Spent a few hours playing Castle Crashers with my buddy over. Enjoyed the heck out of it, especially all the quirky character designs and animation. It's got enough depth and variety in weapons and leveling up for me to make this worth the price versus 800 points for a standard side scrolling beat em up. I got up to Level 14, and pleasantly surprised that each color character is saved at that level to resume later on. Looking forward to playing more!

Same here. I think it will definitely be a slower paced game. I doubt I will double dip on it though. I still have my DS version.

Castle Crashers: I couldn't get one online game going last night. Not one. Have the devs and/or MS acknowledged the problem?

Local co-op is fun as hell, though.

I tore through the game yesterday and had a freaking blast. I played a few ranked arena and quaff matches as well as a co-op game with a buddy in WA (though we did have 2 disconnects).

There's also an Insane mode once you complete the game once, you can access it just south of the Barbarian Boss spot, IIRC.

My Orange Knight is like level 37 or 38 now and I have 14 (out of 24?) animal orbs and 40 of the weapons. Only 2 unlocked characters - the grey knight I think everyone gets after beating the Barbarian Boss and the "lava knight" I got for completing the game. Not sure exactly how that works, probably just random as I played with another guy in arena that had beaten it with Orange and he had the regular Barbarian character.

I love this game and I have faith the server issues will be resolved, otherwise it's an epic fail. Luckily I don't have time for a few days to get back into it so it doesn't affect me yet.

MyGamerCard.net now has this theme, if you're interested:

Cool. Here are my paltry scores. I did manage to up my Pacifism score 10 mil last night, moving up one more spot.

Obligatory humbling cards:

That's crazy that 330mil in Pacifism barely nets you top 500.

A way to go of course...

Here's my set of scores...

I have to agree. I played it for about an hour yesterday afternoon, and in all honesty, I think the VGT review is off for this one. How long is an XBLA game supposed to be? It's fun, it's old-school, it's funny, and it's an original game. In the Genesis and SNES days, this game would have been $50 on day one, and gotten 100% across the board from the review mags. And that's what it's meant to be...

It says "A 4-Player Adventure" on its own title screen.

If you have 3 other players to have on the couch next to you, that's the way to play, no doubt.

But we're in a different world than the Genesis and SNES days. This game is built upon the XBL experience and, as it is right now, it isn't delivering on its own promise.

Granted, through no fault of the game itself, but the factors that allow the game to reach its potential. As such, the game isn't up to its potential 100% score. It is passing, but not a failure. I agree that 60% is a bit harsh, especially with no hope of revision, but the game isn't what it should be right now.

I think you're fixating on the live portion a bit too much. I want to play it with people on live, believe me, but I'm the only one of my friends that had it (as of 6pm last night). It was still fun, and worth more than a 60 even as a single player experience.

It is a blast and I did complete it in 5-5.5 hours. There's a bit more exploration I can do and Insane mode, but the game isn't going to change beyond that. There's only so far you can go in single player in this particular game. In fact, even in multiplayer, the game doesn't change. No new or harder enemies, just less experience to go around so you'll have more teamwork to do than alone, I imagine.

We'll see what you think once you finish it if fixating on the Live aspect is justified or not. GW2 wouldn't be as fun (imo) without the leaderboards.

I dunno...I have plenty of fun on single player games, just as much as multiplayer.

I'm not debating the "too short for $15" nonsense because I've got my money's worth already. I just need stable online play to stay interested is all I'm saying.

Agreed the leaderboards make this game. I "completed it" in 30 minutes otherwise.

I think the Live issues result in too hard of a hit in VGTalk's review as well. Of course, like Flay said, it's just one guy's opinion and some people are going to value online play more then others. Nothing wrong with that. I'm sure it generated more hits being a low review

For me, even with Live working properly with the game I'm not really someone that will hop online to play with a bunch of people so the game is easily a 4 star or 80-90% rated game. Online multiplayer and replayability are always hot topics with reviews these days, but they never really bother me too much.

Ahh, so you're the GloomyPickle.

locking for length, and because I don't want gatordeb to jump the gun and tell ME to close the thread and start a new one again.