The Dink Network

Tyrsis says, "The boy Dink lives with his step-mother. His mother is dead, his father has gone to fight an unknown enemy. This is not the beginning of the story.
So, don't kill the pianist, he's trying his best..."

*Best download of january 2002*

I was probably one of the very few Dinkers that finished this dmod before any patch file was released. Considering the size of this dmod, it is quite amazing that there was no life-threatening bug in this Tyrsis's first dmod.

However, after a few patch releases, I still couldn't bring myself back to play it all over again, because this dmod is not so great that I would like to spend another 10 hours to go through it again.

Overall, the storyline is pretty good. Starting at a rather simple way as the original Dink was, Dink then found out his mom (and dad) did not die accidentally and his step mom is part of the evils who are responsible for his mom's death... (This dmod did mess up with some other dmod's timeline, but since most of Dinkers probably do not care that much.) You need to go to Temple of Light to face the great evil. Along the way you need to gather your lost letters. It's straightforward, but most of the quests are not very original and not necessarily related to Dink's parents. I believe the two different endings are determined if Dink collected all letters or not. That's quite nice, but unless you did get all letters and have the good ending, you don't really know if you miss any letters or not.

Although there is no big bug in the game, there are still quite a few bugs and annoying glitches throughout the game. In addition t what Simon and Dethlord mentioned in their reviews, I found the scripts about the final boss are buggy. It seems to me that Tyrsis had a script to check Dink's strength to decide the final boss's defense (as an anti-cheat, I believe). If Dink's strength is too low, she would increase Dink's strength by 90, but armed Dink with a sword! So if you decided to change your weapon, your extra strength would disappear. If you came in the final screen armed with bare fist, you would find the final boss was not that hard...

A few repeated secrets (talk to the trees with a tree pass). In fact, you can remove the hardness of the block pine trees by trying to burn them with fireballs, and you don't really need the tree pass at all.

I don't know if I can have other options to help the people in Refuge without killing them all, although the idea of finishing a quest that will end up hurting the people is a great idea.

There are quite a few new graphics. Some humor here and there.

Overall, this is a decent dmod and worth your time to play it at least once.