The Dink Network

Dink is down on his luck; homeless and penniless. Milder fast talks him into throwing a picnic party. Dink has to somehow get the food items for the party.

This wasn't a very good dmod, I must admit. I actually found it to be more annoying that anything else. I would normally just quit playing a dmod like this, except I thought I'd give it a review since it only had one so far and because that review gave it a score which I feel is totally unjustified.

There were a few things that I did like about the dmod, so I won't rank it with the worst dmods. And I could sense that the author was legitimately trying to create something good. I have played dmods where I felt the author wasn't even trying.

Well, I'll get to what really annoyed me with this dmod, but first I'll be positive and mention what was good. So here we go.

good:
There were some new graphics. Or, at least, I had not seen them before. Unfortunately there were very few and only one of them was decent. The others were pretty bad. But at least it was something new. There was also a fair bit of humor in this dmod. The humor was hit and miss for me, but some of the jokes were pretty good. There was one in particular that I liked. There were also some slightly original ideas. None of them improved the game-play much, but it's always good to see something original.

bad:
The most irritating thing in this dmod is a forest maze. I'm not a big fan of this type of maze to begin with, but this was the most annoying maze that I have personally experienced because there were hidden warps in there that would set you back. Even this wouldn't have been as bad if there was more to delineate one screen from another so you could remember the spots to avoid, but it was a boring and frustrating maze which just left me irritated. Most screens looked quite similar to other screens. And there was only one (somewhat) interesting thing in this maze. So this maze, while challenging, added absolutely nothing fun to the experience. Quite the opposite, in fact.

Another irritating thing was the conversations. The author omitted freeze/unfreeze in some of the conversations and had annoying waits it the rest. This made every conversation annoying as you had to wait in between every line of text. That made me feel impatient with every conversation.

The mapping was also very poorly done. There were too many instances where the tiles didn't match up properly. I've seen much worse, but it was definitely below average in this area. Also, There were many depth que errors, hardness errors, etc... But the worst was that the map was very bland and very sparsely decorated which makes one less enthusiastic to explore. Plus all the areas except the obnoxious forest maze looked pretty much alike. This also makes exploring less enjoyable. There should be more to delineate one area from another.

The story isn't very good. All you do is look for items for a picnic. This makes the whole dmod essentially a big fetch quest. While this doesn't automatically make a dmod bad, it does nothing to redeem it either.

So, overall there were some good things in there. If you corrected the most annoying things about this dmod, then you'd have a fairly decent romp. As it was, I found it annoying. My first instinct would be to give this a 2.5. But having played a fair number of dmods and having read a fair number of reviews, I will try to be more consistent with other reviews, since there are a lot of poor dmods that get scores higher than they deserve (IMHO). I'm going to make an educated guess then, based on my experience. I feel that had this dmod received several reviews, It would probably average out to somewhere around........... 5.0 maybe? So I'll give it that.

5.0