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January 11th 2015, 01:50 PM
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CocoMonkey
Bard He/Him United States
Please Cindy, say the whole name each time. 
328: Enter the Dead Dragon Carcass Author: Erwin Release Date: April 13, 2011
"Sacrifices must be made."

"Enter the Dead Dragon Carcass" came in fourth place. It features some very cool new magic, but it's ultimately little more than a demonstration for said magic.

There is a plot, but it's contained within the description. You play as a member of the Dead Dragon Carcass cult. You must use your powerful magic to slaughter the inhabitants of a village, as a lot of dead people are apparently required for some ritual. I've got no sympathy for this bunch of morons, who lack the common sense to go inside in order to avoid magical doom. They were probably going to die of something stupid anyway.

Your character, who I am going to call Cultist Betty because she hasn't got a name, is an interesting new recolor of the typical maiden sprite. She has a new set of default text defined in dnotalk.c, which is good, because that's almost all of the dialogue in the game. It's where I got the quote in the header from.


Betty's favorite daytime talk show had been cancelled. They'd pay. The whole world would pay.

So let's talk about the magic. You can turn into a bonca or a slayer if you just wanna whale on people, but that's boring. Your other options are more interesting: the "air gust" and "dagger drop" spells. Air gust is an attack you charge up. Enemies hit when you release it will be pushed backwards an amount determined by the charge level. If they get knocked into something hard, they'll take a little bit of damage. More importantly, if the charge is above a certain level, they'll be knocked to the ground for a little while. D-Mod authors take note: lots of nice sprites of various characters, including boncas, lying on the ground with no blood around them are here. I've seen many a D-Mod just use the corpse sprite for somebody who's lying down sick or something and not dead, and it is super weird and doesn't work. Use these instead.

Anyway, while they're on the ground and having little stars float around their heads, that's when you want to hit them with the dagger drop spell. It's a projectile that, when it hits somebody, summons a wicked cool purple dagger from the sky to stab them. If it hits somebody who's already been knocked down, it does quintuple damage. This isn't necessary to kill the weaker targets, but it's great for the ones who actually fight back.


Betty summons a dagger to stab a stunned guard. It won't fill the The Talk-shaped hole in her heart, but it's a start.

Spells use mana. You have the same mana bar from Erwin's "Day of the Carcass," but it charges a lot faster here and receives a boost when you kill somebody. Mana will never be a problem in this one. All it does is prevent you from spamming attacks without preventing you from getting two of them off in a hurry, as a higher magic cost would.

There are a couple of bugs. Sometimes enemies who have been blown around will stop animating and slide around in a still pose. Much weirder than that, I had an enemy suddenly transform into an animation of a cultist lady stabbing a little girl on a marble slab. There's a similar image on the title screen (which lacks a title, I might add), but it doesn't animate there.


It's bizarre to see slab, girl and all slide around as the stabbing goes on.

It's easy to win, but not so easy that you can't lose. I was careless on my first try and lost while trying to clear out the last remaining screen. On my second try, however, I had a spectacularly easy time. I discovered that enemies will usually freeze if you hit them with dagger drop while they're moving, making them easy pickings. When you slay the last of the townsfolk, Betty says her work is done and poofs away. A dragon's roar can be heard, and the D-Mod exits.

"Enter the DDC" shows more of the skill that produced "Day of the Carcass" in the new magic. The air gust in particular is a very clever piece of scripting. Without a little more to do with your new toys or more background on why you're doing so, however, it's not hard to see how it ended up in fourth place.

New stuff: New graphics and new magic.

Carnage rating: 2 DDCs out of 5. The new magic is fun, but killing all the people gets dull after a few screens. At least some of them fight back in this D-Mod, but they don't react at all when you hit them. They don't even scream like they did in "Snoresville." It feels strangely... bloodless. Like these aren't people you're killing. Compare it to "Mayhem," where attacked people flip out and try to run. That was much more satisfying.

329: Knight Soup Author: Synbi Release Date: April 13, 2011
"I'm gonna stick a spear in you and make mah a new scarecrow!"

I've liked that title ever since I first saw it. "Knight Soup." It's so evocative. Just... picture that. Try to see if you can hold that picture in your mind for just a second. My goodness.

"Knight Soup" took third place in the contest. It's a chaotic arcade-style game where you muscle your way through hordes of tiny but dangerous enemies. You can make the place plenty bloody by killing the little foes, but curiously, this isn't a "kill-em-all" game like the fifth and fourth place entries. In fact, I found that the best way to win involved dashing past everybody and killing very few of the enemies, which is kind of disappointing. It feels like this should be a game where you gleefully mow down absurd throngs of opponents, but it isn't. Engaging them is dangerous; running is clearly a better idea. It's possible to beat "Knight Soup" having killed exactly one enemy: the end boss. That's not very soupy.


Talkative bunch, ain't they?

The path is mostly simple and tunnel-like, but there are little forks every few screens. Mostly they just lead to one-screen spokes of the path. Some of these contain enemies and will screenlock (the only places you get screenlocked; it's best to figure out where these are and avoid them); others contain a fairy. There are seven fairies in the game, and they'll give you certain things to help you depending on how many fairies you've found. The first fairy gives you a powerful flamethrower spell, but it costs gold to use it (a later very gives you herb boots, which are VERY useful). You get one gold every time you kill an enemy, but no experience, so extra flamethrower casts are really the only benefit of killing enemies - in other words, you can ignore them. How many coins you need per cast changes with the difficulty level you select at the beginning. As far as I can tell, this is the only effect of the difficulty selection, so it doesn't have that much impact on the actual difficulty of beating the game. Having said that, I beat it on hard.


Dink uses the flamethrower spell.

I happened to find the one big secret area in the game. You fight a bonca boss and are rewarded with a sword (very useful) and a chance to mow down a bunch of defenseless DDC cultists, "just for the heck of it." Now that was some satisfying carnage.

This one does have a story - a silly story, but a story nonetheless. Dink is making fun of Chealse in Stonebrook for feeding pigs (using the same old words... I wish I'd thought to count the versions of that scene from the original game in D-Mods, there has to be over a dozen by now) when a bunch of knights of The Cast show up. They kill the girl (causing a GIANT blood spatter to cover the screen in an inspired bit of gore), having apparently mistaken her for Dink Smallwood because she's feeding pigs. They mistake Dink himself for Milder because "Nobody else can jeer at pig farmers with such authenticity but you, Milder." Nothing Dink says in the entire D-Mod can ever convince them he isn't Milder, which is pretty funny. I had always suspected the Cast were kind of dumb.


Whoops, you got some on the lens there.

The end boss is some kind of wizard who has been doing horrible experiments of some kind to Stonebrook and the surrounding area. Every time you hit him, he changes appearance. He casts a spell that does a lot of damage every FIFTH time it hits you, which is different. The difficulty setting does matter here because it determines how many shots of the powerful flamethrower you'll get to use against him. After I used the few you get on hard difficulty, I was able to finish him off with the secret sword without too much trouble.


Dink is counting to five. You don't want him to get to five.

It's a neat setup, with named levels and a manic appearance. It's just too bad that you'll most likely end up just running past everything. I tried playing again on easy with the intention of killing everything, but I couldn't make it far that way without dying. The risk/reward balance is tilted almost infinitely toward running away from enemies, which makes the game easy, short, and not as carnage-filled as you'd hope.

New stuff: The flamethrower spell is new. There was something kind of similar in "Outlander," but it had a longer range and the flames left behind kept damaging enemies.

Carnage Rating: 4 out of 5 DDCs. Actually, the carnage was impressive. There were showers of blood whenever you hit things. Even in the intro when Dink punches a door, it explodes into a cloud of blood. This no doubt helped "Knight Soup" with at least one of the judges. I can't give top carnage marks to a game where you can win while killing just one enemy, though.