CONTINUE TO LEVEL NINE
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BACK TO MAIN ADVENTURE DENNIS PAGE
An underwater level was a must, of course. I don’t think that Dennis’s outfit is a reference to anything.
The post announcing that I put this one up on the site went up on the 7th of December, 2009 and I claimed I was nearing completion on the rest of them too.
I’ve said before that I have two regrets about Adventure Dennis. One was that I didn’t go for a pixel art style, the other is that it goes on for too long. I think if I had fit all the tropes and references into the levels leading up to this one, I could have had level 8 as the last level, which would have felt appropriate to games like Super Mario Bros.
Page 1: I used the water as an excuse to clean the blood from the Magic Sword so that in the remaining levels it could be bloodied up again.
Page 2: This level more than any other is about Dennis killing innocent animals.
Page 3: Unlike the animals, I’m willing to accept this diver actually is an enemy. If there was any intended video-game reference, I don’t remember it now. I doubt it was one.
Page 4: The cephalopod is meant to evoke the Bloopers from Super Mario Bros.
Page 5: In all the previous levels the bats attacked in a place where it would kinda make sense. Most were outside, and even the inside ones were a haunted house and an old castle. I made sure of that because I loved the idea of having the bats appear underwater and not acknowledging it at all.
Page 6: “Adventure Dennis is a stunning juggernaut of righteous fury and he will persevere!” is one of my favourite lines in the thing.
Page 7: There have been mermen in videogames (Quest for Glory V comes to mind for me), but mostly this is just me yet again using a generic fantasy foe instead of a direct reference. I did that more than I remembered.
The rest: I’ve always assumed the megalodon is probably not affiliated with King Demonevil, making it the only level boss who is just an innocent animal. But why, I am just realizing now many years later, would the gem appear when Dennis kills it? I choose to believe the megalodon had recently eaten someone in King Demonevil’s employ.
It has got to be a rarity for a comic to depict a megalodon and not at any point show a dorsal fin, right? That’s a weird choice I made, I think.
