Fact 1: A fair number of people seemed to enjoy our most recent episode of Hey Ash, Whatcha Playin’.

Fact 2: I need to get more than one post up on this site so it doesn’t look like it just went live two days ago.

Fact 3: This site just went live two days ago.

Hit the goddamn jump, already.

My friends are better at stuff than I am

I’d always suspected it, but this episode confirmed it.

Christina Cole (the battered wife from the Geometry Wars and Preggers episodes) had always been pestering us to do a Pokemon Snap episode. When we finally listened to her, rather than mocking her resemblance to young Bruce Wayne and shoving her into doors, it actually turned out pretty well.

Additionally, the entire narrative frame of the episode (and the direction, and the visual filter on the flashbacks, and some of the audio work) came from Justin Yngelmo, who played Vamp in our Season One finale.  I put the script together, but Justin’s entire concept of Ash’s two instructional letters are what make the episode work.

Everyone under the age of 40 loved Pokemon at some point in their lives

The actress who played Squirtle brought some of her friends along to the shoot. Since I am prejudiced and stupid, I assumed that they (being fifteen-to-twenty year old women who would not look terribly out of place at a Red House Painters concert) would have effectively no idea what the hell Ash and I were doing, and only came along for moral support.

I was more than a little surprised when, as I drove them home, they proceeded to argue that Pokemon Snap was really great — “especially the part where you have to get the Squirtles out of the water” — but they didn’t find the game particularly replay-friendly because it takes so long to get the turbo boost upgrade for your railcar.

It was then that I realized three indie chicks whom I’d never meet again were more well-adjusted and intelligently critical of games than I would ever be.

Commenters will make ludicrous assumptions about stuff, then treat them as fact

In response to one of the dozens of GameTrailers comments requesting to know who played Pikachu, one random viewer made a bizarrely self-assured statement: that she was my new girlfriend, and I was putting her in the series for the first time ever.

It’s not the total wrongness of that statement that really throws me off. It’s how immensely certain the guy was of his theory. It was said unapologetically, without any evaluative language. The sun rises. The sun sets. Anthony’s banging the chick in the Pikachu hoodie.

It’s like he didn’t even bother to do research or check sources, kind of like 95% of games journalists OHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

One line of dialogue can ruin an entire episode

In the first complete edit of the episode, Squirtle had a single line. A split-second before getting smacked with the rock for the first time, she was to turn around, face Pikachu, and whimper one final, terrified plea: “Help me.”

Justin came up with the line during shooting, and we both thought it’d be so incredibly heartless and brutal that it would make the scene even funnier, in a sort of “we’re being so obviously horrible and misanthropic that you can’t possibly take this seriously on an emotional level” way.  After showing the scene to Ash, however, the result was undeniable: the line humanized Squirtle too much, and made her death much sadder and more unfair than it should have been.

Without the line, we’re distanced enough from Squirtle that we can laugh at her musically-timed death without feeling guilty. This scene also taught me that, if possible, I really need to show early edits to people who care more about human life than I do: in much the same way that I still find the Geometry Wars episode funny, I didn’t really catch the awfulness of the “help me” line until Ash pointed out the effect it had on her.