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

Or if you absolutely hate Azumanga Daioh.

The discussed games include Call of Duty: World at War, Final Fantasy X-2, Bayonetta, and Super Mario RPG. Unfortunately, neither Ash nor myself have completed any of the Mario & Luigi RPGs, so we spend an awful lot of time awkwardly bemoaning the fact that the Paper Mario series was disappointing in comparison to Squaresoft's Nintendo RPG. 

Still, hope you enjoy it.

Clocking in at just under an hour, Ash and I discuss comics, Terry Gilliam, westerns, Joss Whedon, The Sims, and political assassination.

(About halfway through, Ash freaks out about a picture I've sent her. This is the picture.)

If we're all terribly lucky, this will be the last Doctor Who-related HAWPcast for a long, long, long time. That said, Ash and I could not, in good conscience, record another podcast without at least discussing The End of Time and the Tenth Doctor's departure.

We do, at the very least, discuss videogames when we aren't completely nerding the f*ck out about sci-fi shows that don't really matter. Half-Life, Portal, and BioShock are discussed in some detail. Emphasis on some. 

Oh, and listener questions. Lots of listener questions.

Ash feels pretty much the same way.

As promised, we've recorded a running commentary track for "The End of Time: Part One." It is, primarily, filled with a lot of embarrassing nerd statements ("You know, they just indirectly explained an inconsistency with Romana's regeneration") and Ashly screaming about how angry she is.

Ashly and myself enjoy Doctor Who. We've made very little secret of this throughout both seasons of "Hey Ash, Whatcha Playin." We also typically end up discussing it in some way during the other HAWPcast episodes, so we figured, to hell with it -- let's just devote an entire episode to Doctor Who conversations and leave it at that.

With that in mind, this week's HAWPcast functions as a commentary track for "The Waters of Mars," the most recent Doctor Who special. You'll need to not-download a copy of the episode to get the full nerdosity.

This week's episode isn't as zany, unfocused, or long as other installments of the HAWPcast (it's less than 40 minutes), but there's still a lot to enjoy, here; Davis talks about the basic philosophies driving Once Upon a Pixel, where it is, and where she wishes to take it. And also divulges her shoe size.

As always, you can listen to the show here or subscribe to us on iTunes.

Still, there's some decent stuff in there. Bits about almost getting beaten up, and some good discussion about the Star Wars trilogy.

As always, you can listen to the show here or subscribe to us on iTunes .

LINK DUMP:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ke8nWVGCmrU

http://nesslam.ytmnd.com/

http://starwarsuncut.com/#/finished/282

In this episode, Ash and I talk about nonlinear plot and characterization in videogames (the dialogue in Left 4 Dead, for instance), the death of the "hangout movie," and, subsequently, Quentin Tarantino's entire filmography.

There's a bit at the very end of the podcast where I yell "wait" before getting cut off by Ashly's cruelly indifferent decision to hang up the phone, but don't worry about that: I was just going to say that instead of typing in an awkward CreateSpace URL to get to the sexy Hey Ash, Whatcha Playin' Season One DVD, you can now tell your friends/loved ones/mortal enemies/acquaintances to go to http://heyash.com/dvd instead.

Also, the HAWPcast is now on iTunes. Which is cool.

Twilight fans ruining Comic Con , Adella , the sexy Link twins -- if you frequent Digg with any regularity, you're not gonna have your mind blown (Ash did, because she evidently has a job or some bull that prevents her from hitting F5 on every nerd-friendly news site every few seconds).

Still, we do spend the first twenty minutes of the episode reading and discussing other people's fan fiction . That's pretty cool.

Which is why the majority of this episode consists of us reading and critiquing fan fiction we wrote as children.

Yeah.

Do you dare to listen to the horrors of "Nick Poodoo: Action Scientist" and "Even Superheroes Die"? Do you dare visit the HAWP forums and admit your own history of writing fan fiction?

I leave it to you. In the meantime, I'm going to see if I can somehow go back in time and kill myself.

As a result, this week's episode is less than thirty minutes long, but (hopefully) packed with enough decent stories to prevent you giving up on the podcast altogether.

You can listen to it here. If you wanna subscribe to the show via iTunes or Zune or whatever, there are some buttons on the side of that page that'll allow you to do so.

It's certainly workable, but a bit of advice -- don't listen to this baby with headphones on.

To summarize what we talk about would be fruitless. It's random, unfocused, and highly conversational. And reasonably entertaining, hopefully. There are three important things you should know, however:

This Tuesday, I'll be on this radio show if you wanna call in or whatever; the second season of Hey Ash, Whatcha Playin' starts this Thursday; the day after, a brand new pilot episode for Ashley Davis' Once Upon A Pixel will also go live on GameTrailers.

That's about it, really.

This being the first-ever episode of the Hey Ash, Whatcha Podcast (alternate titles: Hey Ash, Whatcha Podcastin', the HAWPcast, etc), two things are for certain: firstly, that it will be much more awkwardly structured than later episodes, and secondly, that the existence of later episodes isn't really a certainty.

The show's future is pretty much entirely dependent on whether you lot enjoy it or not.