The Dink Network

Smallwood-Man!

Murder
June 4th, 2011
ReleaseFinal+
Score : 7.8 good
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MsDink
Peasant She/Her New Zealand
Tag - Umm.. tag, you're it? 
Smallwood man

I am reviewing this in the hope that Absolution will review his decision to not complete it. All in all I found it to be an excellent start to a dmod and the errors I encountered would have (hopefully)been smoothed out before the final version was uploaded.

The dmod had nice new opening graphics, the music is quirky and fit well with the scenery (hard to tell if it fit the final version seeing as there is none planned), loved the mapping, different status bar looks good too, found the opening scene door a little hard to exit due to the shape, also due to hardness errors I can actually leave the room yet not leave the screen.

He has added a life bar to the monsters - personally I don't like this but it worked fine so no complaints and it does allow you to see all the monsters that are hidden by the abundant scenery. There were some (grass and beach) tiling glitches spread throughout, but again an unfinished first effort so pfft.

Choose a sword and the merchant gave me two and also gave me the cash it cost woot! Good deal from my end! If i pressed ctrl when the second sword was armed it quacked but never hit. To actually hit with it I had to press shift then it fired a fireball and sliced at the same time - quite effective really but not intended I imagine. In the end I used the first sword which gained strength after trying the other one.

Talking to the first guy in the tavern froze me and I had to restart because I didnt save (there was only 2 spaces to save games and both were used.)

Over all, this was an excellent start to a dmod and it's a real shame it will never be finished. The speech that was scripted, was exactly as if Absolution was talking (sometimes even to himself) which is half the hilarity if it. The mapping had an original *stamp* on it, I thought some of it was very inventive and (excusing the many hardness errors) visually pretty good. I did however find walking through some screens a bit annoying as the rocks on the ground were all hard, leaving me little space in some areas to pass by. I would like to see some of those have no hardness so as to make it easier to meander through the screens.

Never sure what I was supposed to be doing in this game, but as it was stated as unfinished can't really take that away from what actually was there. I really REALLY want this finished Absolution, you have made a really great start to this and with a bit of polish and fine tuning and a story line to work through, I can imagine this would be one pretty awesome dmod.

Due to it being unfinished and with little actionable storyline and so many depth and hardness errors (plus the re starting grr) in its current state I rate it as a 7.5

Now go finish it!
May 22nd, 2011
ReleaseFinal+
Score : 8.0 good
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It's too bad Absolution abandoned this D-Mod, because it could have been a good game.

Things I liked:

* The title screen
* The music choices
* The status bars on the enemies
* The new stats area
* The new locked screen indicators
* Dink's hexagonal house
* The map looks nice, with lots of interesting things everywhere. I liked the autumn-looking trees.
* The first surprise. Made it easy to level up!
* The dialogue wasn't dumb.
* It was amusing to see the author's note to himself in the girl's house.

Bad or strange things:

* It's a promising beginning to a story, but there isn't really enough of it to know if it will develop well.
* Most of the time there were only two save slots, and they were both filled already.
* There are some unfinished areas on the map, obviously, since this D-Mod was abandoned. Most notably, you can enter Milan, but there's nowhere to go in it.
* There are some bugs. Dink doesn't unfreeze after talking to the green guy in the bar. I had to close the game and restart it.
* The map has a few problems. There are some depth errors and a few tiling problems. On top of the cliff, in the screen just east of Milan, there's a big clump of rocks that a bonca was walking over but that Dink couldn't, so I was deprived of some gold. And in Traviss I got stuck in a locked screen behind a barrier of hedges and couldn't get to the bonca I needed to kill. Sometimes the bonca killed me and I had no way to fight back, and sometimes the bonca got stuck in a loop, continually attacking from a spot little too far away to hit me, and I had to exit the game. Also, for no visible reason I couldn't go west past Chakra's house.
* Here's a good bug: After talking to the weapons shop owner without paying anything, I got both swords anyway, and one of them (the stronger one?) added two points to my strength each time I equipped it. I pushed my strength up to 201 this way just for fun. Hitting with the stronger(?) sword produced a duck sound and no swing animation, and it didn't actually hit anything. But that was no problem, because my new strength stayed the same when I switched back to the other sword, which did hit things. This was handy after a certain key point in the plot.
* Dark gray text is kind of hard to read.

A lot of these would have been cleared up in beta testing, so I didn't count those against the score too much.