The Dink Network

What ever happened to Charlie?

Will the house be forever vacant, with no answers?

Find out as Dink visits the land of Phospher, and uncover the secret of Horn Lace Tactic and Real Shoe UFOs.

Please note, during testing, the 'tab' engine speed up encouraged strange un-explainable bugs to occur in the dmod. It is recommended to avoid using it.

This epic DMOD has many good things about and a few annoying things that a lot of epic DMODs suffer from: too much walking and not enough updating or help from NPCs.

There has been a lot of thought put into the making of this DMOD, and the level of ingenuity with scripting is very impressive.

Story: 8.5 out of 10. The basic premise is an interesting one: who is Charlie and why is he burning houses. I did like how this DMOD tied directly to the original game and Dink's mother's death. Finally getting the mystery of who is responsible for the house fire I thought great, and a really strong driving force for Dink, and therefore the player, to track down Charlie and hold him accountable. But this objective gets lost at times, as the DMOD is combined with a "meta" aspect in which the DMOD authors are part of the game, which for me, distanced me from the drama of bringing an evil pyromaniac to justice. There is an interesting and impressive dovetailing of these two story aspects when Dink finally battles Charlie at the end of the game, but by this time I was more annoyed with the "fetch X for Y" parody that goes on forever in the middle of the game, and the lack of clues from NPCs, or updating conversations that I only bothered to finish for the game for sake of finishing, not because the story was driving me forward. The fetch parody came across as deliberately wanting to make the player feel stupid for participating in it. Then there is the characterisation of Dink, he comes across as too unpleasant, not sure if it was the swearing or the attitude his dialogue took, but I took an immediate dislike to him and wasn't so invested in him succeeding because of this.

Map: 9.5 out of 10. Generally a very good map design, with lots of decorations on many screens. Having the map expand as you explored was a nice idea and well implemented, although why having Dink's position not show up as the yellow sparkle was disappointing. There was one hardness error I inadvertently discovered around the big rock at the bottom cliff that you push aside, somehow I ended up walking on the cliff face. There was also a Lock Screen in the first underground section in which a slime had gotten stuck behind the touch damaging dark green vines and was no longer visible. But as my health was pretty low I would die trying to kill it because of the vine, not because the slime was attacking me. Luckily I had a bomb I could rush in and drop this then rush out before dying to dispose of this pesky enemy. But not being able to see the slime at all, and having to guess it was there was a fault in the map design for that screen. The other somewhat annoying aspect was the warps in and out of secret areas, you would easily zap back to the original screen because of the placement of the returning warp sprite and the direction Dink is facing when he first warps if you are still pressing the arrow key. The rain effect was good, at first, but got tedious after a while. It would have been more interesting, given the "meta" aspect of the authors being part of the game to have Dink curse the weather after a number of times thus allowing the authors to either stop the rain, or completely drench Dink in a torrential downpour, or something funny. I also wished the lava tiles moved, or were animated like the standard fire tiles are. And the bomb maker seemed to be kill-able by attacking and then blowing up his cave, only to have him reappear alive on top of the surface. I was expecting to see some sign of the damage the next time I went down there and was disappointed when there was none.

Music/Sound: 8.8 out of 10. Overall the music was okay with certain sections feeling more electronic gameboy than retrorpg, but music is subjective, so for me there were times I found it annoying. I did enjoy the jukebox stuff in one of the bars though. There was nothing that stood out for the sound fx, other than the rain which I've already mentioned.

Graphics: 9 out of 10. Quite a few new graphics, such as a new status bar, tiles, signs, warps as well as a few from previous DMODs. The new status bar felt very 2D to me, flat and a little strange, like a cross between reptile skin and a cartoon. The red coloured life bars for Dink would have benefited from being changed to a different colour to contrast better with red in the new status bar graphic. Either a light blue or green for the life bar. The boss enemy health bars were great. There was a lot of text placed on backgrounds, and besides the latin one, which made me smile, got a bit plain vanilla boring.

Gameplay: 9 out of 10. This DMOD Is a great mix of fighting and puzzle solving, let down by too much walking and not enough updating of NPCs conversations as the story progresses. I loved the puzzle aspects, far more than the fighting. In fact the mini boss enemies that disappear and reappear got too repetitive for me. The tile puzzles probably could have started with a smaller number of tiles for the one based on that ugly Dink artwork and then progressed to the bigger version for the Robj logo. Loved the head moving puzzle and the locked box in the bar. Thought the password to the goblin boss great play on words, shame you are just given this and it wasn't a true puzzle. Was annoyed with the "activate the volcanoes in the right sequence" puzzle as there didn't seem to be any clues to help on which volcano you needed to press first once the amulet gave the clue as to which screen next, and if you got it wrong the whole puzzle would reset. DinkHD auto save got around that. My main criticism of this DMOD's gameplay is the lack of NPCs updating their conversations as the game progresses. Some conversations need to be available for repeating in case clues or objectives have been missed, or forgotten, but others don't. There is also a lot of expositional material dumped on the player which I found tedious and boring. I'm not a fan of the overly long descriptive titles in a choice menu, especially if they remain the same no matter where the story is it. It made me not want to talk to the NPCs. I thought the gameplay could have been improved by having the Taux God statue give more clues as to what to do, getting ride of having to equip the talisman each time to pass through the force field, not having screenlock monsters reappear on screens you have to walk through to get from one place to the next. Also having a reward for killing all the ducks surrounding the big duck statue from outside the fence would have been nice. At one point I thought you had to do that to get in to blow up the statue. Humour is present, but it is, at times, the wrong side of unpleasant for me some of the conversations with the females in particular.

Overall 9 out of 10. An interesting, well thought out DMOD in which the authors have shown remarkable ingenuity but in the end I was disappointed I didn't get to enjoy as much as I wanted to and had to force myself to complete. Definitely worth a play if the things I found unpleasant don't bother you.