Let’s all sit back and wallow in Cave Story memories.
Memories like:
I have this theory that Cave Story had a kind of pre-La-Mulana effect where if it hadn’t been exactly as difficult as it was, in both the action combat sense and the puzzle/routing sense (in particular its best ending route), then it wouldn’t have been quite as popular. In 2004/2005, the difficulty of the game - not too easy, not for already-familiar experts like, for instance, Touhou - really made it feel like a “product” to lay gamers outside of the Game Maker indie sphere (in that 90s commercial action game sense of a “product”) instead of just a project.
happy 20th anniversary to the first indie game of all time
first time quitting at the bring back three dogs part on a replay and realising im more of a kero blaster fan these days
i still love this one but mostly for the echt hobbyist software feeling of like something mulched together from a bunch of older builds that dont quite cohere, oddly large or functionless areas and characters that dont really come up in the plot as much as you’d think. it is crazily better paced and balanced than something like eternal daughter though. the cockroach section with curly and the machine gun is my favourite “play to keep up with how great the music is” part of any game still i think.
the stuff with nicalis and the really demoralizing looking 3d version also pretty significant in retrospect as an early example of how bad the attempt to commercialise these spaces could / would get
The music echoing in IT labs everywhere
In July 2008, over a holiday weekend, my apartment building management was gone and power went out and the building was hot as hell because the AC was out, and I’d taken the lead on trying to contact the utilities and management to take care of it, and a few other residents were with me down in the lobby of the building for a couple hours as this all got sorted out.
One of the people with me was this very nerdy guy slightly younger than me. He asked me what kind of music I listened to, I listed off a few things, and then he told me that all he really liked to listen to was the Cave Story soundtrack and remixes from the Cave Story soundtrack. He somehow talked to me about this for probably more than like half an hour even though I had never played Cave Story and tried very hard to take the conversation anywhere else. For years, this has been my main association with Cave Story.
I bought Cave Story when it came to WiiWare a couple years later, I played it for about 3 minutes, and never played it again.
I should probably play Cave Story ig
The fervor and obsession Cave Story nerds had for getting a game they already played commercially available as WiiWare is a videogame thing I think about often.
Anyhow:
i wasn’t really around, but i always felt it was like an interesting point that until the xbox live arcade there really was no way to make much money, at least at longform single player games. and stuff like cavestory or eternal daughter basically held as a reference point for like a decade of “haha cave story ripoff” discourse because they were really the only ‘aspirational’ games one could model off of. so it wasn’t until the 2012 boom or so that anybody in the practice could actually feel like there was an expectation you could make money? i am shaken with grief in wondering where that sentiment has wandered off to in the community [edit:] though its hard to instead think about fighting for high score in the blogosphere as being particularly fun, either
and when cave story got caught up in that wave of indie game hype initially it felt like ‘oh this game is finally getting its dues’ but yeah obviously nobody knew how any of that stuff worked at the time, and we are all probably worse off for it?
I’ve played Cave Story through twice but I couldn’t beat the final boss either time.
Guardian FINAL’s edit of the soundtrack is still the version I listen to.
I was once visiting relatives and decided to download a few games on their Wii when no one was looking because they had nothing but 3-4 disc-based games. I bought a few NES/SNES titles that I thought kids should be exposed to. I also downloaded Cave Story but I don’t think I even mentioned that one to them.
A couple years later I learned that my little nephew had found it and it had inspired him to learn to play the piano because he liked the music.
Incidentally, that is one of several households I’m aware of with a Wii still hooked up and no other consoles.
I played this in my apartment with an Xbox 360 controller around 2010 or 2009 or so. I nearly got to the real final boss but couldn’t beat it back then. I recently got it running on my Miyoo Mini and I’m really charmed again by the spritework and music.
I do have a copy of Kero Blaster, which I have for the PS4, a physical copy! It’s incredibly funny sticking a DVD that holds maybe 40mb of data into a PS4 to play Kero Blaster.
The first Touhou game was already over 8 years old when this came out.
Shout out to 2005 me, putting this on every computer in the library and playing it all the time. I never did beat Ballos…
I remember my lil cousin not being allowed to install any games on the family computer, and being amazed that the whole game was optimized to fit on a 3.5 inch floppy with just enough space left for the save file.
Also getting mad the first time I played it on an LCD monitor instead of a CRT and windows rendered the text smoothed to the monitors resolution instead of it being in the same resolution as the main game.
that’s so cute!!
i chose to perform the bass part of the title track for my year 11 music assessment. it didn’t really go very well as a solo piece, especially because i would have needed a couple more strings to hit the ending section
in general the game is somewhat linked with seiklus as something that i probably copped using a floppy disk on my grandparents’ computer coz they had internet, and learned about through either Home of the Underdogs or @sykel’s little freeware column at the time. two expansive examples of what one guy could do after work over a few years
i never really had the heart to hold onto the nemesis, or opt for anything but the spur once i knew about it. i managed to clear hell like maybe just the once, and the idea of trying that again now stresses me out. i thought the cop-out early ending was pretty romantic in its way
