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I'm called Tim. I've been playing Dink since it came out, when I was a young, dumb kid.

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312: Grasp of Darkness Author: Quiztis Release Date: April 18, 2010
"There's something amiss on Freg Island."

Fun fact: Swedish Dinker Quiztis is neither a Quiz nor a Tis. I was surprised when I found out, too.

"Grasp of Darkness" has been updated a bunch. It's been updated three times since I started this project - once just a couple of days after the very first COTPATD post, once back in May, and again several days ago.

The description, readme and intro all warn the player that this is a difficult D-Mod, so I was wary. I was afraid that it was going to be another mod full of next-to-impossible battles that was going to make my life a stressful time. In fact, it wasn't too bad at all. There were a few parts I briefly thought were impossible, but it turned out that I was just approaching them in the wrong way. Actually, I thought "Grasp of Darkness" was a lot of fun. Heck, it might be my favorite D-Mod of 2010 so far due to sheer fun factor. For what it's worth, it won D-Mod of the Year back when the community used to vote on such things. On the other hand, it won with a grand total of 4 votes. Hmmm.

"Grasp of Darkness" (I wonder if Quiztis gave it that title just so people would call it GOD) identifies itself as a "collect-em-all D-Mod" in the rarely-edited Help section of the escape menu. If you manage to collect all the weapons, stat potions, elixirs, gold hearts and gold in the D-Mod, you receive a Reward. Now there's an incentive to hunt down secrets. They're not terribly hard to find, but I still ended up missing just one of them (argh) on my way to the end. However, I was able to load my save from before the point of no return and go back to get it. I couldn't have lost more than ten minutes' progress. It was a bit annoying, but far from the end of the world. This is a good way to handle this sort of requirement - it DOES matter if you've missed something, but you don't have to re-do the whole game.


Dink is bestowed with a Reward.

You're given an option to receive a stat boost at the start, but it only makes you start with 2 strength instead of 1 and doesn't effect your other stats. Hey, I took it - why not? You also get a chance to cheaply buy some herb boots early on, but you're warned that you can't get the Reward if you use them, so as much as I love herb boots, I passed.


Incidentally, you shouldn't mess with Easy Mode Herb Boots guy.

The story is pretty typical stuff. The Island of Freg is beset by an unknown menace, which turns out to be an Evil Wizard of the Week by the name of Darius the Cruel. Darius's evil wizardry seems to involve turning people, lands and houses into darkness - literally, into shadows and such. Half of what makes this D-Mod so enjoyable is that the story and dialogue have that sharp sort of silliness that is common to most of the funniest D-Mods. The text is very clever and had me laughing regularly. In a twist on the usual fourth-wall-breaking jokes, everybody seems to have some awareness of the fact they're in a video game EXCEPT Dink. Every time somebody mentions the game, D-Mods or something like a strength statistic, Dink doesn't know what the Hell they're talking about. He becomes increasingly agitated as people keep bringing this sort of thing up, which makes for a fun running gag. The Epic Collect-em-all Reward includes a sword called the SLASHMASTER 3000, which has a price tag that reads, "2.99." Dink meets some loony characters like the paranoid and mildly crazy King Charlie, whose enduring respect Dink earns by cleaning out his basement. Maybe I'm easily amused, but this exchange between Charlie and one of his guards after Dink is sent off on the final leg of his quest cracked me up:

Frank: Do you think he'll make it?
Charlie: He cleaned my basement, Frank.
Frank: D'oh! That's right. How silly of me.


And then there's these two guys who swap yo mama jokes. Some are funny, others are just plain bizarre.

What impressed me the most about Quiztis's D-Mod is that, rather than just cranking up enemy stats to be a "hard D-Mod," it finds a variety of interesting and involving ways to present a challenge. The game plays like a series of compact, efficient challenges, each under a slightly different set of circumstances and often requiring the player to figure out how best to proceed before they'll be able to win. A timed challenge where you have to kill pillbugs to proceed doesn't give you enough time to win unless you get the pillbugs to group together and take out several at once. There's a boss who lies about its weak point and tells you to do pretty much the opposite of what you should actually do, which makes a lot of sense when you think about it. Another section has Dink carrying a series of increasingly cumbersome objects that restrict his access to his backpack, culminating in a section where you have to fight three tough slayers in a row, one at a time, using only your fists. To beat them, I had to get close enough for them to take a swipe at me, dodge, and come back in to hit them once, retreating again before they felt like taking another swipe. Strategy!


Well, of course it does.

There are two endings (well, three, but two of them are earned the same way) to "Grasp of Darkness." You can head right for Darius, or you can step through a perplexing warp to an especially dreary version of the Darklands, where you fight the dread secret boss named Farmer Bob. Bob is a tough one. In addition to shooting Hellfire at you, he has a "Perish Aura" that makes Dink constantly take damage and, worse yet, a time limit. I doubt it's possible to beat him without using elixirs. If you got the Reward, you have the chance to fight a harder version of Bob. I gave it a shot and won on my first try with just two seconds to spare... whereupon the game crashed. I am not making this up, it crashed to Windows the moment I defeated him. I wrote "WTF WTF WTF" in my notes. In the next several attempts I could not replicate this performance, so I beat the non-hard Bob. Whatever, *I* still know I'm Captain Awesome. I can't say what caused the crash, but it wasn't the only one I experienced. I had another crash during the Darius boss fight, while fighting his shadow pets. I also ran into a bug where, if you press talk too quickly when the text "Show yourself!" displays in between phases of the Darius fight, a "talking to nothing" response comes up and the cutscene never continues, leaving you trapped.


This warp effect looks really smooth and cool in motion.


Darius hangs out in a gray forest. Watch out for those electrified walls, they will kill you in a hurry.

Quiztis is working on a prequel, but it will be very different and take the form of some kind of turn-based puzzler. Whatever it is, I'd be interested to play it.

313: Dink Z Trivia Author: Zeddexx Release Date: May 12, 2010
"*Blush* Heyeahhhh....i AM alowed a LITTLE vanity!"

Does anybody remember "Dink X Trivia," JVeenhof's quiz D-Mod from 2000 that was made to promote a not-terribly-long-lived Dink website? Cocomonkey Farms remembers. I played it when it came out, and noted that I was mentioned in it. I don't remember it setting the community on fire at the time, though, and there's even less reason to play it now, so I was surprised that Zeddexx felt a further installment was warranted. But hey, here we go: more Dink community trivia. This one has more questions than "Dink X," at least.

This D-Mod received an update in 2011. I mention this because it has the funniest release notes I've seen so far: "Now with reduced vanity!" I'm tempted to download the old version to see what he's talking about. Heck, I did. There's just an additional question or two about Zeddexx himself.

There are three question categories: "The DN," People and D-Mods. The first category's button graphic is missing, so there only appear to be only two categories, but I correctly guessed that there was a third button in the empty space. The DN category features some specific questions about events on the forum at the time, so I didn't do as well on it as I did on the other categories.


On top of the missing button, the title screen uses "you're" in place of "your."

I can see why people wouldn't find this to be too interesting, and you certainly wouldn't want to play it more than once, but for what it's worth, I liked it more than "Dink X Trivia." There are more questions, and more special responses to certain answers. A few of the questions are kind of funny, and one of them made me laugh out loud. Some questions are confusing or opinion-based, and at least one of the "right" answers is wrong, but it doesn't really matter that much. I guess it's a bit worse as a trivia game than "Dink X," but it is more recent and I'd argue more entertaining, not that anybody is demanding games of Dink trivia at any rate.


Bahahahaha! ...Uh, sorry MsDinky... >_>


I keep looking for WC, but he doesn't seem to be there.

Some concepts don't seem to have a lot of potential and a Dink trivia game is one of them. Still, I wonder if you could make a game along these lines that would really draw people in. Maybe go full You Don't Know Jack with it, with high-quality presentation and three player games where you have to buzz in. That would be an awful lot of effort, though, for something that would still probably elicit a response of "Why?" from many. Actually, the best Dink Quiz I've seen is easily the one in "Quest for Not Quite as Lame." You could at least have done as well as that, people who made entirely-quiz-based D-Mods.