There we are.

Been a while since the last HAWPcast, and it’ll be more than a week until the next one, but I think this is a pretty informative episode in terms of where HAWP and OUAP are ultimately going. Which is to say, “somewhere, maybe” and “I dunno, to be honest,” respectively.

If nothing else, some neat OUAP merchandise should be coming. We’re thinking about shirts, and maybe offering a DVD/book combo pack once the season is all done.

[Image by David North.]

If you answered “yes” to both of these questions, then I’ve got one hell of a treat for you!

On Monday night, I’m going to be giving a talk at UC Berkeley for this class. I was originally going to title the talk “Player, Character,” but that seemed really fucking pretentious, so it doesn’t really have a title anymore. Either way, it’s about character development in story-based videogames (a la Mass Effect, or Uncharted). The talk is scheduled to start at 6pm, in 123 Wheeler. I assume you can’t actually show up unless you’re actually UC Berkeley student, but I figured I’d mention it on the off chance.

On Friday the 11th, I’m going to be part of the Artgame Sessions panel at GDC. The specifics are here. I’ll be giving a ten minute talk about Far Cry 2, which should surprise absolutely nobody who listens to Podtoid.

I’ll post the slides and notes for both talks on this site sometime in the middle of March.

I was pretty happy with this week’s HAWP when I uploaded it, but I was also a little bit worried: the jokes made me laugh and everything, but would people resent a Papa Burch origin story? Was his hatred for Ash one of those fun, mysterious little things that you don’t ever want explained, or is it so random and silly that it never even feels like something that can be necessarily ruined?

Given the Metal Gear finale from last year, do people feel like we’re building canon, or are we being so consistently ludicrous and inconsistent that you can take each episode on its own merits without spending every subsequent Papa B episode thinking, “well, this is less interesting because I know he’s just trying to get back at some chick named Martha from his childhood?”

I mean, obviously that’s not the only reason the character hates Ash — given the way she acts, it’d be hard not to hate her — but I was worried that this episode might be a little to much like the Master hearing drums as a child, or something. Unneeded explanation, even though it’s all obviously in the service of the episode’s punchline.

Luckily, everyone seems to like it and I was worrying over nothing. Woo!

1. At some point, you will cross a threshold and QTE failure means your characters will die, rather than just get bruised and battered.

2. The game does not tell you when you have crossed this invisible threshold.

Heavy Rain is not very good from any perspective, really, but these two small facts imbue the latter half of the game with more suspense than it truly deserves. Regardless of whether or not I really cared about any of the protagonists — I didn’t — the Super Hardcore Gamer in me will always desire total victory, and a quick glance at the trophies assured me that “total victory” translated to, “get to the end of the game with four characters still alive.” Everytime I got into one of the dozens of poorly-motivated QTE fight scenes, I couldn’t help but feel that niggling in the back of my head: “if you screw this up, this person is going to die and you’re not gonna be the Super Hardcore Gamer you thought you were.”

The fact that the game allows character death — that, as in Mass Effect 2, you may have to watch one of your crew die in front of you due to your choices and not be able to immediately undo it via a Game Over screen –  is such a goddamn useful tactic that I’m at a loss as to why we had to wait until 2010 (twenty-goddamn-ten!) to see it adopted in any significant way.

Heavy Rain’s plot may be ludicrous, and its first half may include as much meaningful player interaction as a finicky DVD player that has to be unpaused every thirty seconds, but I can’t deny the inherent suspense in being faced with a challenge and knowing that if I make poor choices, my actions will be permanent and won’t stop the overall story.

Go to a Renaissance Fair dressed up like the Doctor and look ridiculously confused about where you are and what’s going on. Mutter something about time being switched up, and how the technology you’re seeing doesn’t make sense for the period, and wonder aloud if you’ve made a mistake somewhere and merged two alternate timelines.

And if any of the staff catch on, experiment: is it possible that a Renaissance nerd, who, being a nerd, likely has a knowledge of other nerdy things, will be aware of what you’re attempting to do? If so, are they willing to take their Renaissance roleplay a step further and acknowledge your quirky roleplay, and not just pretend that they are a Renaissance-era wench, but a Renaissance-era wench who has met a time traveller and now has to cope with that fact? Could you, in fact, convince a random attendee or customer into being your companion for an hour purely by the force and bluster of your contrarian roleplay?

In one of the very first episodes of the HAWPcast, I talked about an idea for a zombie movie I had. More specifically, I had an idea for a montage revolving around the protagonist’s everyday, postapocalyptic life, ending with what I referred to as “the saddest shot scene ever put to celluloid” — a guy cutting a cookie in half, eating it, replacing the other half in a tin, putting it away, and crossing off a date on his calendar marked “COOKIE DAY.”

Two different people have actually made short films depicting that very thing: “Anthony,” by Carwyn Sussex, and “Cookie Day,” by Andrew Stuelke and Spencer Claypool.

If you want, you can watch those in a marathon along with Phallus Knife Fight’s “The Chocolate Taco” and “Nick Poodoo Chapter Two Dramatic Reading.” Doing so is pretty much like watching an official HAWPcast feature film.

Whether or not this is a good thing is up to you.

This week’s episode of Hey Ash, Whatcha Playin’ is about Rock Band. Sort of. I don’t think Ash and I have ever played Rock Band together, come to think of it.

A lot of people also seem to get some sort of incestuous vibe from this episode, which really isn’t intended. Just throwing that out there.

It used to be three times as long, but I cut out everything except for the jokes I especially liked. On the one hand, it’s much tighter than it would have been otherwise and, to me, considerably better. On the other hand, a lot of people seem to inexplicably love episodes I don’t (Trauma Center), so maybe I’m cutting out good stuff. I dunno.

Fucking nice.

That’s not a dig at the game’s difficulty level, or anything; on the whole, BioShock 2 is an unquestionably more difficult experience than its predecessor. Gameplay-wise, it’s also a much more enjoyable one. I just happened to meticulously plan out every little fight and carry around a shitload of health packs to the point where, at the game’s finale, I realized I’d never actually seen the inside of a Vita-Chamber. And that was awesome.

More after the jump.

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Image by desfunk.

Ash and I don’t watch a lot of anime, but we’ve watched enough to fill an hour’s worth of podcastery. If you’ve got a soft spot for Cowboy Bebop, or if you absolutely hate Azumanga Daioh, you probably won’t like us very much at the end of this week’s episode.