The Dink Network

Happy Color

July 15th, 2002
v2.00
Score : 6.8 fair
fish.gif
So the author asked me to rewrite my review since he did add quite a few things. So here is the new review.

First of all, I was a little disappointed that the author did not include enough "information" in his ReadMe files. I was hoping to see why ver. 2 was released, and maybe some credits to the one who caused this version to be born. (Hint! Hint!) But that is not a big deal.

For the new version, this time the author add 17 more screens in addition to the black title screen. Each screen has a commonly-used tile filled the screen. (In fact, the screen was filled as 600 x 300. There is a 600 x 100 black area on top of it; with the buttom 600 x 80 black, the author made it look like a wide screen similar to some movies on DVD/video. It looks quite good.

The 17 screens include grass, floor, forest, water, dried land, sand, mud, spiked land, fire, darkland, snow, icy water, pavement, dungeon, road, grey sand, and black. In principle, the list almost covered all the tiles that used in original Dink. If you do want to be picky, you could find a few tiles that were not included in here. For example, the mountain, hill, dungeon's path, 3 of the 4 pavement, building tiles, and white background. But you can't criticize a lot about this.

Different icons were made for the indicators of the color codes. They have the color of its respective color. It is very good. However, again, the author did not put an extra icon for default color. I don't know why he chose not to do again this time. But well, he did not need to take all my criticism, did he?

There is a little poem in MSWord doc format in story sub-dir. I don't quite know how to appreciate poem in English (not my mother tongue), but if you are into it, take a look. You might like it.

This file did use a midi from the original Dink. Well I cannot say much about this.

In principle, this is a much improved file over the original version, but my biggest criticism about this file is still the necessity of this file. Although this file let you test most of the tiles with all different colors, you still cannot know how the color looks like if some texts on top of another sprite (like wall, table,...). It's a nice bug-free little file, but I really don't think it is practically very useful.

This file basically shows you how the different colors look like on different tiles. You can now at least avoid some trivial mistakes like using code No. 8 in the dark area or No. 3 near water. But practically you might still need to see how the text would show in your dmod to really have a best result.

So my score would go from 5.0 for version 1.0 to 6.8 for version 2.0.