Some of you may remember that I yanked from a bag fractal a golden helm of overt, yet obscure, magical property. The question was raised as to what it actually did. Well, as of a few seconds after this screenshot was taken…
…I finally have an answer. The helmet remains on my head as I leap sideways off a bridge for no reason. I’m not saying this game’s controls are mishandled, but so far one hundred percent of my deaths have involved straight, narrow bridges with zero enemies.
Anyway, I can’t find the helmet again.
Re-loading my last save brings me back to the dark days when pants were thin on the ground, even for honest, steadfast, upwardly mobile and downwardly plummeting gentlemen of fortune such as myself. Fortunately, in time, I am able to harvest from the bumper crop of mewling scamps a reasonable armory.
For example, my shoulders will never long for the coverage of brass cornflakes ever again.
For another, check out my latest trousers. Description in yellow text, center bottom:
Pants of Assured Stalking. For you–the modern adventurer who who just can’t settle for probable stalking. You need your stalking assured, possibly even documented and notarized, and our pants have you covered. Also, your legs and butt.
In the process I find a few more of those E-Z Apocalypse stations, big fat red buttons crooning like rugged radio-era sex bombs. The designer apparently felt the seductive qualities of the button should be offset by the giant mauve skeleton next to it. Or vice-versa. Anyway, whenever I find an unjoined linkage, I join them back up again. I’m helping!
I run into a few more Vermai Oathkin (that’s the big ugly studio-sci-fi nondescript monsters with a penchant for squaredancing) and at least one of them beckons me to speak. Again, it’s a pretty short and fruitless conversation and ends in violence. I can’t help but wonder if my supernaturally poor personality and pronounced lack of education have anything to do with this.
I also run into a few more of those dremora fellas I showed you last time.
They mix up swordplay with huge, rapid, multi-flavored and apparently devastating balls of magical death. I say “apparently devastating” because while I’m completely immune to all of them, they sure do a number on any Vermai who happen to be attacking me. I get the sense this isn’t a very happy neighborhood.
I’ll level with you; I am just the most lost.
It’s difficult to explain why this place is so hard to navigate. Part of it’s necessary limitations of the graphics and display; rooms tend to be grainy and nondescript, long hallways tend to be indistinguishable from last and next one you’ll use, view distance is often constrained or blurs your destination beyond recognition. Plus, having this narrower-than-human-vision aspect ratio always meant it was surprisingly easy to just miss an out-of-the-way side passage or alcove.
But that’s not the whole story, is it? Daggerfall had similar problems, but even though this game is in theory less procedurally generated and more deliberately designed I’d give Battlespire’s level design the gold cup for Achievements in Making My Brow Furrow. The tunnels are all at odd angles and run up and downhill constantly, zagging into weird dead ends, zigging through puzzle rooms that loop around to deposit you right back where you started. Every time I think I’ve explored all of an area I end up finding a nook or cranny that somehow undoes my understanding of the level’s layout. This very well may be a simulation of the Battlespire‘s magically-constructed impossible space. It is not a simulation of fun.
I eventually rediscover the planks that lead into total darkness. I’m pretty sure this is the only path that hasn’t looped or dead-ended on me yet. This may be because it killed me the last time I tried, but we’ll fall off that bridge when we come to it.
This turns out to lead to a network of plank passages and stone platforms. I think it is linear. You can’t actually see much longer than the next stone platform, and I swear plank passages appear and disappear when you’re not looking, and I ended up accidentally backtracking like six times in ten minutes, and TELL ME YOU LIKE MY HAT.
At the end of a very long, very confusing, very slow-to-navigate passage of planks I find my reward: a dremora who wants to chew the fat. This time I’m given the option of being indirectly hostile as well as just threatening. He’s exactly what I am whenever I try to cross a bridge too quickly: con descending.
I actually engage him pleasantly enough. He indicates that if I give him a gift, hunting down and killing that Trenelle person everyone’s talking about, he’ll let me into some kind of special club. I accept his quest as a way of putting a pin into this whole thing scratch-my-back-murder racket until I’ve got a handle on the local politics. Then I look for another way forward.
I don’t find any.
Anyone know if EB still carries the Battlespire Strategy Guide?
Batman v. Superman Wasn't All Bad
It's not a good movie, but it was made with good intentions and if you look closely you can find a few interesting ideas.
Starcraft 2: Rush Analysis
I write a program to simulate different strategies in Starcraft 2, to see how they compare.
Philosophy of Moderation
The comments on most sites are a sewer of hate, because we're moderating with the wrong goals in mind.
Are Lootboxes Gambling?
Obviously they are. Right? Actually, is this another one of those sneaky hard-to-define things?
Who Broke the In-Game Economy?
Why are RPG economies so bad? Why are shopkeepers so mercenary, why are the prices so crazy, and why do you always end up a gazillionaire by the end of the game? Can't we just have a sensible balanced economy?
We’ve found it! The worst threat ever!
With the right combination of flexing, posing, and zazz, that could make a great boast, if you were playing the airheaded, overconfident villain in a play for young children, but as a threat? To someone you actually intend to harm, physically? Well, gosh, you better hope you kill them after that. The alternative is that someone, somewhere out there knows that you said that shit, out loud. It’s great motivation to leave no survivors. It’s such a bad threat, it’s a functional anti-threat, alarming the speaker into frenzied, nothing-left-to-lose bloodlust. It’s Cortez burning his ships.
I think a 40k space marine could pull it off. The PC game Chaos gate had plasma gunners regularly shout:
“STARFIRE SHALL DEVOUR YOUR BLACK SOUL!”
and
“THE HEAT OF A THOUSAND SUNS SHALL DESTROY YOU!”
That may be, but if someone’s taking literally anything about WH40k seriously, well… that’s an entirely different conversation.
Some voice actors seemed to have managed…
“Look! Rhinos! RHINOS! Our enemies hide in METAL BOXES, the cowards! THE FOOLS! We… We should take away their METAL BOXES!”
“The Emperor orders you to die!” *bang*
-“I die f-” *urgh* *fall over*
And bless them for it. Warhammer is best when completely ludicrous but appearing to be unaware of it.
Yes, but Space Marines are also people for whom grabbing two parts of an Ork’s skull and pulling them in opposite directions until it dies is considered a refreshing bit of entertainment.
Fashionspire. There. I said it!
I do chuckle whenever I see the characters face. It’s so perfect.
I think the arm is a turtle shell, sprouting a giagantic, misshapen turtle arm, from the palm of which comes another, stubbier turtle arm, dangling limply past your hand. It’s hollow, but isn’t worn as a sleeve–it’s just half-assedly attached to the side of your arm with double-sided tape. The gauntlet-and-sword combination, of course, is a large cardboard cutout stapled to the back of your hand. That, or they’re real, but the gauntlet has a handy slot in it for dangly turtle-arm purposes. Everyone knows it’s a major faux-pas for your secondary turtle-arm to obscure your pommel.
In short, what it is is Haute Couture.
More like Hate Couture, amirite?
In the “completely stumped” picture, it looks like your arm is wearing an arm-cape of two monster’s hands sewn end to end, but is just your normal blue shirt holding a gauntlet holding a sword.
*Why* you feel compelled to wear an arm-cape is… um… left as an exercise to other readers?
I think it’s actually an arm cape and a leg cape, with the second paw clutching, as it were, our intrepid plummeter’s knee. Although now we need to also work out why anyone would wear a leg cape, so I guess I’m not really helping matters claritywise.
Obviously you put one over the right arm and leg, get a second one to put over the left arm and leg, and then you can glide around like a flying squirrel. Doing so is necessary to reach the next area, push the last button, and bring about the end of the world (and more importantly: the game.)
I love reading your lets plays Rutskarn. Hope you get hired for a AAA game eventually.
Aye right – I don’t know that ‘genius’ is an especially useful concept, but it is certainly an applicable one.
I love this series.
IT IS A VERY NICE HAT WELL DONE
Argh, there’s helmet eating the protagonist! He’s almost been devoured already, painfully groaning for help and struggling to break free.
The demon arms motif on that armour is pretty snazzy. Last time I saw something like that it was on a breastplate in a Japanese game.
To those of us following along at home, I want to point out that
A) you can actually talk some creatures out of combat (though it’s rarely useful) and even (at later stages) get quests from them
B) While I doubt we’ll get the whole game this way (as it would probably get tiresome), the quest for those five anchors is literally *half* the quest to get out of level *one*. Of, erm, I can’t be bothered to look it up, but…ten-ish levels all in all? We’ll be here for a while longer.
To Ruts, I want to say I do enjoy and love this playthrough :-) Certainly different from anything I’ve ever tried.
Not sure if this will work but… Very Fine Hat.
I had to go trawling through both my ij and lj accounts to find that one, but I also got reminded of how many other userpics I have and how many make me laugh, so that was fun!
Rutskarn, are you not familiar with the term “headbuttoning”? I thought it was common knowledge by now.
Great series, enjoying the madness and bags a lot so far.