New episode is up, and it doubles as a Mother’s Day present because I ain’t buying that woman shit.

This is another one of those episodes that I’ve been sitting on forever — wanted to make sure it was actually around Mother’s Day when we released it. Anyway, hope you enjoy it, even though its connection to videogames is tangential at best.

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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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.

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.

The premise for this week’s episode came entirely from a conversation Ash and I had with Grant Cushman (Raiden from the MGS4 episode) and some of our other friends at a party.

The conversation went on for at least a half-hour, and we never came to a conclusion. I’m not sure if I want this episode to result in the world reaching some sort of consensus, or if I want the confusion and uncertainty to continue for all eternity on a much larger scale.

The latter, probably. Probably the latter.

I was at GDC when this went up, but better late that never.

This’ll probably be the last Dad-heavy episode for the next month or so; people dig him, but I don’t want to overexpose him. Three episodes in a row is probably pushing our luck.

My friend Justin Yngelmo really wrote 99% of this episode: when I got Heavy Rain, he came over and played it, doing exactly what Dad does in the video. Justin has a tendency to be as monstrous a human being as possible in games (if you give him a grenade, a baseball bat and an old lady, he’ll turn GTAIV into performance art), and this time around, that meant screaming “JASON” while running into the same comic book store eighty times.

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!

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.

Image by munnyman5.

Anyway, the new episode is up, and — surprisingly — people really seem to like it. As I said at PAX, we really have no idea which episodes people are going to enjoy and which they aren’t. Given how dialogue-heavy and visually unspectacular the episode is (not to mention how its poorly hidden pro-gay rights agenda), I fully expected the GameTrailers crowd to meet it with hostility or indifference.

I’m glad to be proven wrong.