Sonic for Hire is a new web series about what it would be like if Sonic the Hedgehog had to make some extra money working in other video games. So far, the series has put the heroic hedgehog in Punch Out, Paperboy, Toejam and Earl, and Street Fighter.

I’m back from my brief east coast visit, where I got to play a really fun show with Minusbaby, Crashfaster, Glomag, and Marieke. It was a HUGE honor to actually get to play my iPhone music at a Pulsewave NYC event after hearing so much about that scene for so many years.

One of the show’s many surprises was a cool homebrew video game by Batsly Adams called DrunkenNES, which was a breathalyzer game for use with Nintendo Entertainment Systems. I wrote a post about it on the LaughingSquidhole, but I thought I’d post some of the pictures I took here:

PETA recently set their sites on the indie game makers of Super Meat Boy with a vegan friendly parody called Super Tofu Boy (playable as Flash, Mac, or PC). SMB’s response is very classy. Also, they added Super Tofu Boy as a playable character in the game.

Pros: Inflated ego. Cons: Highly ineffectual.

The Knifetank character is a ton of fun to work with, but I was surprised at how fun it was to use him with a “choose your fate” kind of game. Just about every clickable item is full of jokes, and I think the art is some of Mike’s best yet. The game feels fantastic on touch devices too, so try it out on your iPad if you get the chance.

The game was coded by Lilia Markham. Mike Hales did all of the fantastic art. The eerie music was written in MIDI GM by Crashfaster. The writing and basic game design was by Doctor Popular (me). To be honest though, everybody had a big hand in the writing in the game… especially at 4am (17 hours into our dev cycle) when started going a little crazy.

Crashfaster plans on releasing The Hauntening soundtrack next week on our bandcamp page, with remixes by myself and others.

Enjoy the game, click until you find every joke possible, leave comments below (no spoilers!), and feel free to ask me any questions here.

We hope to have our next Knifetank game online by Monday morning.

Thanks to those who played our first game and downloaded the albumhole.

We started work on our newest Knifetank game on Saturday morning at around 10:30am… we finished (mostly) by 10:30 am the following day. I think the game works great, looks stylish, and is fucking hilarious. I can’t wait for it to go online sometime soon. we’ll post it on Knifetanks.com as soon as we can.

Don’t forget, you can still get our Knifetank: The Albumhole for hella cheap here.

Anders Ekermo is a video game programmer who also likes to knit. Recently, he has posted some of his video game inspired crafts onto ebay to raise money for Child’s Play Charity. There are a few classic gaming icons represented, but the collection largely seems to be a tribute to some great indie games such as Fez and Castle Crashers. Check Ander’s ebay shop to see them all.

FEZ GAMEPLAY VIDEO TWO from fish on Vimeo.

The kickass folks at the Polytron Corporation have just released a new gameplay trailer for their upcoming game FEZ. Still no word on the actual release date of this long anticipated game, but this is the first new gameplay footage released in 2 years! It’s cool to see how the newer art looks in gameplay.

In the above video, you can see Polytron’s “Trixel-vision” engine in work. The driving game mechanic is that Fez is that it’s a 2D platformer that allows you to switch between which dimensions you can access at a time. So a jump may appear to be too far from one angle, but once the world is rotated then flattened, the jump is very close. It’s a great idea that appears to be well executed.

On a side note, if you like 6955‘s soundtrack for the game, you can download the free 3 song “Fez Demos” here.

I was also lucky enough to receive a few pieces of KnifeTank fan art from George Webber and Jeff Plotkin. Here is George (aka NoCashComics) piece:

And here is Jeff Plotkin’s, which you can see in this recent video interview I posted yesterday: