What got you into Cave Story?

I know I've asked and said this way too many times on the discord before (I'm sorry), but what introduced you to this game?

In my case, I watched a Calamity mod nohit video and really liked the music which was a Running Hell remix. Eventually, I listened to the original which motivated me to play the freeware version, and the rest was history.

 

Back in 2010, I was reading an issue of Nintendo Power, and there was a review section and one of the games that was brought up was Cave Story for WiiWare, praising it for its gameplay and soundtrack, and similarities to games like Metroid and Castlevania (if only you can make up a word that combines the two names). I didn't think about it until when a relative decided to give me his old 3DS, on my brother's birthday of all times, and Cave Story DSi was one of the games installed on it. So yeah, that rekindled my interest in the game after only reading about it once a couple years prior.

Edit: Also I feel like a thread with the same exact question has existed before, but I can't seem to find it.

 

i wanted to get a modification of little fighter 2 from a classmate back in 2009/2010, so he lent me a cd with the mod and it turned out there were more things on it
visual boy advance with pokemon fire red (i didn't know any type matchups and there was already a save file so i just tried beating the elite four by spamming hydro pump with blastoise against every opposing pokemon), and also cave story
turns out more classmates have been playing the game, so we started talking about it a little more. i even found a way to download it onto the school computer (we were using macs at the time so i was surprised there was a mac version of an actual game) and that's where i beat hell for the first time (with the time of 4 minutes and 36 seconds!)
took me a couple more years to join the forums

 

I saw this piece of fanart for the game:

https://www.deviantart.com/raizy/art/Cave-Hero-35819910

The description read "If you haven't played Cave Story yet I feel bad for you. :<".

Who was I to argue with that. I played Cave Story, loved it, and joined the forums in 2007.

 

My dad tried to get me into Final Fantasy on the playstation some years earlier but I never really got far in those games even though I found their art directions super endearing (It was especially awesome on a huge tube tv, felt properly cinematic). Adventures / RPGs weren't my thing but I also had recently went through my first Minecraft phase as the adventure update was something I was super hyped over (Then promptly unable to play on my Windows XP because they updated the requirements)

I was very terrible at just about every video game at the time so it's not like I completed many of them

I had recently gotten a DSi at the time, this was roughly around when the 3DS launched so I felt especially shit I didn't get a chance to get in on the fun until a bit later, but this new game called "Cave Story" showed up in the DSi store and I had no clue what it was about, I was assuming it was gonna be some weird but artsy adventure game based on the description. I begged my papa to buy it and he obliged, my mental image of the game initially was a bit more in lined with the stuff that was being released by larger companies on that hardware, so I was initially a bit let down by the look of FIrst Cave but by the time I got to Egg Corridor I'd fallen in love with it already, it let me go in so many directions and talk to so many characters which was something I didn't see at all in 2D platforms I was playing around then.

It took me a while to beat but I got all my friends in school into it and we all sortof obsessed over it for a little while and they thought the idea of modding a game was pretty cool because the tools were intuitive enough to make it quick, so I'd mess around with Cave Editor until I got interesting results. I joined the forums at too young of an age and regretted a lot of the consequences of that, I got banned, drifted to other communities but kept modding Cave Story away from the forums. Modding the game without access to the forums or IRCs was a very tough nut to crack though, so I just refined my skills on the basics as much as I could before touching ASM.

 

Modding the game without access to the forums or IRCs was a very tough nut to crack though

Oh yeah, that does remind me of my very first attempt at a mod, I think I was working on that just a few months before I first joined. It would've just been Cave Story but the dialogue was changed.

 

Modding the game without access to the forums or IRCs was a very tough nut to crack though, so I just refined my skills on the basics as much as I could before touching ASM.

i tried my hand at modding before i ever got to the point of joining the forums, but since i didn't have internet at home, it was kind of a hassle to get all the tools i needed. my only way of bringing software that i wanted home was via the library computer - i had to buy CDs at a local store, get all the stuff i needed, burn it onto the CD, take it home and PRAY it was what i needed. i am pretty sure that if i checked a certain drawer in the kitchen i would still find a CD containing most of the useful cavestory modding tools! (can't really check the contents, though, because i lack a DVD drive in my laptop)

 

burn it onto the CD, take it home and PRAY it was what i needed. i am pretty sure that if i checked a certain drawer in the kitchen i would still find a CD containing most of the useful cavestory modding tools!

Yeah I'd burn mods to CDs to take to school and show on the (at the time half decent) windows xp computers in the special ed class I was in, my friends got to playtest the levels and I sorta started drifting the way I designed things based on their feedback, though it was mostly making something pretty as opposed to making something fun, because a lot of them grew up in nicer houses than me they'd grown up with more modern systems than I had so they were more worried about graphics than gameplay


USBs were kindof expensive for a bit in the recession in retrospect?...

 

Would've been nice to show off Cave Story more during my last few months in high school, I think only one student asked what I was playing on my 3DS, but she didn't really continue talking after I answered her. Then again I didn't have any friends in high school either, so I was lucky that Cave Story caught someone else's attention, even if it was for a quick second. People still had more of an interest in popular media back in 2013, I doubt Cave Story would've picked up a meta just as easily. xd



2900 posts.

 

I think I've shared (part of) this story before, but eh, always nice to reminisce. Sorry for the wall of text.

So my dad found a bunch of free games somewhere online and downloaded some for us (me and my sister) to play, back in like 2009-ish? I think? One of them was Cave Story. We got up to Egg Corridor but didn't know how to proceed from there, in hindsight I think the presence of Basil at the bottom was scary enough that we never even considered going down to investigate by entering the eggs. So we stuck to the other games in that little package, I remember playing a lot of Battle Pong, Bubble Trouble, DX Ball, Stranded 2, Supertux, don't remember what else.
Eventually, like maybe 2010 or 11, we get comfortable enough using the internet to have the bright idea of looking up online how to proceed in Cave Story! I remember reading from a site called StrategyWiki, following the instructions exactly, but it was still a little confusing, so our first full playthrough we jumped over Booster, saved Curly, got the Spur, but still couldn't get the true ending for some reason. I remember being really frustrated with the (hidden) Last Cave and Sacred Grounds, and my sister reassuring me that we'll clear it soon (it took forever to finish, inching forward bit by bit). And yet, I don't have any clear memories of the first time we cleared it, which is kind of sad (I have a terrible memory in general). I replayed the game several times, trying out all the different weapon upgrade options, and had recently learnt about the PrtSc key so I was taking a screenshot every few minutes and pasting it into a big Word file to save because I thought it was cool to document the journey (lost that file a long time ago :/). As an aside, I now wish I hadn't just followed the walkthrough so closely - I should've just looked it up when I got really stuck, and tried to play on my own as much as possible, which would let me appreciate the game more and have more fun. But at this point, that's neither here nor there.
Once on a vacation to visit extended family, without much to do, I spent a lot of time trying to beat Hell in under 6 minutes because I'd heard cool things about the title screen changing, I remember thinking it was impossible, there is no way the maker of the game could expect anyone to do it that fast - after a couple months, I finally got my first sub-6 minutes time of like 5:46 which was weird but cool because I had only typically been shaving a few seconds off every time I tried.

I don't remember at what point throughout all of this I learnt about the forums, or how long I had known of the forums before thinking of joining, but in late 2012, at which point I was fairly comfortable using the internet, I tried joining the forums and I think it didn't work out because my country had "an extremely poor track record for spam"? and they were asking me to do some sort of manual verification which I didn't understand so I just left it alone. Just as well, perhaps, because I was trying to join under my real name, probably not the best idea. A year later I tried joining again (under this name) and it worked. I don't know whether I was acting annoying because I hadn't lurked enough or because I was just inherently stupid, but yeah I was annoying for a good few years.
Started learning about the modding scene and I played a few mods - A Lost Land, Jenka's Nightmare (the version by MagicDoors), King's Story, WTF Story, The Show, Cave Story Redesign, Misery Story, Sue's Story, The Mimiga Army are some of the old ones I remember off hand. I thought it was kinda interesting and tried playing around with some modding tools myself - learnt about hex editing and tried my hand out at editing sprites and making orgs by looking at midi files, I wanted to make a Bleach (anime)-themed resprite mod but quickly grew bored with it. (I'm still very glad about this phase of my life because a lot of what I learnt about programming and computers and files and stuff has turned out to be useful later in life!)
Also at some point around here I discovered music boxes and really liked the sound of them so I used orgmid (probably the first command-line program I ever used, I found it very strange at the time), changed the instruments, and used a now-defunct online midi renderer (SolMiRe) to make some music box covers of some of the game's soundtrack. I got some appreciative comments, but wasn't quite satisfied myself, and did a do-over recently.
Around 2016 I played Undertale and was very impressed by all the comics and art the fandom was pushing out, I was kinda bummed Cave Story didn't have that kind of output and I resolved to learn to draw to make some contributions to Cave Story fanart, because I felt like too much attention in the fandom was focused just on modding. I started out with paper sketches (a few of which I am slowly digitising and colouring now), and moved on to making some drawings digitally (first attempt), but it ended up never being a consistent effort, and after finishing what I thought was a pretty good piece I kinda fell out of it. Went on to play other stuff, went to college... I checked in on the forums every now and then, but there wasn't a whole lot going on anymore.
At some point c. 2021, I joined Discord for some quiz event at college, and immediately joined a bunch of Cave Story related servers because of course. The release of the Rockfish demo, the unearthing of the prerelease versions, the source code leak, etc. rekindled the Cave Story spirit in me. A comment by andwhyisit about how he was waiting for updated drum support to add organya-js to the site, and the fact that no one else really seemed to notice this or be interested, inspired me to learn programming and make a fork with said support which was accepted. This emboldened me to try making a spinoff of organya-js for PiyoPiyo (which ended up kinda terribly). I saw fans working directly with Pixel to port Rockfish and Azarashi (which was so cool and impressive), and I was also inspired by the revival of Soaprun, that I ended up trying to remake JilJil and Akantares. The prerelease versions inspired me to do some digging of my own and I discovered Saying 'I love you'. I've always been a passive consumer in any space I'm in, so I'm kinda proud of finally putting myself out there and doing something, haha. Even if it ain't much.

I actually haven't gone back and played the original game since forever. Like, at least not since joining the forums. And this is actually a conscious choice. I want playing it to evoke nostalgia as intensely as possible, so I want to keep the experience of playing it associated with the era back then. Plus I want to forget about it to the extent possible, so playing it anew feels as fresh as possible. But now that I think about it, the more I put it off, the more I'll just lose those precious memories, and the more the replaying will fall flat. So I should really play it again soon.

Anyways, with all that's happened, I'd like to get back to playing mods, which I haven't really been into for awhile. It should be exciting considering the crazy progress that's been made in the field over the years. I also want to try drawing more, but I'm in grad school now and work will get more and more demanding, so I don't know how that will turn out. What I do know is that this game holds a special place in my heart, and has made me who I am today. Thank you to everyone who was a part of this journey.

 

My brother got a jail broken Wii for Christmas one year, and then got cave story on it since he played it on his old computer.
Which then lead me to play it after he played until he reached the side-room in egg corridor.

 

found it sometime in 2016 on another game's store page on steam and i'd been wanting to play a good platformer so decided to buy and give it a go - never got past the undead core til i got a new laptop sometime in 2017/18 and remembered it as i was redownloading steam and whatnot, decided to replay it, finally beat the game around the end of 2018...

 

Broke kid on the early internet lookin' for free games online, as a kid with unfiltered internet access does. Many viruses and 1 completely unusable laptop later, I eventually I found Cave Story and because it was an actual safe and small game to have, I kept it on a thumb drive and took it with me to my school's computer class every day. I was only ever good enough to get the bad ending over and over again and assumed a sequel was always coming. I never found out about the other endings until my mom got me Wiiware like a year later and I played that even more endlessly.