{"id":31535,"date":"2016-04-13T02:26:19","date_gmt":"2016-04-13T06:26:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=31535"},"modified":"2016-04-27T02:47:30","modified_gmt":"2016-04-27T06:47:30","slug":"rutskarn-vs-battlespire-ch4-the-prattlespire","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=31535","title":{"rendered":"Ruts vs. Battlespire CH4: BAbagsGS"},"content":{"rendered":"

There’s no way around it; I am lost. Deeply, passionately, irreparably lost. I’m not sure where this space is relative to anywhere else and I’m not sure it even matters, as space and time themselves seem capricious, aloof, even spiteful. I gave up getting out of here fully intact some time ago. Now I’d settle for retaining just a shred of sanity, just an ounce of vitality–some souvenir of the man I was before I entered this hateful parallel dimension beyond mortal understanding.<\/p>\n

I’m talking, of course, about my inventory screen.<\/p>\n

Let’s take a modest gander. And by “modest gander,” I mean let’s settle once and for all how overbearingly asinine this system is so I can move on to grousing about bigger and better things. Behold:<\/p>\n

Made up of equal parts polished art and elegant design.<\/div>
Made up of equal parts polished art and elegant design.<\/div><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Observe that there are currently ten item squares visible. “Visible” is an understatement; they’re massive, all the better to give us a good look at the chunky blurry inscrutable item images. Then we can look right down to the very bottom to see in tiny yellow text what a given item actually is.<\/em><\/p>\n

Now, for a dungeon crawler developed for the PC, ten squares of visible inventory at a time is a terribly miserly quantity. If you asked me to pick my top ten favorite pieces of equipment in a given Bethesda game, I’d need spreadsheets and the aid of a counselor to narrow it down past fifteen. But here’s where the rub really comes in: column B on the right there isn’t for your inventory at all. It represents the dirty floor, DVD bargain bin, or pocket you’re rummaging. So trusting our fates in fickle arithmetic, that means there’s only–five slots <\/em>visible at a time?<\/p>\n

How would you like to try four?<\/em><\/p>\n

See, that big square on top–taking up exactly as much real estate as the others–is just to indicate whether or not you’re currently looking inside a bag. How does it indicate that? By displaying an icon of a bag–the same icon that any of the squares below, when they happen to hold bags, will display. This is somewhat confusing in the beginning and annoying merely forever. And really, they needn’t have gone through the trouble, because I can solve this little mystery for you right now: yes, you are<\/em> looking inside a bag. Most likely a bag inside another bag inside another bag. Because it turns out everything is bags now; your life is bags. Your high school sweetheart is a bag. Every night you close your bags and dream of the bags on bags your bags bags bags.<\/p>\n

Battlespire<\/em> is the only game I know of where you can take inventory and lose.<\/p>\n

It quickly becomes clear that my inventory is 85% the following two items: floating mystical energy signatures fashioned by daedric magics, and burlap sacks. The sacks often contain two or more sacks within, as well as a few large weapons; the sacks in those <\/em>sacks yield more sacks. Careful analysis turns up a few items of interest buried within these nesting containers, so I post up in an out-of-the-way alley to start conducting a painstakingly, painsmakingly thorough search. By the time I’m done there’s a stack of empty sacks reaching to the dungeon ceiling and a small pile of as-yet-undiscovered windfalls, which include:<\/p>\n