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So, Castle Crashers came out today.  Highly recommend, it’s absolutely fantastic.  The single player and co-op is pretty much seamless and the experience is the same unless there’s some bad lag, but it feels like the other players are in the same room playing on your 360 with you.  The campaign is plenty long as well with tons of unlockables.  If you like games like Golden Axe (side scrolling adventure/RPG type), co-op games in general, get it.  If you like gaming at all, at least try the demo, you won’t be disappointing.

PAX is this weekend.  I’ll be there Saturday and Sunday.  I’ve got some stuff going on Friday and won’t be able to make it.  I might show up late but Sat and Sun are definite.

I leave you with this: Meet the Sandvich

Blizzard has released the opening cinematic to the upcoming World of Warcraft expansion, Wrath of the Litch King (viewed here).  The video is stunning, in classic Blizzard cinematic fasion.  Watch it.  I emplore you.

So, I’ve been writing posts, really.  I’ve just been doing it via e-mail since WordPress supports posts via a POP3 account.  Unfortunately, it apparently doesn’t like the login system my server uses and, as such, hasn’t made a single post.  Lame, I know, but that’s the way the cookie crumbles and it means I’ll just have to do the posts manually again.  I did want to try out the remote posting functionality but am completely unable to find software that supports the Atom Publishing Protocol and gave up after picking through Google results for almost an hour.

I come to you with two games to keep an eye on.

The first is Battlefield Heroes, made by DICE, the same guys who have done all of the Battlefield series.  Basically, it looks like DICE’s own interpretation of Team Fortress 2‘s cell shaded graphical style but on a much larger scale, typical to the Battlefield series.  It looks like it’d be a blast and, apparently, is going to be free so be sure to keep an eye out for it.

The second is Command & Conquer: Red Alert 3.  Like most RTS nuts, I’ve been a fan since the original was first released on the PC and have been waiting for a third installment to hit.  After looking at several screenshots and movies on their media page, I’m pretty excited for this to come out.  I’m also really happy EA has gotten Frank Klepacki back to compose the music.  Anyone who played the original, or even remembers it, would know Mr. Kelpacki from the famous “Hell March” track.

I found this cool little WoW addon called OPie.  Basically, you can bind it to show a ring of buttons around your character whenever you click/hit a hotkey.  Overall, the concept looks interesting and I might use it on my shaman for those rare totems or my mage for portals/teleports or for setting up quick gear switches on all of my characters.

Well, tickets went on sale for Blizzcon today and a bulk of them was sold out in two hours during the middle of the day when I was at work without access to the outside world.  An extra batch of tickets went on sale at 8pm PDT, to which I had FireFox open and would minimize WoW to refresh the site to see if they were available for purchase or not during tonight’s raid; going afk several times when the site was actually responding.  The site’s servers crashed right after I had clicked “Add to Cart” and were unreachable until 8:45pm at which time, the site reported all tickets being sold out.  So, I guess I’m out of luck.  It’s a shame because I was really looking forward to sitting in on some of their panels on game and dungeon design, cinematics, and class design.

I will still be attending PAX (Penny-Arcade Expo) August 29th – 31st.  On the upside, PAX is local and the tickets were only $30 versus Blizzcon’s $100 ticket pricetag and whatever else in travel spendatures and hotel costs.

More of a personal note to myself but here’s the upcoming games on Xbox Live Arcade:

• Geometry Wars 2 – July 30
• Braid – August 06
• Bionic Commando: Rearmed – August 13
• Galaga Legions – August 20
• Castle Crashers – August 27

I’ve already purchased Geometry Wars 2 and Braid and have gotten a lot of entertainment out of them.  I’m kind of iffy on Bionic Commando as I never played the original version on the NES but it looks rather interesting.  Maybe I’ll buy it with extra points on my account, assuming I get enough.

Galaga’s a classic and the new and improved graphics look great, much like the redone 1942: Joint Strike which was released earlier.  It reminds me a lot of a top-down version of R-Type Final.

Honestly, I’m most stoked about Castle Crashers.  It’s basically Golden Axe but cell shaded and, as far as I can tell from the screenshots and trailers, absolutely rediculous.  My kind of arcade game.

How are you?