Hot from the Not News Department of the Kotaku press room comes word that Castle Crashers is going mainstream. That is, if you consider being prominently displayed in endcap ads at crunchy grocery chain Trader Joe's mainstream. Reader Jose wrote in to say he spotted the stars of The Behemoth's XBLA hack and slasher shilling ridge-cut potato chips and Virgil's root beer. Clearly, this kind of endorsement speaks to the gaming/snacking crowd that shuns high fructose corn syrup.

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Right now, The Behemoth are busy fixing the online problems plaguing the fantastic Castle Crashers. Once they're done with that, they'll move on. Move on to giving us all new stuff to play with! Writing on their company blog, they've revealed that at least two new playable characters - the King and the Necromancer - will be made available as DLC, as will at least one new weapon, the chainsaw.

Chainsaw massacre !!! [The Behemoth]

Castle Crashers is great. So much fun. Sadly that fun is often tempered by serious technical glitches in the game, from wonky online connectivity to stuff like erasing your entire game progress. It's annoying, yes, but The Behemoth promise (cross their hearts!) that a fix is on its way.

We just got off the phone with Microsoft and we had a great talk about updating Castle Crashers, YES!! Looks like we're on our way to getting this title update out and the bigger issues like saving and online connectivity resolved, in addition to other bugs that have been reported.

Unfortunately that's as precise as they get, saying they "don't have a specific time frame yet" for when we can expect the release, but it can't be too far off. Can it?

Title Update is Coming! [The Behemoth]

The Behemoth's last game - Alien Hominid - wasn't fun. Looked good, but wasn't fun. It was the gaming equivalent of taking your balls, resting them on a table, picking up a hammer then smashing them over and over and over until you sobbed yourself unconscious. The Behemoth's latest game - Castle Crashers - shares many of Alien Hominid's traits. It's lovingly drawn in 2D, it scrolls sideways, you have to kill everything in sight.

So, should you be reaching for the hammer again?

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Alien Hominid came out aaaages ago on Xbox Live Arcade. Did OK for itself, but really, as good as it looked it was just way too hard. So it promptly faded away. But this week, it's back! With The Behemoth's Castle Crashers coasting into the top spot on the XBLA sales charts for last week (and deservedly so), Alien Hominid's been dragged along with it, slotting back into top ten in ninth spot. If you dig Castle Crashers, and have seen the "please buy our stuff it helps keep us alive" notices all over The Behemoth's site, you should be quite pleased with yourself.

Xbox Live Arcade Activity For Week Of August 25th [GamerBytes]

The Behemoth aren't fools, they understand that adding ninjas not only adds awesomeness, it compounds it. (Seriously, try it out. Take any noun, say "plus ninjas", and tell me if it's not awesome. Christmas. Oregon Trail. My cousins' confirmation. Told you.) So word's out via the official blog that you can count on Ninja as another character, and Skeleton as still another.
Ninja carries a sai and a coffee mug, described in a pureley def4. That has to be an inside office joke. The mug is purely defensive. There's also a haze/halo around Ninja in the screens provided by The Behemoth, so does that include invisibility, camouflage or teleporting, or is that just a motion effect? Dunno.

Second character just announced: Skelly, whose weapons seem to include a sword and a bow-and-bone arrow. Plus from gameplay screens, he's either blocking or projecting some kind of energy attack.

Full screens after the jump.

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The highly anticipated Xbox Live Arcade title Castle Crashers has just gotten its gold wings from the ESRB. Xbox 360 Fanboy caught the latest update on the ESRB site, showing that the hyper-cute beat-em-up still gets a T for "blood and gore, cartoon violence and crude humor." Well done, The Behemoth! More assurance that this title is on the way, and it'll be chock full of irony and lulz.

Castle Crashers Isn't Only Done, Now It's Rated! [Xbox 360 Fanboy, also the pic.]

While we wait (and wait and wait) for Castle Crashers to make its Xbox Live Arcade appearance, we'll have to settle for a simple, hirsute 2D throwback known as Castle Crashing The Beard. It pits the player against a manly beard of dedication attached to The Behemoth's Tom Fulp, which is the best last name I've heard in years. Perfect for making the last ten minutes of your work day disappear.

Castle Crashing The Beard [Kongregate]

The Behemoth, developers behind upcoming Xbox Live game Castle Crashers, plan to hand out bronze Castle Crashers trophies to the top leaderboard slots once the game comes out.

The devs say they hope to show off the statues, which are made of "genuine genuine bronze", during this year's upcoming Comic Con. They also showed off one of the statues gnarly arms. Apparently, casting bronze isn't as easy as one would expect.... I'd expect it to be really hard.

Gnarly Arms [The Behemoth Dev Blog]

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Did you know that The Behemoth's Castle Crashers is going to have a staggering 22 unlockable characters? You would if you simply visited the developer blog on The Behemoth's follow up to the Xbox Live Arcade hit Alien Hominid! The dev team has put together a regularly updated blog to keep fans drenched in good development news and Dan Paladin art, which we hope means that Castle Crashers is edging very close to completion and that Summer 2008 wasn't a randomly chosen release window. We'll definitely be keeping an eye on it.

Castle Crashers Development Blog [The Behemoth]