It amazes me that most of the games I spend time playing are gorgeous games that take basic gameplay principles and apply them in HD. I have gotten more playing time out of more 15 dollar games than I have in 60 dollar games.
What’s more, I have had the distincy privilege of not just playing an obscenely violent and expensive sci-fi shooter across the country with my friends. No. I have had my chance to go back to the basements of our collective youth, to the days when we sat around and played something silly that Capcom or Tecmo or Acclaim used to make: a beat-em up side-scrolling brawler game.
It’s a miracle to accomplish this across such great distances. Such magic is usually reserved for time machines and teleporters. And here I was, tonight, playing a video game like I would have over ten, maybe even 15 years ago. With friends. Happily slaying throngs of enemies, laughing and joking and planning.
It wasn’t until tonight that I realized how utterly detached Nintendo was from its core audience. They may not release as many “core games”. They may have their reasoning for friend codes and other parental placations, but that an Xbox 360 has literally delivered me to the basement TV of my youth has showed how little Super there is left in Nintendo. That an entire system cannot do it, on the system that delivered such things. This isn’t Wii Bowling. This is STAYING POWER. No mere nostalgia; this is the stuff companies were made of.
Castle Crashers isn’t perfect, but it delivers the perfect experience. There are many hosannahs in the Live Arcade catalogue: Braid, (Portal to come), Geometry Wars, Lumines, and now Castle Crashers. These games show creativity, pushing games’ boundaries in ways that many of the big leaguers forget. The level of fun and attention to detail is born straight from the same purple and gray oven that baked my gaming experiences.
We are the better for it. Friendships are stronger for it. In gaming, you truly can win sometimes. I love Castle Crashers, if only because I felt like a kid again.
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