Showing what an awesome development team they are, The Behemoth gave Major Nelson a custom, hand made FBI Agent trophy. This was in thanks for his support of their first title for Xbox Live Arcade, Alien Hominid HD, back in late February. Now, some of you may remember that The Behemoth was going to give awaytrophies for those at the top of the leaderboards of the game.
Major, being an MS employee was not eligible to win, no matter how mad his skillz, so they hooked him up with this absolutely badass trophy, and he's posted pics on his flickr page of the gift and the thank you letter included in the package. Hopefully, The Behemoth will remember X3F and our GDC interview when Castle Crashers lands on Arcade, right guys?
We ran a story on Friday stating that Castle Crashers will release in 2008 because of the recent size limit increase on Xbox Live Arcade games. This info was apparently communicated to Joystiq during GDC. Since running the story, The Behemoth's Tom Fulp contacted us to let us know that The Behemoth is busy cramming as much as they can into Castle Crashers, but are still adhering to the 50 MB limit. In fact, Fulp noted that The Behemoth enjoys the challenge of meeting the size restriction. It seems the size limit increase is decided on a case by case basis, and The Behemoth has not requested a size increase at this time.
Size increase or not, we wouldn't expect the game to hit anytime soon.
Joystiq cornered The Behemoth's Dan Paladin after the GDC awards ceremony and asked about a release time-frame for Castle Crashers. To their (and our) dismay, Mr. Paladin stated that there was still "about a year of development left" on the XBLA title. Shocked, Joystiq then inquired to whether The Behemoth was going to take advantage of the 100MB bump in the XBLA size limit and were pleased to learn that Castle Crashers would benefit by adding additional features and content. So, we'll be seeing more Castle Crashers content, but will also have to suffer a longer wait. With a year or more of development nobody will be having any Castle Crashers fun until 2008 ... so you better make one hell of a game Mr. Paladin, because this hurts. This hurts a bunch.
We heard the rumblings. We smelled the awesome. We knew that Castle Crashers was somewhere at GDC. It was just a matter of finding it. After what seemed like days of searching, we found the title in the Independent Games Festival pit, loaded up on an HD screen with some pumping speakers, Castle Crashers was ready and raring to go.
Game Almighty posted an interview with Dan Paladin, The Behemoth's artist extraordinaire for Alien Hominid HD and upcoming XBLA title Castle Crashers. In the interview, Dan talks about the differences in the art style between the games, where he gets his inspiration, and why he is so cool. He also talks about the challenges and changes they've encountered while developing Castle Crashers, including reducing the size of the knights on screen and dealing with the complex code. One of the most interesting tidbits from the interview is when Mr. Paladin talks about a few of CastleCrashers' game features stating:
"In Castle Crashers, when holding down the right trigger all 4 of the buttons on top become spells that are intuitive to the player. For instance, press jump without right trigger and you jump normally. Press jump with the right trigger held down and you do a magic boosted jump. You can unlock a lot of characters to play as - as well as weapons, pets, and items! Every character has their own magic abilities which affect the enemies in different ways."
We must admit, we are uber excited for some four player co-op over Xbox Live and beating on those bad dudes. Anyone satisfied with XBLA title Alien Hominid HD and overly pumped for some Castle Crashers later this year?
It's been a long time coming, but we finally have new Castle Crashers media to share. The last time we had a new Castle Crashers video was in July, and that's just too long. Granted, we know what a beast the Xbox Live Arcade certification process can be, so we're not getting our hopes up that we'll actually be able to playCastle Crashers anytime soon. For now, all we can do is watch this video and dream of co-op hack & slash action with some seriously large bosses. Watch the video, and enjoy.
For more intrepid readers, you can even download an HD version, stream it to your Xbox 360, and pretend you're actually playing Castle Crashers!
We love Castle Crashers. That's no secret. It sits at the top of our XBLA wish list, right next to Small Arms. We could think of many words to describe it. Awesome, sweet, phat, dope, cool, all of these words leap to mind. But racist? That was the thought of one concerned mother upon seeing the trailer on GameTrailers.com. First of all, what mom is cruising GameTrailers? That's awesome. Second, racist? Apparently, she thinks the multicolored knights are actually white supremacists. We'll just let you absorb that for a minute ... and there we go. Listen to her bewildered phone call after the break.
Head on over to Joystiq to take a gander at the latest Castle Crashers footage. As an added bonus, you'll have chance to win a sweet Castle Crashers tee. Everybody loves free tee shirts! You've got until 2:30 EST (GMT -4). Check out the post for official rules and whatnot. Good luck!
Behemoth has announced that they are bringing Alien Hominid and a new original title to Xbox Live Arcade. The new title, Castle Crashers, is sure to remind many of old school beat 'em ups like Golden Axe and Guardian Heroes. The game features lots of enemies, 4 player co-op, and some serious action. Bonus points to Behemoth for making the characters look like the Black Knight (who, as you know, always triumphs). After you watch the gameplay video above, be sure and check out the official trailer on Xboxyde.
I'm just going to abandon all journalistic objectivity here and say Castle Crashers looks like it's going to kick ass.
Showing what an awesome development team they are, The Behemoth gave Major Nelson a custom, hand made FBI Agent trophy. This was in thanks for his support of their first title for Xbox Live Arcade, Alien Hominid HD, back in late February. Now, some of you may remember that The Behemoth was going to give away trophies for those at the top of the leaderboards of the game. 
