Snake is only really useful for casual speedrunning because it can trigger specific bombs in Sacred Grounds room 3 through walls (which, to be clear, may be beneficial if you really aren’t good at holding back cherubim, but requires better execution/missile usage for Ballos)
This game came to me after having played Gunstar Superheroes…I think at the same time I found Lyle in Cube Sector. I remember being charmed but not convinced and that’s where I like to live. I made no progress whatsoever because it did not fit into the DOS gaming framework that I approach most games on a PC from. I don’t enjoy being forced into any collectively approved aesthetic of whimsy or ‘story-book’ but Cave Story got into that groove for me, back when I was making an electron drift trajectory through my own Ruby Quartz version of a mathematics degree.
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making my way thru the new cave story piece by the person who wrote “a year of yu-no” Cave Story Revisited
aside bc its mentioned in the piece:
is bourdieu actually worth reading… all the stuff about distinction always just sorta seemed like a cruder version of existing ideas abt hegemony and superstructure, and social/symbolic/cultural capital like loose analogy at best..?? but i’ve never actually gone to the source and i’m probably applying guilt by association with corny, john carey intellectuals-and-the-masses stuff
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I leafed through that and my thoughts are
A) Microsoft Gothic 12pt is not actually a good font for article text
B) having read the section about it twice, and the wikipedia article on ‘database consumption’, I still don’t know whether or not sekaikan 世界観 is really a coherent concept or just “genre awareness” on the level of TVTropes but overblown to make it seem more exotic (and the linked Zack Wood definition seems to be about something else entirely),
C) complete lack of discussion of any meaty details on Cave Story’s legacy and Pixel’s career afterward - the gradual fall of Nicalis’s reputation, Kero Blaster, any of the insights in Pixel’s archive of the development BBS, or even Pixel’s current webcomic feels quite disappointing
E) despite being called ‘revisited’ I feel like nothing in this is actually a personal, renewed impression of the game itself, or how Phantom actually feels about it today. At least the YU-NO post got a bit more hands-on.
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i finished reading it and liked the description of the playful mixing of brush styles in the pixel art (with sudden glimpse of post-pixel future..?!). the comment on the spread of tools and engines in doujin spaces was interesting to me.. i feel like while ofc few people actually did this, western indie spaces often seemed to have a view that rolling your own engine (or language) would automatically be the “deeper”, more insight-generative approach… but wasn’t this kind of a mythologisation of pixel’s own tool development for cave story too?
maybe seperate from how it’s used here but i do kind of think the “database animals” idea is onto something. the thing i always think of with it is actually hp lovecraft, and the way the cult around his stuff always seems more focused on treating his entities as a “set” to endlessly be reshuffled rather than as distinct characters inextricably tied to some particular set of stories. to me it’s not really a national thing, it feels like some weird reflection of the commodity form.. it’s notable to me that the stuff i most associate with the database thing, touhou, lovecraft, SCP, etc is kind of culturally hobby-space-adjacent. i’d associate it with the particular charge of a failed commodity, one which doesn’t quite cohere into something self contained and kind of gestures outside itself to things a singular product can’t contain. i dont think the piece really gets into it, but it is something i think of with cave story’s narrative, the feeling of characters as artifacts of some endless hobbyist reshuffling across builds. it wouldve been interesting to compare kero blaster here, since maybe part of the lonely mood of that game is the way it feels so much more self contained.. the characters work in an office and both they and the game itself seem to have some new and wary sense of professional expectations
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complete video walkthrough for cave story, in the form of a rap album, uploaded a week ago. i kinda figured the nostalgia cycle would hit white guy nerd rap at some point (i am making some assumptions) whether i wanted it to or not but apparently the guy started working on it in 2009
im glad that cringe is dead and that he got to finish such a bizzarre artifact… any critical engagement i could make with it is probably missing the point. but i do think just flipping beats from aesop rock is kind of a missed opportunity. siivagunner has shown me enough rap songs set to cave story tracks that i somehow have standards about this
the effusive replies from people with touhou and homestuck avatars definitely adds to the feeling of this being completely out of time
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I watched the whole thing which frankly is very rare for me. It is definitely bad but there is something very compelling about its singleminded focus. Actually I think the video editing is more impressive than the music. I don’t think I ever would have sat and listened… it’s a multimedia experience.
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so its not joining the likes of mc chris in your playlist
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Even with the forewarning of your post I did not expect such a clapping on the 1s and 3s, my name is balrog and I’m here to say flow
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MC Chris is like an order of magnitude better than this guy, yes
hahahhahahah
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Having recently obtained a few portable emulation machines I’ve been trying to determine a good Android build of doukutsu-rs that supports physical controllers built into these systems. Thus far I haven’t had much luck in that regard. Almost wonder if I should just find a way to emulate the Windows or Linux ports in the Android OS, but that seems maybe a bit too convoluted.
The prospect of trying to play Cave Story with nothing but touch screen controls gives me the horrors. Seems unnecessary as well but I guess Android is a finicky mistress in that regard.
There’s a Megadrive Port that is at like version .7 which should be pretty good.
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Oh, that’s a great point. The Mega Drive port is pretty good if memory serves. I guess there’s also the PSX port. I know one of the two is essentially a complete port so one of those would probably be fairly ideal for an Android-based portable emulator console.
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I VERY slowly made my way through that cave story rap and the comment under the end starting with “from one cave story rapper to another” made me feel Dread
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aaaaahhhhhhh