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This is another one that went up on the now-defunct Contains2 website, so I have no idea when it happened, but we can assume probably still in 2004.
Page 1: Going from a blue-skies and surface level to a cave level is directly Mario-inspired. I think there’s a cave entrance that looks something like this in Mario 2?
This is the first of Dennis’s wardrobe changes between levels. If either of these first two outfits were references to anything I don’t remember it, but the red in Level 1 and now green does make me think of Mario and Luigi, naturally. The lack of suspenders makes me assume I was not going for them, though. He also inexplicably heals between levels.
“Entering the cave makes him be inside the cave” and similar redundant or grammatically-incorrect phrases were a reference to badly translated text in games.
The actual entry into the cave is definitely supposed to be like one of those parts in the game where you’d hit up on a door to go inside.
Page 2: We have more bats, thus cementing them as the repeating foes.
Page 4: The goblin doesn’t feel like a reference to any platformer I can think of, though I’m sure there are some. I suppose I just though goblins are just generic foes, so I threw one in. As I said in the Level One commentary PC adventure games were actually more my thing than platformers, so when I think of goblins, the ones I think of are from Quest for Glory (well, the Hero’s Quest version is the one that comes to mind, but we needn’t get into that here).
But hey, the goblin’s spear gets one of those motion lines like Dennis has.
The rest: I guess skeletons and dragons can be platformer enemies, but they don’t feel like specific references to me. Inexplicably the dragon is one of the most pixelly characters in the game and I like it. The fire is very not so and it annoys me.
The dragon being afraid for its life is meant to make one doubt the inherent goodness of Dennis’s quest. That said, the dragon is willing a member of the bad guy team, so we can’t claim it is an innocent. Such depth of storytelling!
