First time playing, doesn't launch

Hi. I've recently downloaded Cave Story and patched it to English, but whenever I try to launch the game, all I get is a small window with strange symbols on it, then a button that reads "OK". Everything else on my screen goes black, including my cursor. I have to guess where it is and then attempt to click OK. once I do that my desktop, cursor, etc, I can see again. What do I do from here?

 

Is it still in its home folder with this stuff in it (Doukutsu is the game itself)?

Here's how it looks like.

 

Have you tried switching to windowed? Not sure if that'll fix the problem but at least your screen won't go black. Also, you know you can simply press the spacebar or enter to hit ok, whenever a screen pops up.

 

Do any of the parent folders of your copy of CS contain foreign or non-ascii characters in their names? If so then that might be the cause of your problem. Alternatively did you by any chance re-patch the pre-patched copy rather than the Japanese copy of the game? For that matter try the pre-patched copy and see if that works for you.

 

It's going to be difficult diagnosing the issue with limited information on the topic. I'll just assume you ran the English translation on a fresh copy from this very website, and your game unexpectedly crashed. This may be caused by not unzipping the .zip that it came packaged in.

Edit: The game indeed doesn't run without being unzipped.

 

The game indeed doesn't run without being unzipped.

Of course not. Only standalone executables can be run in this fashion.