Castle Crashers Development Wraps Up

The wait for Castle Crashers has been a long one. Originally scheduled to be released over a year ago, the game's developer, The Behemoth, decided to delay the game in order to take advantage of the 100MB of extra space Microsoft lovingly bestowed upon XBLA developers. So while the delay was painful, the end result should be a much bigger, deeper game. And now, the wait is almost over because the game is officially complete.

The Behemoth's Dan Paladin wrote on the Castle Crashers blog,

This game is undoubtedly the largest 360 XBLA game that has any kind of story; Large in scope, takes hours and hours to go through with your buddies. Lots of little treasures and secrets hiding around the levels, many unlockable characters all with a different feel

Unfortunately, due to the way XBLA works: certification, fitting the game into the release schedule etc., it could still be a couple months before the game is actually made available for purchase.

On the bright side though, what a summer this looks to be for XBLA: Penny Arcade Adventures, Bionic Commando ReArmed, Commando 3, Super Street Fighter II HD, Braid. Even with all the garbage that usually ends up released on a weekly basis, we shouldn't go more than a couple weeks without something really cool.

It's nice to see that the Big Three have all realized that their online services are the perfect venue to combat the annual summer drought. 360's got a great XBLA lineup, Nintendo just introduced WiiWare, with games like Alien Crush and Eternity's Child on tap for the Summer, and Sony has the intriguing looking PixelJunk Eden as well as the episodic Siren: Blood Curse coming to PSN.

I'm looking forward to most of these games more than anything that's coming out at retail until Too Human hits in late August and my excitement for that has dropped dramatically in the wake of the complete neutering the co-op has gone under.

4-player co-op lives on in Castle Crashers!


[via Joystiq]