Cave Story, The best freeware game ever made Options

[MorriganAensland]

Cave Story is truly one of the best games I've ever played, between its colorful characters, gripping story, and a difficult but fair learning curve.

Our story begins with a mute individual waking up, simply, in a cave. Not too long afterwards, he ends up in a village, and not too long after that, a girl he meets there gets kidnapped. The standard-fare storyline quickly diverges as the game continues, becoming much darker and serious as you play. You can't save everyone, people you meet end up suffering depressions, and in your first playthrough, you WILL make glaring mistakes you cannot unmake.

The game plays similar to Metroid, complete with a few Missile and Heart tanks strewn around the massive, floating island the game takes place on. However, they're almost always out in the open and you won't have to deal with the whole "go through an invisible part of the wall" more than a few times in *one* level. You also pick up a collection of guns as you continue on, ranging from the pathetically weak Polestar, the previously-mentioned Missiles, the embarrassing-to-use Bubbler, the slow-moving Fireball, the short-range Sword, and the all-but-omnipotent Nemesis guns.

However, the game has enemies, upon defeat, cough up experience points for your weapons, which you can then pick up. If you take damage, whatever gun you're using will lose experience points. The Polestar evolves into a long-range and respectable, but otherwise unimpressive weapon, you'll shoot off dozens of homing missiles, the Bubbler becomes the ultimate king of crowd control, the Fireball will rip through everything in its path, the sword stays short-range, but has a level of power off the charts, and the Nemesis? It devolves into shooting harmless rubber duckies.

There's also three "Upgrades" to the Polestar, the rapid-fire Machine Gun, fusing it with the Fireball to becomes the Shake, and the best gun in the game: the Spur. However, if you take either the Machine Gun or the Shake, the Spur is lost forever. Depending on your playing style, this is either no big deal or the end of the world as we know it, since the Machine Gun and the Shake have their own advantages over the Spur. The Shake, for instances, goes through walls.

And the bosses start out intimidating (giant block-like goofy demon guy named Balrog) and end genuinely terrifying. The one of the final bosses is a genuine nightmare, with enough things flying around on the screen that you wonder for a moment how you're going to have a chance against it.

There are also multiple endings, ranging from simply taking the coward's way out and running away to pretty much fixing the whole problem that's been happening and saving the day as best you can. To get the best ending, however, you have to perform a number of very precise steps, and missing one of them prevents you from unlocking the final dungeon. I advise you go on the fan website to get help playing the game. Even knowing *exactly* what to do, the game loses no enjoyment factors.

The game was originally just in Japanese, but the nice guys at Aeon Genesis made a translation patch for it too.

So if you have a few hours to kill one of these days, give it a shot. You won't be disappointed.

[Asher Omega]

you've ... just ... learned ... of ... THIS?! the game has been out for a long time (comparatively speaking) that its going the route of Alien Hominid, and (as of yet) is in the process of being made for the DS, PSP, and possibly for digital distribution for the consoles. and I will say this, the single person who made this is made of awesome (I praise you Pixel).

[MorriganAensland]

Well, no. I've known for a while. But it never hurts to just spread the word about a very good game to a bunch of people that probably have never heard of it.

[Asher Omega]

Oh. sorry then.