PAX East 2010: BattleBlock Theater and Castle Crashers PS3
The Behemoth's booth at PAX East was one stop I was sure to make on the trip to Boston, and the line to play their newest game BattleBlock Theater turned out to be the longest line I waited in at PAX. Not because the line was longer than some of the higher profile games on display like Crackdown 2 or Red Dead Redemption, but because the people playing just wouldn't let go of the controller. When they finally were forced to leave, they walked away with a forlorn look back at the booth, as if the mob in line would invite them back with open arms. And after getting a taste of BattleBlock Theater myself, I can't blame them for not wanting their time with the game to end.
To start in BattleBlock Theater you must create your character. This means choosing a head shape, a facial expression, and a weapon. There already seemed like a decent selection of options in the PAX demo, but apparently there will be a ton more in the final game. Maybe not Borderland's 87 Bazillion, but well into the thousands, with hundreds of face options alone.
What I got to play of BattleBlock theater was from the multiplayer co-op mode, though there will also be a more competitive multiplayer mode and a full single player story mode ("our most story-centered game yet" as one of The Behemoth's people told me later). To go along with the theater theme of the game, each match was considered a play consisting of three acts. These acts took the form of various timed multiplayer challenges.
One act had me and another player running around the stage with every block we touched changing to our team color. There were level hazards a plenty, including lasers, spikes, disappearing blocks, spikes hidden under disappearing blocks, and hot coals that acted as a springboard. Despite these traps, this mode we were quite good at and easily tagged more of the level than the opponent team. Confident, we then moved on to the second act which had us trying to knock the souls from our opponents and steal them in a fun mix of capture the flag and keep away. The catch though, is that you can still gain points for holding an opponent's soul even if you've lost your own. Not knowing this, and the fact that I dumbly chose a boomerang as my weapon which kept stunning me and my teammate, brought us to our defeat for the second act. But as we all know "the show must go on," so we moved on to the third act. Here a floating golden whale dropped gold bricks that we needed to collect and deposit into a flying safe. Bizarre, perhaps, but in the world of BattleBlock Theater such things are commonplace. My boomerang once again was our downfall, with it's ability to make us easy targets for AI to steal our gold. We lost terribly, but by this point we were laughing far too much to care. Somehow The Behemoth has created that is just as fun to lose as it is to win.
I talked to one of the nice folks hanging around The Behemoth's booth to try and find out more. Hit the jump to see what I discovered about BattleBlock Theater, news on the PS3 version of Castle Crashers, and a slip of the tongue that I'm not sure The Behemoth meant to announce yet.
When talking with The Behemoth I was told something about the character customization that I wasn't able to see in the PAX demo. In Castle Crashers on XBLA they found that players were starting up online games solely to exchange weapons that they had found. The Behemoth wanted to better facilitate this unexpected community feature, and so for BattleBlock Theater you can swap any of your collected faces (which are unlocked through the single player campaign) with your friends. Considering that there will be hundreds of faces to collect, this will surely be a welcome addition for completionists. I also asked about the multiplayer and whether it will support four players on Xbox Live or just the two for co-op, to which I got the response: "we're shooting for at least four players." Does that mean it could be more than four players? He, who had previously been quite friendly, suddenly became evasive and refused to answer any more questions until I changed the subject. Maybe he had just misworded the answer, maybe the game will support more than four players, but if body language counts for anything, then color me intrigued.
So we turned to the PS3 version of Castle Crashers. "It's definitely coming this year," I was told, "and it's much more than just a port." One of the big new features for the PS3 version is the Volleyball mode. On the Xbox 360 there was a volleyball minigame at the end of one level, but for the PS3 this has been re-imagined as a separate game mode on the main menu. Hints were dropped about additional new modes, but The Behemoth was tight lipped as to what they might be. For a final question I asked about possible DLC for either game, considering that Castle Crashers received two DLC packs. All he would tell me was that "The Behemoth likes DLC." I'll take that as a probably-maybe.
Overall I came away mighty impressed with The Behemoth's PAX offerings. BattleBlock Theater takes the action-heavy gameplay and fantastic 2D art that The Behemoth is known for and turns it into what could basically be considered a party game. And with the promise of a big single player campaign on top of that, BattleBlock Theater looks like it won't have any trouble following in the success of The Behemoth's past games. Meanwhile, Castle Crashers looks as good as ever on the PS3, and with new modes to make the PS3 version the definitive Castle Crashers experience.
NaviFairy
Posted to Hot Stuff, Video Games on 1 April 2010
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