I Am Completely Serious

Chrono - Heir of Time. His name's Chrono and he's associated with death, so yeah, he's got to be the Time player. He's the Heir because Heirs do what girls tell them.

Lucca - Mage of Light. She talks a lot, knows things, and is the girl who bosses the passive hero around. Clearly a Light player! She's a mage because she's an offensive caster type, and because I think the outfit would look cool on her.

Marle - Seer of Life. Life players are always Princesses, so let's assume the converse is also true. She's a Seer because she's the first one to see and understand what's happening and what they need to do.

Frog - Knight of Hope. Obviously the dude is a Knight. He's Hope because Magus is Doom and that's funny. Also, he's destined to fight the Dark Lord, but it doesn't work out the way he expects.

Robo - Prince of Void. He's spent most of his existence alone and unconscious in a near-empty, dying world, and he'll choose to make said void-y world cease to exist. (You could argue for Space for him, since he's a gardener, but I think it fits better with Ayla.)

Ayla - Rogue of Space. She's associated with green things and with rebirth after terrible destruction. She steals stuff, but I think she'd look cooler in the Rogue outfit than the Thief one, and anyway she also let the Gate Key get stolen.

Magus - Bard of Doom. He helps to destroy the doom-y thing, but kind of passively and ass-backwards, and while wearing a fucking codpiece. Oh, Magus, you are my favorite sullen inept villain who fails at everything.

I'm pretty sure it's just a really elaborate prank.

A Homestuck hiatus means that I start ruining the lives of pretend ASCII dwarves again, apparently. Homestuck is a much healthier preoccupation than Dwarf Fortress.

I made an awesome gruesome trap corridor that drops things 26 z-levels onto a bunch of spikes. Smashes my enemies into unrecognizable bits! I'm trying to lure the goblins into it, using a puppy for bait. This should obviously appeal to ASCII goblin sensibilities. Look at this goddamn puppy, goblins. This thing is fucking adorable. Why don't you come inside and kill this puppy?

They won't come inside and kill this puppy. I might have to stick a dwarf I'm not using in there instead, I don't know.

I did get a minotaur to come into the doom corridor, but that was because I stuck a door at the end for it to break. As any scholar of Greek mythology will tell you, minotaurs enjoy nothing more than breaking doors, tables, chairs, and "querns." Yet such stuff does not tickle a goblin's fancy, I fear.

You know, I even set up the trap corridor with plumbing this time? So I can flush it out, if an eldritch horror shows up miserably shedding its diseased flesh like confetti! Yet the only guests I've gotten are minotaurs with grudges against doors and goblins too tenderhearted to kill puppies. It's all very discouraging.

The GTS online trading system only lets you see six trade offers at a time, and every search I've tried has given me six trolls claiming to want impossible things. Mainly sub-level-10 legendaries.

I guess if I wanted to waste some time, I could hack in a few boxes of level-1 Zekroms and clear out the ones in the categories in which I actually want stuff. But I don't actually want to waste some time on that particular thing.

So I just hacked in the Pokemon I actually wanted instead? Sorry, real Pokemon trainers, I needed that Umbreon! Umbreon is important to me.

Under a cut due to spoilers for the whole game.

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Mr. Itoi. This game you made. This game is not really a kids' game.

I'm worried that Homestuck will end the same way. They have the same villain! They have the same narrative progression pattern! They have the same preoccupation with frogs! "Homestuck" is a reference to "EarthBound"! The healing device in Mother 3 is literally the coffeemaker in Homestuck.

I googled "wholesale mineral cosmetics" to see how much it would cost to actually assemble a Dwarf Fortress eyeshadow line - I'm not going to, but the answer is, "less than $200." This place, which was the first thing that showed up on Google, will sell you a 1-oz bag of eyeshadow for $11, and they've got the little sifter jars for $25 for 100. I could get the labels printed up at a place in town for $50, and then all that remains is to set up an Etsy storefront with a super-classy logo:



I found this website advertising its makeup as "gluten-free." Oh, yeah? Well my mineral foundation is 100% guaranteed not to contain the fat of unbaptized infants. No other line of cosmetics makes that particular promise. That means I win.



What I'm trying to say is that makeup doesn't ordinarily have any goddamn gluten in it. It's not a banana muffin.

You made a trumpet out of moose leather (how did you do that) and named it "Craftplunged the Disembowelment of Virgins." That is not a thing that you should have done.

But it forgot to bring a boat, I guess. It's been just kind of standing there for a month or so. These guys could actually probably get close enough that their archers could shoot at my woodcutters if they just kept going southeast along the river a little ways, but I guess they can't figure that out.

It's hard, being a bunch of goblins with a primitive pathfinding algorithm. It's hard and no one understands.

It may surprise you to learn that this game is frequently better written and acted than are the actual films. Or it may not? Bioware's usually pretty decent, I understand, but this is the first game of theirs I've played.

Though other players are often present around you, this feels more like a single-player game than an MMO. It's very plot-driven - there's an overarching narrative to each place you visit, and your character has her own personal story that's driving her from one planet to another. She has a personality, too; there are dialog and story choices that determine whether she's going over to the Dark Side or not, and also how her sidekick (you get a sidekick) feels about her.

I'm playing as a smuggler, and I really love the voice actress; very cool and sardonic. She sounds forced and unconvinced of herself when she does conspicuously Light Side-ish things. Which I unfortunately have been making her do a lot; presently my character is awfully nice for a smuggler. Her sidekick is pretty happy with her, but not specifically because of the Light Side choices. I've determined from his reactions that he values personal loyalty - he doesn't like it when my smuggler chooses to betray someone, even if she's learned that they're messing with her - and sarcasm. He likes it when I choose the options that involve snappy retorts.

(Sometimes after he kills someone, he says excitedly, "Now you're ugly, stupid, and dead!" Oh, you have your fun, sidekick.)

The Dark Side/Light Side choices are often pretty simplistic. Shooting when you've got a chance to talk something out turns out to be Dark Side. Who knew? But you do run into some less obvious ones. At one point you're helping a politician fight some gangsters, and learn that she once accepted money from them. She now gives every evidence of being on the side of good, and she has enemies who are not, and revealing what you know will end her career. I personally feel that the better thing to do is still to out her, and the game agrees - that's the Light Side choice - but it strikes me as an edge thing.

In World of Warcraft, even if you're playing on a PVE server, there's a sense of competition with the other players, simply because you're usually after the same resources as someone else - you have to kill eight of a sort of bad guy of which there are only twenty-four at any given time, or whatever. In ST:TOR, though, the resources required seem to be pretty much infinite, so even if there are other players around, you can usually just ignore them and get on with whatever your task is. There's lots of empty space, too - clusters of enemies are far apart and areas are very large, so you're less likely to be near another player when s/he's fighting, and thus find it convenient to help him/her. There isn't a strong sense of the presence of other people.