{"id":33318,"date":"2016-07-16T16:43:19","date_gmt":"2016-07-16T20:43:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=33318"},"modified":"2016-07-16T16:44:53","modified_gmt":"2016-07-16T20:44:53","slug":"ruts-vs-battlespire-intermission","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=33318","title":{"rendered":"Ruts vs. Battlespire: Intermission"},"content":{"rendered":"

Battlespire <\/em>is catstrophically broken, inarguably mishandled, forgettable at its best and never more than two inches from the border of Creepy. I bought it with the intention of incorporating my thoughts on it in my Elder Scrolls retrospective.<\/a> I barely outlasted the first room. The same berserk spirit that impelled me to finish all five core games in about a month didn’t survive an hour’s contact with nesting bags and glitching jumps.<\/p>\n

Then I started this Let’s Play when a few other games fell through. I had absolutely no plans for it–I didn’t know how far I’d make it or long you’d tolerate it. And now that I’m sixteen posts in, I think I’m ready to confirm:<\/p>\n

We’re going all the way.<\/p>\n

<\/div>
<\/div><\/p>\n

I knew nothing about this game before I started. Out of self-defense I’ve since developed a pretty comprehensive knowledge of the game’s more arresting glitches, surprises, and pitfalls, and I can already tell it’s not going to get any easier to play. Quite far from it. There might be segments of the game where I’m stuck for a few weeks at a time, which hopefully I’ll have the buffer and wit to condense into something entertaining.<\/p>\n

But I can’t walk away from this thing for two reasons. The first being, I can’t seem to go an hour without something happening that’s so bizarre or inexplicable or busted that I have to share it with someone just to confirm I’m not going crazy. This game is frequently terrible, but even when it’s boring, it’s not [i]boring[\/i]. How am I going to stop when I know (for a fact at this point) that there’s even weirder stuff to come?<\/p>\n

And secondly–when I did my retrospective, I’d thought it was such a shame that much of Bethesda’s history, its earliest forays into open-world gaming and its first sleeper hit, was forgotten. I wanted to share their origins with people who didn’t have the know-how or money or time to play them. In my own very modest way, I thought I was reviving obscure elements of gaming history. And then I found this<\/em>. It’s like discovering Vincent Van Gogh not only painted cartoons of clowns farting, he earnestly and passionately painted them and tried to market them to the world,<\/em> and absolutely nobody will talk about it–much less ask, “Is this an evocative <\/em>cartoon of a clown farting?” <\/em>It’s an incredible nugget of gaming history and I feel weirdly privileged to be the one sharing it with you.<\/p>\n

So thanks for reading. We’ll be back to it Wednesday with an extra post on Friday, plus my RPG series restarting Saturday. See you then.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Battlespire is catstrophically broken, inarguably mishandled, forgettable at its best and never more than two inches from the border of Creepy. I bought it with the intention of incorporating my thoughts on it in my Elder Scrolls retrospective. I barely outlasted the first room. The same berserk spirit that impelled me to finish all five […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[242],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-33318","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-lets-play"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33318","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=33318"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33318\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=33318"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=33318"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=33318"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}