Castle Crashers and Braid Bring Joy

So this weekend my goal was to get through a couple of new XBLA games, Castle Crashers and Braid. I’ve been hearing a lot of great stuff about both of these games, and I wanted to check them out, with hopes of reviewing them sometime in the next week or so.

As of right now, I’m completely thrilled with and loving both of these titles. It’s funny, because they’re the exact opposite of one another in terms of their playing styles. Braid is a puzzle game and Castle Crashers is an old school arcade beat-em-up a la The Simpsons or Streets of Rage.

The interesting thing though is that both games are 2D sidescrollers, essentially. And they’re a blast. It makes me wonder how come developers ever stopped making these 2D sidescrolling games that are a great throwback to old school gaming?

Yeah, I know they can push more polygons and do all kinds of crazy bloom and throw a bunch of brown colors at you (since brown is the official color of this gen, Gears of War and COD 4), but 2D games never stopped being fun — people just stopped making them.

So, two questions. Have any of you guys gotten to play either of these fun games? And two, why do you think it is that people are so scared to make games like this for full release (LittleBigPlanet excepted), rather than just downloadables like LocoRoco or Geometry Wars, etc.?

Written by

I write about samurai girls and space marines. Writer for Smooth Few Films. Rooster Teeth Freelancer. Author of Red vs. Blue, The Ultimate Fan Guide, out NOW!

5 thoughts on “Castle Crashers and Braid Bring Joy”

  1. I think the developers are scared with the community’s reaction. There are so many great 3D games out there, so they just don’t want to go old school. My theory…

  2. I’ve been playing a few 2d games recently, they are fun but like you stated in the post there are a lot more limitations u can do in a 2D game than a 3D. I don’t know if its the way how they are made or that its just 2D is that they seem awfully buggy. Snowman7’s comment is also an issue I think, people want pretty graphics over gameplay now so even if the companies wanted to make a 2D game they would probably back down because people wanted 3D games.

  3. I love 2D games. New Super Mario Bros was a dream come true and I pine for Konami to do a 2D Castlevania on the PS3!

    Use those awesome graphics for something like that!

    Also, this is why I think the DS and GBA were so popular and the PSP took a while…they had the kinds of games you could not play on the consoles.

  5. I enjoyed the crap out of both those games…I was having so much fun with Castle Crashers my x-box had to put an end to it by red ringing.

    Question 2, I haven’t a clue.

Comments are closed.