Howdy, Stranger!
It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!
If you have an email ending in @hotmail.com, @live.com or @outlook.com (or any other Microsoft-related domain), please consider changing it to another email provider; Microsoft decided to instantly block the server's IP, so emails can't be sent to these addresses.
If you use an @yahoo.com email or any related Yahoo services, they have blocked us also due to "user complaints"
-UE
If you use an @yahoo.com email or any related Yahoo services, they have blocked us also due to "user complaints"
-UE
Cave Story
This is, without a doubt, one of the most kickass games for the PC ever. The gameplay's just so tight and the story, while sorely lacking in content, makes up for its predictability and tiredness with its amazing narrative. Really, get it if you are into Metroid, Castlevania, or Mega Man. You won't regret it.
Comments
I always felt like it was overhyped. I mean, I played it, and it was good, but I never got how it was always treated as so awesome. Especially when some of the design decisions (looking at you, method of determining the ending) are just bad.
The ending was a textbook case of Fake Difficulty.
Fake difficulty still isn't actually a thing.
^Eh, the term is probably inaccurate, but I think the concept of difficulty introduced in an unreasonable way is valid. For example (I don't know if you know this already or not), to get on the track to get the best ending in Cave Story, you have to
So basically, what ending you get isn't determined by how good you are at the game, but by whether you read a walkthrough.
I don't think that's really unreasonable, per se.
Yes, it's very, very obscure. But it's also not meant for every player of the game to do anyway. The game is perfectly fun and satisfying even if you just get the standard ending. The secret area and ending is supposed to be a reward for the kind of players who obsessively look for secrets everywhere, and it wouldn't really work that way if it were easier to find.
Hiding a significant part of a game behind a sequence of events with no causality and no indication of how to get it is bad design of the worst sort.
I'm thinking of docking my rating of the game from five stars to four stars based on precisely that, actually.
I want to agree with you in the same way that I want to agree with people who say allowing grinding in games is bad.
But then I remember actually playing games and I really can't agree. The thing is, I don't feel like I had any less fun with Cave Story because I needed a walkthrough to unlock the secret area than I would if it was more obvious (and more obvious in this case pretty much means unmissable), but I do think the obscurity of it increases the retro-ness of Cave Story, and whatnot.
I mean, I don't think doing things like that in games should be encouraged, and from an abstract, purely design perspective I can see that it should be bad but as a player I don't really think it detracted from the game.
I had fun playing the game (I don't think it's some amazing feat of game design or anything like a lot of people seem to, but it's okay), but I disrespect that decision enough that it's one of the reasons why I never bought the premium version. The other being that the "improved" graphics look much worse to me.
Well, despite being generally a fan of retro games, I actually don't think that "retroness" is a good standard of judgement.
I do remember thinking that that action--ignoring that character--was quite unintuitive. (And the jump was also pretty annoying, but that's a different issue.) It's best if the actions a player takes in-game are as related to and reasonable within the story/setting as possible. Now most of my enjoyment of Cave Story came from its story and music, and this one little bit involving me looking this up in a FAQ bothered me only slightly, but that doesn't mean it's not a flaw.
This is a pretty amorphous area of game design. It's currently common (and good) practise to make most things very clear to the player in terms of capabilities, goals and requirements.
On the other hand, I often ask myself what I'd do if I was a project lead for a AAA title and had significant say in the marketing. And I always return to the same conclusion; I would completely hide some game features from the marketing so players got more than they expected. And I suppose this applies to smaller games, too. Misdirection and leaving information out entirely can be a good way to give players a sense of discovery and mastery.
For instance, a swordsmanship game might have enough versatility in its core system to pull off the majority of real fencing techniques without necessarily teaching them all. The game might teach the basics in terms of principle as well as control, then let the players discover their own favoured strategies and derived techniques. It might be balanced in such a way that a very strong grasp of the basics can see a player through until the end, but discovering and developing other techniques might make certain adversaries and scenarios significantly easier. Even an adversary with perfect defense can be tricked and thwarted by a feint; likewise, a heavily offensive adversary is weak to a single-time counter attack.
If anything, I think games could use more true secrets and unadvertised features. Chances are, without walkthroughs or a game community, few would know about Cave Story's best ending. Kind of like back in the old days of Pokemon, where the 99 Rare Candy cheat was sort of aethereal knowledge, passed from one child to the next. More discovery, more ways to game the system, more of a personal experience.
Oh, I disagree then. I think that "hidden" features should at least be hinted at. I don't like, say, bombing every wall in a dungeon just to see if it might be a hidden passage. Now, if you leave some slight visual indicator, such as a small crack in the wall or some shrapnel on the floor nearby, that would be much nicer.
Granted, in this Cave Story example, there IS a subtle indication that you can do something odd.
When I say "hidden features", I mean more in terms of core gameplay than exploration. Like that guard-thing you do in SSB where it cancels a recovery animation. That might just be taste, though -- I absolutely love discovering how to do things supported by the game system that I'm not outright told to do (as long as they're not too glitchy). It's a sense of discovery that I find comparable to naturally learning a rule in music theory rather than being taught it.
Given that to do it you have to ignore explicit plot prompts and dick said character over with the meta-knowledge that he gets better via contrivance, one could say that it's meant for nobody to do. It's one thing to hide an easter egg for clever people who abuse the machine gun to sequence break a series of tricky jumps (Metroid Fusion comes to mind) and clear the game without an otherwise critical item that the game outright tells you to get, but for that easter egg to be the only ending where most of the cast doesn't die horribly is just...mean-spirited.
It's the same thing that was wrong with Chrono Cross. The best characters came from being an asshole to Kid every time she walked onscreen.
I really only did the best ending so I could run Sacred Grounds. I really don't give a shit about the characters.
Same here, and I thought that was how it was for most people.
The characters are, quite frankly, two-dimensional. They expected you to care about them in the same way that Wrath expected you to care about the dumb servant girl.
True, but I still say that the only thing resembling a happy ending should absolutely not be a well-concealed easter egg you have to actively avoid following the game's directions to find.
You have a very valid point.
^^ Well, unless you're talking about some kind of jackass directions like Portal. Then it's fair game.
aw come on guys
let's talk about its good points for once
Cave Story is a good game, but it's getting pretty damn over-marketed. $10 WiiWare port adds nothing new; $10 for Steam (with extra time attack stage) is sorta justified I guess?
3DS version? Uh, $40 can net me four copies of the Steam version with roughly the same amount of content, thank you very much.
The Steam version also does not have to pay for physical distribution costs. And not everyone has Steam.
So guys, here's an idea for a challenge run:
No Spur/Nemesis/Super Missiles
Nope, none of that bull. You're not going to use the three best weapons in the game. At all. Like, ever.
Here's what I think is the best possible build under these rules:
Level 3 Snake/Level 3 Blade/Level 3 Missiles. Don't bother with the Bubbler: it's useless anyways.
And yes, you DO have to run Sacred Grounds with these rules.
I've heard of people doing Polar Star runs, so eh.
LEVEL 1 BUBBLER. ALL THE WAY.
Level 3 Bubbler would like a word with you.
How do you use Level 3 Bubbler? It's kinda slow as an offense weapon.
Hold down the fire button to launch a field of bubbles. Release, and each bubble shoots a projectile in a single direction. The bubble field can also deal damage and absorb projectiles, IIRC. It's deceptively useful, and a well-placed bubble can help hit places you couldn't reach otherwise.
the Polar Star seems like an excellent weapon from the little of the game that I've played, though