The Dink Network

Legend of the Ancients: The Capture

Dink casts a new fiery spell. From the COTPATD project.
August 29th, 2009
v1.00
Score : 4.7 tolerable
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metatarasal
Bard He/Him Netherlands
I object 
The Legend of the Ancients is a bit of a crossover between a weird DMOD and a brute force DMODing attempt. It has the kind of ingenious use of stock elements in bizarre situations that makes you scratch your head.

Let's start with the story: An evil ancient has kidnapped a set of other ancients. Good riddance you'd say, but apparently you should try to save these ancients. I guess not every ancient is a villain then. Some ancients, apparently, are actually persons known from the Dinknetwork forums. These are the ancients featured in this DMOD. So, I suppose this story is rather nice if you're among those represented in the DMOD. But I'm not one of them, so I hope I can see this story from a more neutral perspective.

And from my perspective the story was quite weak and shallow. I mean these ancients are really just ordinary people locked up in a small prison cell, I really can't see what's so ancient about them. And the guardian of light (zeddexx himself) spends too much time on the Dinknetwork to help his fellow ancients (=fellow board members). You'd think this DMOD's is a bit of a joke. And I suppose it is, it's just not particularly funny. And in my book a bad joke is worse than no joke at all.

Gameplay isn't this DMOD's strong point either. You're basically dumped in a world with no clear indication about what you should be doing. So, you start the game collecting power-ups and being warped into rather strange pieces of land. And that's pretty much what you're going to be doing for most of the game. Later on you'll get a story, a magic spell a sword and some bombs, but most of the game is still about warping you from one strange place to another. These places are strange because of their strange uses of standard sprites. There are magic stars everywhere... This rather ingenious use of sprites made me smile as it reminded me of some brute force DMODing attempts I've seen in the past. But I'm still not sure if that's a good thing.

The fighting in this DMOD is pretty much worthless, as long as you get all the power-ups in the DMOD the enemies should be a complete walkover. Not that you'd have to bother about beating them if they weren't. The huge amount of power-ups make level raises seem redundant, and you wouldn't need their gold or health either as there is plenty of health to be found in the map anyway and you can't spend the gold you find on anything.

So, I can't say that I really enjoyed this DMOD. I just felt as if I'm working my way through to the end. But from a different perspective: The DMOD didn't feel genuinely bad, it wasn't unplayable or totally riddled with bugs (though it had a few), it just failed to entertain me.

4.7