Thursday, October 20, 2011

CASTLE CRASHERS!

The world doesn't even know it happened,
but an epic quest has come to an end.

While you were sleeping safely in your bed,
or watching reruns of The Fall Guy,
me and Maxwell Atoms:


WERE HACKING AND SLASHING OUR WAY
THROUGH AN AMAZING ADVENTURE!


This is us:


I'm the electric guy on the right, obviously.
Mr. Atoms is the Blue Knight with the icy magical powers.

See, whenever we would go out on the town to
discuss matters of great importance,
we'd usually end up back at his secret hideout,
Castle Dreadmore.
(Dubbed 'The Fab Fortress', SECRET HIDEOUTS AND GARDENS, Nov 2005)

Whilst there we'd load up our saved game of CASTLE CRASHERS
and delve further into our seemingly never-ending journey to
save the Princess from the Evil Wizard.


Never heard of Castle Crashers?
Dude.
You're missing out.

At face value, it's nothing new.
Just a basic side-scroller where you hack and slash your way towards increasingly harder boss monsters.


But the devil is in the details here.
Firstly, the game is BEAUTIFUL.
Nothin' fancy.
Just a deliberately hand-drawn 2-D look.
But what STYLE!!!
(by the brilliant Dan Paladin)
The characters, backgrounds and effects are all simply drawn
but have buckets of flavor.
Great silhouettes.
Bold colors.
Snappy animation.
Who needs all that busy, complicated 3-D crap?
Gimme something with STYLE any day of the week.


Secondly, the game has a great sense of humor.
And it's everywhere.
In the character design.
(there's an awesome sock monster boss)
In the game design.
(there's a great volleyball mini-game)
Amongst the backgrounds.
(all your weapons are kept inside a giant, living frog)
In the weaponry.
(you can fight with a chicken stick)
And I can go on.
And on.
And on.


Thirdly, and most important,
the game is FUN.
The levels are fresh and creative.
Not too easy.
Not too hard.
And with plenty of new places to go and different things to kill.

Anyway, Mr. Atoms and I had been playing the game for almost a year.
(I assume it would go faster if we played more than once or twice a month.)
And now it's over.
Just a couple nights ago we beat the big sooper main boss and our epic quest came to an end.
And I'm a little sad.

It's tough to find a game that much fun.

Sooper triple huge thanks to the guys at Behemoth!


I definitely can't wait to play more of their games!


2 comments:

Drury said...

I think I remember seeing video of early beta of this!

Umm, no I don't.

Anyways.

"Who needs all that busy, complicated 3-D crap?"

Eeeeeexactly. Kinda why 3D worms aren't nearly as good as 2D ones. Or Jazz Jackrabbit, or GTA... Man, gotta play some 2D oldies again.

Wait, I ALREADY DO PLAY 2D OLDIES! Since, well, 3D revolution. Videogames never get old.

But it's good to have indie developers, just in case.

brianna14 said...

Heeeey I've played that game before! Yeah, that's the game where you defeat enemies and have a little pet following you, right? That game is sooo addicting! But I always have to play as the Green Knight...