In the very near future, I will be leaving Destructoid and going to work at Gearbox Software as a full-time writer.

A few people have asked me how this will affect HAWP and my other side-stuff (Rev Rants, etc), so I’ll answer all of that stuff after the jump of this post.

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Long story short: we wanna make a HAWP episode full of fanart. The HAWP episode will basically be a recitation of a Maya Angelou-esque poem about Bullet Bill.

We’d like y’all to make drawings that fit with the poem, that will be displayed onscreen during the recitation.  You can post links to those drawings below, in the comments (along with how you’d like to be credited should your piece get chosen). In a month from now (May 25th), I or Justin will edit the episode and put in my/our favorite pieces.

You can read the poem after the jump.

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This week’s episode of the HAWPcast is about:

- The Passing

- Catholicism

- Kick-Ass

- Sausages

-That one thing we always talk about in every HAWPcast, but that we’ve learned to save until the very end because not everyone cares about it as much as we do

Boosh.

If you own Sleep is Death (which you should) and want to use the resources Ashley Davis and I made in your own stories, you can download them here. Just copy the resourceCache folder into SiD’s “importOldCache” folder, and you should be good to go.

Seriously, though, you should buy Sleep is Death. Even if you only tell (or are told) one or two stories with it, it’s still an incredible experience that you simply can’t get from any other game, or any other sort of collaborative storytelling.

I just completed the co-op campaign of Splinter Cell: Conviction, and damn. I thought Far Cry 2′s ending had shown me the true extent of UbiSoft Montreal’s world-weary nihilism, but I was dead wrong.

I won’t spoil exactly what happens, but I will say that if you want to experience the co-op campaign’s ending as intended, do not look up a full list of Conviction’s achievements.

Even though I wish there was an option to say “no” to the ending, to refuse to participate, the sheer cynicism of what you are forced to do is so refreshing that I kind of don’t care.  Mass Effect teaches us that everybody can get along and survive, so long as you’re charming enough. Final Fantasy (pick one) teaches us that friendship is eternal, and good triumphs over evil. Far Cry 2 and Splinter Cell Conviction’s co-op teach us that the world is a harsh, stupid place where brutal people do awful things for dumb and horrible reasons.

Regardless of whether or not you buy into that, it’s a philosophy that has every right to be explored and examined through interactivity as any of the ludicrously optimistic “muscle and determination will conquer all evil” stuff that makes up pretty much every third-person shooter I can think of.

As mentioned earlier on the HAWPcast, this week’s episode is about Puzzle Quest, and not me and Justin having gay sex while dressed as Gears of War characters.

I really can’t overstate that last part.

I kinda dig this episode, which is odd, because it’s been on my hard drive for a year and I only decided to upload it on a whim. I think the dialogue is entertainingly paced and Ash is pretty funny, but — for some reason — I didn’t think this episode was good enough to upload back during Season One, and I’m really not sure why. Maybe I thought the total lack of iconography from the source game would have pissed the GT crowd off. Maybe I hadn’t gotten good enough at editing dialogue to understand how funny it could be.

I’m really not sure. Either way, though, I enjoy it, and I hope you do as well.

Given that Ash and I talk about Doctor Who more than we talk about videogames or our own video series, it’s not particularly surprising that we get this question a lot.

“You talk about Doctor Who a lot,” the question usually starts. “Please stop doing that,” it usually ends. “That’s not a question,” I usually reply.

When it doesn’t end that way, however — when the person in question finds Doctor Who interesting but, confronted with a series that started in 1963 and is still going, simply does not know where to start — I usually have a pretty clear answer for them.

You can find that answer after the jump.

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Don’t worry — the HAWPcast episode itself isn’t an unfunny Gears of War discussion. We have a discussion about an unfunny Gears of War episode.

Anyway.

You can listen to it here. We discuss Attack of the Clones, Firefly, Mass Effect, and a bunch of other, random stuff. At the very, very end, we talk about the new Doctor Who. If you’re not at all interested in Doctor Who, just stop listening near the end once we start talking about it. There’s nothing in our conversations from that point on that doesn’t include the words “Tennant” or “Moffat.”