Warning numero three: They may sound a bit pessimistic as well.
×Personally, I felt a little let-down by the hold in general. It may have been that my expectations were too high, it may have been all the hype about the hold, or it may have been the fact that
The Choice, which was the first SS hold I attempted, seemd so fresh and new, but it just didn't jump out as exciting to me. The majority of the secret rooms were clever, but a few just seemed cheap and uninteresting, namely the southenmost ones on Levels Seven and Twelve.
I think my biggest complaint was that you had a wonderful graphics engine to work with, but you just didn't use it to it's full potential. While most of the tiles built into JtRH were more suited for being outside, you had the custom image feature to work with (It would have been an insanely cool bonus to see new graphics), and you could have used the Mosaic tiles on a few levels as well. Also, there were some spots where there were 3x3 or 4x4 walls that would have looked nice as obstacles or statues, but were just left there. Neatherville on Level 24 was a nice example of using the new 2.0 engine, but you didn't do much on Level 25, and that made me sad.
Some of the script felt a bit forced, but for the most part, it was enjoyable. Challenges in-game were a really nice touch, and they gave rooms a second life and a good amount of replayability. The one script that stuck out at me as false was Level 8's secret room. Since this is supposed to be Beethro's first time in the Dungeon and as a prequel to JtRH's story, the room shouldn't have looked familiar. Having him say comments like "
This looks like an architect could make many harder version of this room"
would have been foreshadowing JtRH a bit, and would have been funny to laugh at the irony. No offense to whoever did the voice of the goblins, but I didn't find it as good as Mike Rimer's goblin voice. Call me biased.
The Neather script itself seemed awfully weird. First of all, he sounds like a high-class Englishman even though he was apparently trapped in the dungeon for many years. Of course, it may have been a bit bad timing that I watched a show about children who were deprived of attention and ended up losing their brain function to properly communicate and live a healthy life. Of course, I realise this is fiction and not reality, but I think that the script sounded too....civilized for the Neather. Also, having the Neather say "
Tar mother, EXPAND"
every thirsty moves sounds good on paper, but started to annoy me after the 3rd time.
The other thing that confused me was the tile selection. Since the Neather script defaulted to the Negotiator tile, why didn't you use that on all the custom scripts? Having the Neather change from Purple to Green and then back again looked a wee bit unprofessional, IMO. Of course, it confused me even more that Mike Rimer said in
this topic that the Neather's graphics had been updated for JtRH, so I was kinda dissapointed to not see him in there, especially for all the people who hadn't seen his original graphics before.
Yeah, I'm kinda being a bit negative on the whole thing. For the most part, I did enjoy it. While I still have yet to get behind the Master Wall, I have a nagging incling as to what it is based on what others have said, so we'll have to see. Nevertheless, it was nice to play KDD again, as I finished Level 15 for the first time, and the new secret rooms are, for the most part, both challenging and fun, but I'll give a final score after I master it.