The Dink Network

Ric says, "Thanks for playing my dmod. Playing it offers you the chance to be good or evil, or a fighter or mage. These parallel game paths will hopefully make play more realistic, knowing your actions will change the path of the game. The game contains three new weapons and five new spells. It might be worth playing twice!"

*Best download of september 2003*

I've played the version with patch 1.1.

Summary: Dink starts out as a Duck and then agrees to help Matridge free a town from the evil clutches of the "Bringer of Light"

This DMOD has a lot of good things going for it, but it still has a number of annoying bugs.

Graphics: Some graphics from other DMODs which is nice. Some new bits of scenery and items which is always welcome. Dink is made small a couple of times which kinda works except for moving around and talking to some objects.

Map: Nice work in general, although I found myself continually getting hung on bits of hardness in the forest. A little too cluttered for my tastes, a couple of hardness bugs at edges of the cliff. But there is a lot of good detail work here.

Sounds: Loved a lot of the midis - especially the soundtrack to 1492 (I used this in SOB too - it's great), also the classical piece of Sceherazade. Sound effects were new, but the stuff for the boncas was too long a sound I found.

Scripting: lots of stuff here, with changing monsters on the same map - this I found this both good and bad, if you exited and entered the same screen quickly the types of monsters jumped around which was annoying... but if you were looking for some extra points/gold then doing this to get the grey boncas was handy.

Bugs: A few of these remain, which is annoying. There is a graphical glitch that appeared at times. Dink would idle and change direction. And when using fireball magic against trees a bmp of dink would appear in the tree sequence. I got the being put in jail sequence twice and one time the friendly Guard appeared and told be to climb down a tree. Never could figure out how to do this... so I just walked out the other door.

Sometimes the guards would say weird things... such as that the bridge was repaired leading to the north but it wasn't.

Meena would repeat herself even though I found the scroll before talking to her.

Conversation was missing in dialogue with Matridge - especially towards the end.

In the end I got the Sceptre about 5 times... Then Matridge didn't provide any help as to what to do next... but thankfully the girl in the Church did. I got frozen at the portal/gate to heaven, and had to force quit the game here.

The whole business of thief skills almost went by without me knowing about it, until a door leading to the Netherworld... it kept saying I would have to come back later as I couldn't pick it right now... this I found a little confusing. It was then I remembered someone talking on the DN about thief skills so... I went looking for the person who was meant to teach me thief skills - I found the Jackal but talking with him already assumed he had trained me - which he hadn't, but my thief skills were already so high. I then went into the scripts to see what has happening... found the Jackal script and realised that although I now had excellent thief skills - noone had told me about the "H" key. In the end I just bombed the door to get it open.

The evil Hades boss reappears if you kill it, and thinks it is talking to the skeleton army which wasn't there any longer. A number of mini-bosses (those with locked screens) should have been once only instead of reappearing all the time.

Also Mother's dialogue when you return to heaven with the complete secptre is not right... it gives you options to talk about the sphere... when you've already got it.

Specials: New play with choosing between warrior and mage. Very nice. Thief skills are great, shame they aren't more clearly explained.

Overall: A good DMOD, with some frustrating and some annoying bugs. And why does Dink start out as a duck????

Score: 8.5 out of 10