Castle Crashers

Castle Crashers debuted in 2008 on Xbox Live Arcade, and two years later it also got a PlayStation 3 version. It wasn't until November 2012 - more than four years after its premiere - that the game arrived on PC via Steam. It's still the same game: a colorful co-op brawler with RPG elements, in which four knights hack through hordes of enemies on a quest to rescue princesses and a kingdom kidnapped by a dragon - but by that point the PC version had accumulated all the content from the console updates and expansions at once, including bonus characters and game modes.

The port to computers brought mainly technical benefits: adjustable resolution and graphics detail, support for Steam achievements and trading cards, and the option to play with keyboard and mouse - although most players prefer the gamepad the game was designed for, which controls noticeably more naturally. Same-screen multiplayer was retained, but online co-op support via Steamworks was also added, something that wasn't a given on consoles in this form and let players team up with friends remotely as well.

The long wait for the PC version was due to The Behemoth being a small independent studio focused primarily on console platforms - the PC port only came about after the game had built a solid fan base on Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, and demand for a computer version was evident from discussions on gaming forums and social media as well.

The four-year gap between platforms made Castle Crashers a textbook example of how long it can take a small studio to gradually serve all the relevant platforms of a single generation - yet in terms of gameplay and content, the PC version barely differed from the console ones at all; it was mainly a matter of available development capacity.

Even with this delay, the PC release arrived at a time when Steam was already an established platform with a massive player base, so Castle Crashers quickly built its own, separate community of players on computers - often younger than the one that had discovered the game in its console debut four years earlier.

Why play it: For players who missed the series on consoles - even with a four-year delay, Castle Crashers quickly built its own, often younger community of players on Steam.