So, it’s no secret that I’ve been playing a lot of Diablo
III lately. If you don’t know what DIII is, imagine a little person on your
computer blowing up things, people, and critters in a variety of imaginative
and possibly illegal ways. As they’re killed, the things, people, and critters
often spray out a bunch of gold or items, which you then pick up. This lets
you buy better equipment, which then allows you to kill more things,
people, and critters even faster.
It’s like an assembly line of destruction, only Henry Ford
has been replaced by a dozen-odd giggling Blizzard game designers.
NOTE: I cannot prove that they were giggling, but
considering the highly inventive ways you can kill stuff, I can only assume
they were. It’s what we designers do when we come up with things like that.
It’s also why many of us are still single.
At any rate, I can only hypothesize that someone at
Blizzard, mayhap some of the aforementioned game designers, really, really hate
barrels and other containers. This is because you spend a good chunk of your
time in-game smashing things in the hope that gold will pop out. These acts of
destruction are oddly satisfying, to the point that Blizzard could have
foregone with the demons and just made a container destruction simulator.
Very little escapes your wrath. You smash barrels, sturdy
barrels, piles of bones, urns, crates, weapon crates, ’57 Chevys, goatmen
totems, rocks, and my personal favorite: torture barrels.
Yes, you read that correctly: torture barrels. There are a
couple levels in a dungeon (a surprise, I know) and there are barrels there,
save that they have spikes all over them and they’re labeled as ‘torture
barrels.’ Now, I’m not an expert on torture devices (some say the blogs count),
but I’m not exactly sure what one does with a torture barrel.
Do you put someone inside it? Maybe, but I think you could
do that with a regular barrel. I mean, both would be equally uncomfortable.
Perhaps you’re meant to use the spikes and simply roll the barrel over people? This
seems plausible, but you would probably get the same effect by just stabbing
someone vigorously. Now, if there were a bunch of monkeys in the barrel, they could,
I dunno, screech or something. This would allow you to say ‘more fun that a
torture barrel full of monkeys’ on a regular basis, which would also count as
torture.
Anyway, I have no idea what one does with a torture barrel,
other than smashing them in the hope that gold will pop out.
Or a monkey.
Cheers,
-Jason
6 comments:
You obviously just leave them in locations where they're likely to be found.
The true purpose of torture barrels is tormenting people by making them wonder what torture barrels would be used for. Just think of it, you're laying in bed awake, counting destructibe containers (because let's face it: counting sheep does nothing, besides maybe having you consider a vacation in Australia) trying to get some sleep. You're counting piles of bones, barrels, crates, maybe the odd urn and suddenly a torture barrel! You're not going to get any sleep that night, instead you'll wonder what the damn things are used for.
Of course now I've told you so you should be safe.
Actually, now I'm wondering how you know so much about torture barrels . . . :)
In Victoria, British Columbia, there is a wax museum that used to (maybe still does, not sure) feature torture devices such as the swinging axe and iron maiden. I remember being very freaked out by this as I walked through the moaning exhibits as a young boy.
Anyways, one of the devices was a spiked box that could just barely fit a human who was hugging his knees tightly. Now imagine being placed into one of these things after the spiked lid was shut. You may be unharmed, but you know that moving an inch in any direction will get you pierced by the relatively tiny spikes. In fact, they would be so short that you would more likely die from madness and blood loss than from actual impalement. Psychological torture at its worst.
Love the comic by the way. ^_^
Ooo!! Oooo!!! Finally I get to put my (small amount) of knowledge around torture barrels to use!!
I remember reading encyclopedias all the time as a little kid. I'd just open it at random and read. Although it was a children's encyclopedia, I ended up learning quite a bit. Unfortunately, a good percent of this bit proved to be mentally scarring, BUT HEY! That's the price of knowledge. =)
ANYHOO. Torture barrels. I remember seeing an article on torture in a (children's!!) encyclopedia. I was quite fascinated and I remember the old sketch that accompanied it. It showed two men shoving another man into a hollow cylinder (with a door in the front. Almost like a demented phone booth) with spikes sticking out from the inside walls. The article said that they would then roll the cylinder (with the man inside) down a hill.
Yeah. I was around 7 years old. And I absolutely loved it.
There is another story of these barrels being rolled down hills. Eulalia of Barcelona, a 13 year old Christian who was put to death on the basis of her religion in c. 303, was put "into
a barrel with knives (or glass) stuck into it" and was then rolled down a street."
Unfortunately for her, this didn't kill her immediately. She was said to have been sentenced to 13 tortures. She was finally decapitated.
The Spanish invented something somewhat similar:
"A barrel pillory, or Spanish mantle, torture method is quite similar. A barrel is fitted over the entire body, with the head sticking out from a hole in the top. The person is kept locked in the barrel, forcing him to kneel in his own feces."
Mmmm, feces.
Here is the story of Eulalia.
Oh darn. I forgot to also mention the Iron Maiden. Fortunately for everyone here, I need some sleep pretty soon and that last comment ran me out of steam. I'll just leave you with two links.
Here ya go!! =^^=
The Iron Maiden
And a Diablo III player who is just as confused as the rest of us.
Thanks for the info! I'm slightly worried that you all seem to know so much about torture, but I'm sure there's a reasonable explanation for that.
I hope ;)
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