XBLA classic Castle Crashers is getting a remaster this week

Oh, halcyon days. Before Share buttons and in-game social integration matrices, when Twitching was something that you went to A&E for, and 60 frames per second was Bobby Fischer's sideline in record-breaking snooker. These were the days when all you had were a few friends, a few controllers and some relatively high-end equipment to play games with.

Chief among those games was Castle Crashers, The Behemoth's magnificent cartoon brawler, a four-player riot of colour and comedy. And it's back this week on Xbox One to show modern games what's up.

The re-release is out on Wednesday (in the US at least - other regions are confirmed, but not dated), and a company blog post has detailed just what's changed. Alongside the expected improvements to online performance, visual fidelity and increased texture sizes, there's a new mini-game called Back-Off Barbarian, which looks strange and unfathomable. It's apparently a rhythm action game, which is pretty cool. Look, it's in the trailer:

The game will be priced at $14.99 for new buyers - but those who owned the game on Xbox 360 can claim the new version for free if they download it before 20th September. If for some reason you really aren't all that bothered by the new version, but own the original, it will be joining the Backwards Compatibility programme at an unspecified point in the future.

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Joe Skrebels
Joe first fell in love with games when a copy of The Lion King on SNES became his stepfather in 1994. When the cartridge left his mother in 2001, he turned to his priest - a limited edition crystal Xbox - for guidance. And now he's here.