't unlock. Only by directly unlocking the screen could I reach the sign telling you that the demo was over.
There is an interesting screen at the end where you have to be careful about hitting barrels that may be explosive in order to progress.
There are more problems. Tiling is bad, especially in caves and on water. There are a lot of hardness errors on both indoor and outdoor screens. There's no music. Events that freeze you for a long time are repeated every time you enter certain screens. There's a couple of big chunks of dialogue lifted directly from Pulp Fiction and peppered with misspellings. Some NPCs leave you frozen, forcing you to quit and load a game. The hedge maze toward the end is quite ugly. One positive element is that some of the interior screens looked good and had interesting ideas for decoration. I also liked that a few pieces of decoration yielded different dialogue after the kidnapping took place.
Look, it's a post office! That's neat. I'm permanently frozen in this screenshot, though.
Honestly, I didn't find much to enjoy here. "Dink Wars" isn't one of the worst D-Mods, but I've seen more promise in others that were worse. Sometimes I think a D-Mod might be cool if certain issues were fixed, but I feel like this one would just go from mediocre and broken to mediocre and well-built.
--The Carnage D-Mod Contest--
On February 9, 2011, the Carnage Contest was announced. The basic rule was really simple: have lots of carnage (that is, people dying violently) in your D-Mod. This theme was apparently the brainchild of the bloodthirsty MsDink. You might call it the polar opposite of the previous contest; then again, you could still enter a non-combat D-Mod. There's nothing that says the player character has to be involved in the carnage.
There was an extra requirement that some authors may have found difficult to meet.
4. Must have at least one new thing incorporated whether it is weapons, magic, sprites, fighting system. Anything new - use your imagination!
5. The one thing in point 4 (minimum of one) needs to be new to Dink OR previously developed by someone else, but not used in any actual dmod yet.
Ah, but there's an out for those who can't come up with something new themselves. I think it's good to encourage people to use the dev files on the site, and there are certainly still some of them that have never been used. However, it might be tough for an author to know what's been used and what hasn't. I used quite a few graphics packs in "Malachi the Jerk," but I don't think any of them had never been used before except for VonZeppelin's Dink Toupee. Anyway, I'll keep an eye out for new things in the entries.
The deadline for the contest was April 12th. I'm not sure exactly when the five entries were released because there was no news post about it! It is ever a frustrating task to catalog the history of this place. I think it was April 13th, though, and that's what I'm going with.
327: The End of Snoresville Author: Merder Release Date: April 13, 2011
"this town is to be dinkolished. *evil laughter*"
This D-Mod came in last place, and it's not hard to see why - it's terrible. Even so, it really shows the potential of the theme when even a D-Mod as bad as this one had me grinning at one point.
It's been a while (DinkDoodler's work in 2009) since I've seen a D-Mod with this kind of disregard for how a D-Mod is supposed to be put together. The screens have no borders, they're mostly empty seas of cobblestone, and hardness is a joke. Seriously, there isn't a single bit of hardness that serves its intended purpose. The houses have an inadequate hardbox that doesn't prevent you from walking "into" them, and in the two spots where there are supposed to be tile-based borders, you can slip right past them. This D-Mod would be a sure DFMAOB recipient if it didn't contain one extremely cool idea. I'll get to that.
The premise is about as simple as it can get: Dink comes to a town so boring, they named it Snoresville. I can't disagree, from getting a look at it. All the people there moan constantly about how boring it is and how they wish something interesting would happen. Knowing what I was there to do, I have to hand it to Merder - that is a pretty amazing setup.
Ooooh, they're BEGGIN' for it. Slaughter time!
It would be nice, though, if each NPC had something to say rather than everything being pulled at random from two short lists.
Unfortunately, the anticipation is the best part. Actually killing the townsfolk is rather boring because they hardly do anything in response. They make screaming or grunting noises when you hit them (the little girl sounds like a loudly squeaking mouse), but they don't run away, fight back or have anything to say. You'd think they'd panic or at least complain. Actually, given the setup it might be funnier if they were apathetic or even glad that something interesting was finally happening in their town. Dink, for his part, emotionlessly counts off the deaths. "And that's no 18," he says. "And that's no 19."
You also have to destroy the houses, which amusingly bleed when you punch them. The regular punch doesn't really do the trick, though. You have to use a "magic punch" spell that you find. I used it on the people, too - it comes out a lot faster than the normal punch. Dink excitedly says, "I can hear bones crunching!" as you wreck the houses.
Incidentally, you've got to check out MsDink's review, in which her impressive thirst for carnage is laid bare for all to see. "I did like how you can kill the houses but as a contest entry for carnage, they didn't bleed enough (minimal splutters whereas I had wished for some arterial gushes!)..." "...I felt this dmod idea could have had more impact with blood spurting mightily from the dying houses as they gasped their last." Wow! That does sound exciting! I wish she had made this D-Mod instead.
Here's what redeemed this D-Mod for me: on one screen, there's a stairway leading down. If you go down there at the start, there's a big empty crater:
Totally snoresville, man.
But as you kill, it fills up with blood! Yes, the implication is that rivers of blood are flowing to this spot like a shower drain and filling up an underground lake with the stuff. There are three different levels you can see the lake at, not including empty. This. is. Amazing! What a great idea! Bravo!
*hideous, evil cackling*
There is one person who fights back. After you've killed all the people and houses (yes, killed the houses), a knight in armor shows up. She (we're told it's a woman) doesn't believe it's Dink who killed everybody at first, but when she realizes he's the culprit, she's understandably pissed off. You're given the option to taunt her into using potions and make the fight harder, but even if you do, she's a cinch. After that, you pay one last visit to the blood lake. It turns out that, by filling the lake with blood, you've summoned a demon's spirit, who possesses Dink... but the joke's on it, because there are already no fewer than ten spirits/voices in there already, including a cameo appearance by Mr. SBV from "The Green Voice in My Head." It's not a bad ending.
New stuff: I'm pretty sure the blood lake graphics are new. While I've seen a bunch of "magic punch" attacks before, this is the first one meant to kill buildings with.
Carnage rating: 3 out of 5 Dead Dragon Carcasses. It'd be lower because of the unsatisfying killing, but that blood lake is brilliant.
