When Yacht Club Games decided to style Shovel Knight after the NES games that inspired it, they took that project seriously. Shovel Knight can t fill the screen with 1000 bullets or radically switch up how it plays. It has to stay true to its inheritance, else, as programmer and co-designer David D Angelo tells me, It d stand out as bizarre.

So its bosses naturally follow classic rules, too, including its final one, the Enchantress. Here, Yacht Club faced the challenge of producing a fight with the same restriction of four attacks and 20 hit points as all the other bosses, while also acting as a striking culmination of the adventure. But the real> challenge began when they went back to redesign her another three times, once for each of the game s expansions. And now the project is finally done, these four riffs on the same battle are a chance to witness a studio jamming on and exploring the nooks and crannies of its design. (more…)

The final Shovel Knight campaign launched today, letting us play as the dastardly King Knight in King Of Cards, and so did its battle mode Showdown. These are the final two big Kickstarter stretch goal features that developers Yacht Club Games have been ploughing through since first launching their rad retro-styled platformer in 2014. It’s taken longer than expected but damn, backers got a hell of a deal. Have a look in the trailers below.

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Armour-clad 2D platformer Shovel Knight will be launching a double expansion on April 9th. As well as the previously announced King Of Cards, Yacht Club Games will be releasing Shovel Knight Showdown, a local-only multiplayer party game that will come as both a free update for owners of the game and as a standalone purchase. You can watch a 10-minute gameplay demo courtesy of IGN below:

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I settled a ‘Dracula vs. Frankenstein’ debate the other day by referring to the authority on power rankings: Top Trumps cards, where Dracula trounces Frankenstein. Granted the debate was about the books rather than a monsterfight, but it’s still fun to throw fictional folks together to see who’d win a rumble. Enter Blade Strangers, a crossover fighting game released today. Along with pugilists from previous games by developers Studio Saizensen, it draws characters from games including Shovel Knight, The Binding Of Isaac, Azure Striker Gunvolt, and Cave Story. But which is better, a spade-swinging knight or a weeping dead child? There’s only one way to find out: fiiight!

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The Battletoads have escaped the confines of Microsoft’s corporate grasp and have made their way to the greater PC audience through Shovel Knight [official site] update. You can now meet, battle and befriend the burly amphibian trio in a whole new level. This was initially exclusively to Xbox then spread to the Windows 10 version, and thanks to last week’s update (full patch notes here) everyone on PC can now play it.

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The final campaign of fab platformer Shovel Knight [official site] will arrive in 2018, developers Yacht Club Games have announced. Like the Plague of Shadows and Specter of Torment bonus campaigns before it, King of Cards stars one of the main game’s villains on an adventure of their own. This time it’s the dastardly King Knight, who’ll bouncing and bopping his way through four worlds and over thirty courses. It was previously expected some time in 2017 but now 2018 is the lucky year. (more…)

Specter of Torment, the next add-on coming free to cracking throwback platformer Shovel Knight [official site], should be bouncing our way in April. That’s the word from developers Yacht Club Games, who previously said more broadly that it’d arrive in spring. Like the Plague Knight expansion, Specter of Torment will bring a campaign starring another knight, this time Specter Knight with his swish wall-climbing and air-dash attacks. Here, check his moves out in this trailer from December: … [visit site to read more]

Everyone’s favorite game about a knight with a highly undignified weapon is getting a prequel, and how! Starring Spectre Knight as its playable character, the ‘Specter of Torment’ campaign will arrive as a free update to Shovel Knight [official site]. We’ve had a peek at his swift moves before but a new trailer shows a lot more of what we should expect when Spectre Knight leaps out in spring 2017. … [visit site to read more]

Shovel Knight is already a cracking fighty platformer – have you played it? – but developers Yacht Club Games have kept adding to it as they tick off stretch goals from the Kickstarter which funded it. The dastardly Plague Knight got his own campaign last year and now Yacht Club have revealed the next boss becoming playable in a free update, Specter Knight. He’s an agile-looking fella with tricks like climbing walls and air dash attacks to get around, as a few GIFs of him in motion show. Yes, King Knight and more modes are still coming too.

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I exhibit levels of nostalgia some describe as “monstrous” – I recently decided that keeping both the last birthday card and the final Christmas card from my dead grandmother constituted hoarding and binned one of them, and don’t even get me started on chiptune – so you can trust that I’m not simply taken in by the retro stylings of Shovel Knight [official site]. It’s pretty nice. Now it’s bigger, as this week brought the free expansion Plague of Shadows, a pleasant bundling-up of old Kickstarter stretch goals including a secondary campaign starring the dastardly Plague Knight.

… [visit site to read more]