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Hey Ash, Whatcha Playin’is a surreal comedy series made by Anthony and Ashly Burch. They do a (semi) weekly podcast. This week’s episode of the HAWPcast is, perhaps thankfully, a little shorter than our other episodes. Clocking in at just under an hour, Ash and I discuss comics, Terry Gilliam, westerns, Joss Whedon, The Sims, and political assassination. You can listen to ithere(click the iTunes button on the right side of the page if you want to get it that way)....

Disappointing news on the third-person, cooperative tower-defense front — Trendy Entertainment’sDungeon Defendersfor PC, Xbox Live Arcade, and PlayStation Network won’t be out this year. Trendy’s Jeremy Stieglitz has revealed that while the mobile versions for iOS and Android will hit in mid-December, other platforms will have to wait until January of 2011. The good news is that Trendy has already completed work on two additional maps, several items packs, and new enemies....

Hotel Duskreally was a great little game. It took everything you loved about old school adventure games and made it all look like an A-Ha video. What wasn’t to love? If you’re one of those who gave the game its cult following, we’ve got good news for you —sequel time! The Last Window: Midnight Promiseis a followup to Kyle Hyde’s original adventure. Developed again by Cing, it’s set in LA during the 1980s and will see Hyde return and possibly meet an adult Ashley Mizuki Robbins fromTrace Memory....

inXile’s third-person action dungeon crawler-y thing,Hunted: The Demon’s Forge, isn’t out until next year. But that’s not stopping the game’s publisher, Bethesda Softworks, from dropping a slew of pre-order items all over North American consumers right now. As is becoming the norm with these types of things, figuring out what you get and where you get it requires its own Prima Strategy guide, because it’s all over the place. There’s the “Darkset” pack, and you get that from GameStop....

Anytime someone says that games aren’t art, we’re up in arms burning straw effigies of Ebert. Any time someone says games are destructive, we want blood. Half of us want to pretend that games are only toys, and the other half of us devote thousands of our best thesaurus words to dissertations on the validity of our medium. We want to be taken seriously — and yet, every time we see a game that isn’t meant to be strictlyfun,we dismiss it out of hand....

If you haven’t yet playedDyson, then you can play the free, original version here. I’m told it’s very good, though I can’t speak personally because — despite how simple it looks — I couldn’t figure out what the hell to do after twenty minutes of clumsily dragging the mouse across the screen like an idiot. Other, smarter, more RTS-inclined people seem to really like it, though. But that’s all background. To differentiate the soon-to-be-released, presumably enhancedcommercial versionfrom the free original, developers Rudolf Kremer and Alex May held a name-changin’ contests....

Our Indie Nation series highlights cool independent games. What isthis? An interactive poem? A fast-paced Choose Your Own Adventure? A smarmy existentialist critique of videogames and the status quo? A silly bit of conceptual game art a la Tale of Tales? Ergon/Logosis all of these things. Or maybe, it’s none of them. Or it’s some of them. I’m not a hundred percent sure. Iamsure of several things, however: it is free, it is very well paced, and it isinteresting....

N.O.V.Ais considered one of the top-tier iPhone games. Gameloft’s first-person-shooter not only nailed the controls, it provided a genuine console experience and some pretty impressive graphics. Now PSP and PS3 fans can play it, as Gameloft is porting it over to PlayStation Minis. Seems like it’ll be a straightforward port with no extra content, so those who already own it on the iPhone probably don’t need to worry about it. The rest of you, however, would do well to check it out....

Look at these new videos ofRed Steelfor the Wii. It actually looks like they may have finally honed in on getting the control precision to work and the game actually looks a bit more polished then last time I saw it. After looking at these vids, what do you think? Did Ubisoft actually makeRed Steelplayable?

Almost. This Ford Fiesta commercial is somewhat cute. It’s centered around a dude taking his car to a driving range but, on arrival, he instead uses the 12V outlet (and a secondary, optional one) to power a Wii and a 40″ LCD television which fits snugly in the rear storage to playWii Sports. Cheeky bit of cross-promotion there. I have to wonder how something like this comes together. Did Nintendo pay in for that screen time or was Ford footing the whole bill?...

Newsweek‘sLevel Up videogame blogis reporting that Namco Bandai’s next-gen rolling-s**t-up simulator,Beautiful Katamari, will be coming exclusively to the Xbox 360. When the game wasoriginally revealed, the title was set to find a home on Sony’s console as well, but it seems weak hardware sales and some clever negotiating nipped that one in the bud. Level Up’s N’Gai Croal points out that while a niche title likeBeautiful Katamariisn’t going to make or break Sony’s console, moves like this are quite telling....

Looks like the once-Japanese-exclusive Dialga/Palkia Pokemon DS Lite is on its way to North America. Reader Spindash54 sends us images of next week’s GameStop marketing, which displays an image of the limited edition handheld. According to the marketing, the DS Lite will sport a $129.99 price and will come with a DS carrying case, aPokemon Mystery DungeonDVD, a poster and a t-shirt. This special package seems like a deal to us, but Nintendo has yet to officially reveal plans to release the handheld in the States....

Last night on Backlog, we started in on the fourth assassination ofKiller 7, which technically puts me at the halfway mark if you’re going strictly by the number of “stages” the game has. I know we’re farther along than that in terms of overall game length, and I suspect some of these final chapters are going to be pretty short. But enough about that. New chapter, new assassination target, same incomprehensible plotline, unsettling audio and stark visual style....