Changing difficulty and getting to hell

I heard there was a way to change difficulty in Cave Story, how do you do this? I have the windows version. Also, is there a way of cheating or hacking to get to Hell?

 

Yes, there are hard and normal modes. And yes, there is a way of cheating and even hacking to get to hell. But then it isn't fun to play this.
To get to hell, you need to play at hard mode. If I'm correct, you need Iron Band from Curly (and you need to rescue her), rescue Booster (and get Booster 2.0) and collect counter (I don't remember name of it now).

 

It's not a change in difficulty the normal way you'd usually think of it for most games, such as enemies having more health, player having less health, etc. The only things that are more difficult on the "hard" track (which I prefer to call the good ending track) are:

-You don't get the Booster for the end of the Labyrinth (Monster Nest -> Core -> Waterway ->Ironhead)
-You do the harder Final Cave
-If you want the ending, you have to beat the hardest level
-You have to fight two extra bosses, and two more at the end of Hell

That's it, really.

You can change the difficulty in making a mod in a similar way that it was done in Endless Chaos, by having spikes that are flagged to appear only in hard mode, making life capsules give you less health, starting you on less health, etc. I don't think it's possible to give the same NPC different health levels, but you can have more enemies in hard mode, by way of flags, same as the spikes.

 

Eternal Chaos*

 

Save won't work

I tried a few saves for Cave Story, replacing the profile.dat, but when I go to Cave Story and load it just goes to my previous save. How to fix this?

 

You have to name the currently used save 'profile.dat'.
Are you on a mac? You have to use a different cheating technique there.
Otherwise, here are some good Windows saves.

 

Yes I did name it profile.dat and I am on Vista.

 

Eternal Chaos*

Sorry about that. I just remembered the folder on my computer was abbreviated "EC."

 

Thanks everyone I figured it out. Apparently on Vista you have to "Run as Administrator" for the save file to work.

 

Why use someone elses save files?
Doing it yourself is half the fun.

EDIT: 90% of the fun.

EDITEDIT: Not that anyone really cares, but sorry I haven't been posting recently.
You try posting from tomorrow...