Retronauts - 797: Episode 797: Cave Story

Episode Date: September 28, 2026

Jeremy Parish, Diamond Feit, and Scott Sharkey link up with patron Jeff Peterson to escape the island early and bring you a discussion of indie game classic Cave Story (instead of surviving Hell).Retronauts is made possible by listener support through Patreon! Support the show to enjoy ad-free early access, better audio quality, and great exclusive content. Learn more at http://www.patreon.com/retronauts

This week in Retronauts from somewhere a transmission. Hi, everyone. Welcome to Retronauts episode 797. That's a lot of podcasts. And I am here with some people who are going to talk about a thing that surprisingly, in those 797 podcast episodes to date, we have not devoted a full conversation to, despite the fact that I think all of us love this game. and one of us has a pretty longstanding, deep-rooted connection to it.

So actually, why don't we start by introducing ourselves? And, well, we've kind of got two guests of honor this episode. So I guess I'll start with the person who actually made this episode possible as responsible for precipitating it. The patron of the hour, please introduce yourself. We finally got this one together. Hi, I'm Jeff Peterson, and I'm crashing into this podcast like Balrog. Huzzah!

Or, oh, yeah, I guess. Nah, it's Huzzah. Hizah. Yes, so thank you, Jeff, for requesting that we talk about the great, the phenomenal, the classic, the beloved cave story. And I felt like any conversation about this game could not be complete without our second special guest. So calling in from the deserts of someplace, please introduce yourself. Oh, hi, Scott Sharkey. Scott Sharkey.

Yes, thanks for joining us. Scott Sharkey is the person who introduced a lot of people to Cave Story, I think. And we'll talk about that later this episode. Certainly, since I was your editor at OneUp.com at the time, you introduced me to it. I was like, what is this Dobutsu Mono Gattari? there's a yeah we can talk about the the weird stomachache that some people

at Zip Davis got about having any Japanese words on the front page of our website when this went up I got an earful of it really I never heard that part yeah oh that yeah okay so it wasn't like how dare you it was just

you know we put this you put this guide together for the game sort of an introduction to this amazing PC game that had just come out as freeware as part of your, you know, freeloader business that you were doing and wrote together, you know, put together this great article. I put it, you know, assembled it into HTML and got it on the website and promoted it. And at the time, there was no name Cave Story.

It was Nobutu Motogatari. And I remember, I'm not going to name any names, but a couple of people who were not really part of the site at the time. It wasn't like Sam Kennedy or someone, but higher-ups were like, is that really a good idea? Is anyone going to click this? Is it doing anything for us? You know, it's just going to alienate people to have something like that on there. A few months later, you know, I went to E3 and I saw Katamari Damasi.

Like, wow, I can't believe they're bringing this over. So I wrote about Katamari Damasi. And they were like, you know, is this really going to do anything for anyone? Is anyone going to click this? I feel like it's just alienating to have this on the front page of the website. Blah, blah. And then, of course, you know, both of these games became extremely popular, not just cult classics, but, you know, beloved well within the mainstream and took on a life of their own. So I got to say, yeah, thanks guys.

Two fingers. I'm not going to tell you which ones, but they were sticking up in the air. Anyway, there is one other person here for this conversation. What was that shirt? I was just going to say, don't you wish you had a time machine just for that? like screw killing Hitler. I just want to go back and like anybody who gave me shit for giving like Minecraft at 8 plus, just suck a dick, dumb shit.

All right. So we do have one other participant this episode and who would that be? Good morning. My name is Diamond Fight and I'm phoning in from Japan to report that it's dookutsu. Oh, do kutu, right. Sorry, goopu's animal. Yes, d'obutsu is animal. Dookutsu means cave.

and my work here is done. So long. Thanks. Good night. Yes, my mistake, even as I was saying it, I was like, is that right? I wasn't going to correct you. I want to make animal story. That would be great.

Well, you've got Dobutsu Nomori, which is animal forest or animal crossing, and then Dokutsu Monogatari. So, yes. Now I'm wondering if the recent animal well might have had an alternate Japanese title, because that is in itself, I would say, one of the many descendants. of Cave Story. No. I do need to play that game.

Oh, you do. Oh, yes. You know, I just left my job at limited rungames.com. Limited run games. You have free time. And, well, no, I don't. But I have six years of comp video games that they give to the staff members. And that includes Animal Well.

So I'm having that, you know, transported to my storage locker. But I'm going to dig that out and finally play it. So I'm excited about that. Anyway, so video games. We're going to talk about them. We're going to talk about one of them. The one game called Cave Story, which is, actually, let me ask. Jeff, why did you want to talk about this game?

Well, we get, when you do this thing to try and commission an episode, you get to give a list of five options. I'd put up a few, but I needed to give one more. And so I was looking through the episode list because I had just recently played Cave Story again as part of the retro Achievement's websites. We Wear a Rollout and played through it, mastered the achievement set. But I was like, wait a minute, Cave Story. I love that game. Surely Retronauts has talked about it before, scrolling through. through Task Architect's spreadsheet, nothing there.

I'm like, no way. We need to talk about it. So I put it on the list. You chose it. We were here. I feel like we have talked about it under the auspices of like, you know, Metroidvania Roundup type things. Well, yeah.

And Diamond's article as well. Sure. Yeah. But collectively, we have not devoted an entire episode to Cave Story until now. We're here. We're about to change all of that. So what's the big deal with this game? That's our cutoff for retro, isn't it?

It's spent 20 years, so it's just kind of barely within that range. Oh, no, no. Remember, it was 10 because when we started in 2006, 1996 seemed so long ago and was such a generational divide in video games. We were like 10 years. That's like totally fair game. Now you look back 10 years, you're like, these are exactly the same games that we're playing now. So, yeah. there's been a

there's been a sort of a slip in time I think but yeah I think I mentally added another 10th just because oh okay yes no it has been 20 22 years since this game came out 22 so it's the second anniversary of the 20th anniversary of Cave Story

that's the occasion for this episode so Cave Story was originally released on PC on Windows as a free game just kind of came out of nowhere. It's one of the first Japanese Dogeon games that really sort of broke through into kind of international mainstream popularity, I would say.

Can you think of any Dogeon games that sort of predate this that actually, you know, people have heard of? Okay. Yeah, the second part definitely disqualifies basically everything. Oh, yeah. there were plenty of Dojin games before this, but... Yeah, but like that were... They got a, like, a physical release.

Like, no. Not off the top of my hand. I mean, maybe... Maybe some of the 90s-era fighting games might have. Maybe one or two of those got out of there, and I don't know about... When was the first Toho game? Kevin's not here, but Toho is a big thing, but...

Was Toho even around at that time? Is it pre-Ho? Is it pre-Ho? There might be pre-to-ho. I think Toho started around. the same time as Cave Story. I'm going to look it up. See what Google AI's lies. What's that?

What's that game that the Neko arc is from, like the weird little cat? Was that like pre-2000? That was like 2000. I don't know if that's a Dogen game, though. That doesn't really count. Toho started in 20 or sorry, 1997.

It does pre-Dade Cave Story, but I don't think anyone had heard of Toho until quite a bit later, a little more than 10 years ago. I mean, when I say anyone, I mean, like, leaked into sort of the public consciousness. So this definitely qualifies as a Dojin game because it was a game created by a single person, a programmer who started working on it, I believe, in college. And once he graduated, he went into programming and just kept kind of plugging away at it.

The game is credited to Pixel Studios. That was the original copyright on it. but Pixel Studios was just one guy. Daiske Amaya. Studio Pixel. Which I love, yeah. Studio Pixel. I love the end credits of the game because it was all just one guy.

It's been a long time since I've been in the game. Does it roll like all the different staff positions and it's just him? No. No, no. He doesn't do like a Neil Breed or anything. He rolls like all the characters in the game and their names and their little descriptions and stuff. And that's the credits roll because otherwise it'd be like, Like, three seconds.

The very last thing, it says, thank you for playing. And it shows him, like, bowing. And then it says at the very bottom, copyright studio pixel slash dice gay Amaya. Hmm. So, Shirkie, I can't remember. Were you around the offices, the one-up offices, when Amaya was, when he came by? I was not. I didn't know that that happened.

Yeah. Was that when... That was after the one-up offices moved down the, or across the street. Yeah, just just across the street. Yeah, I was gone by that. Okay. Barely. But yeah, I just missed that.

Damn. I had no idea. So when the game first kind of made the rounds in, you know, as a mainstream console release for Weware and, you know, then it went to DSIware. And then it went to retail. I believe he did a presentation at Game Developers Conference. So during that event. he did make the rounds to a few of the publications. And I was, you know, I had the opportunity to interview him.

And he drew a little kind of like Mimiiga character on our whiteboard. And we, we left that there for as long as we were in that office. Like, we were like, you could erase anything on this board, but do not touch the little guy here in the corner. Because Amaya drew that. But he was, he was fantastic. He was very quiet, which, you know, probably not too surprising. He's a programmer. but he was very nice and just he seemed a little not starstruck but like a little a little a little

like he was reeling a bit at the fact that people were treating him like a celebrity but everyone was like this is the cave story guy oh my god uh but you know he he did not wear he did not develop an ego about it that's for sure he was very very uh just like leather jackets and uh no I was just going to say, he didn't kick in the door wearing a cowboy hat, put his boots on the table. Yeah, none of that. No, there's, you know, there are some indie developers who do something and get a, you know, become successful. And they decide that they are king shit. And then there are some indie developers who are like, it's so amazing that people love the thing that I created.

It just makes me happy. This is, you know, the thing that I always dreamed of and people enjoy it too. And he was definitely in the latter category, which, you know, kind of makes it a shame the way everything sort of went down eventually, or at least from what I've heard, you know, kind of secondhand. But this was a passion project that he created, and it really comes through. And it's not just a work of passion, but also, you know, a game that was created by someone who had really good design, like game design, and also, you know, a game design. aesthetic design instincts. And, you know, I feel like the thing that Cave Story really did was to make it okay to, for games to look old-fashioned again without being like a, you know, a Game Boy Advance or DS game.

Like, it's okay to have really simple pixel art as long as it works and it's attractive because this is what's possible for one person to do. This is what's realistic. And that's okay because one person, if they're a really talented person, can make a great game. And this was kind of an awakening, I think, for a lot of people. And I kind of credited for sort of helping to spark the indie games revolution of the late 2000s. But we'll talk about that later, Diamond.

I would argue that it is ironic that Cave Story has changed so many people's lives, but it ultimately didn't change Dyske Amaya that much. He's still the same guy, I think, based. on your story and certainly my experience talking to him at BitSummit years ago, the very first BitSummit, like at no point was he, even in a room full of people who were obviously looking up to him, like literally looking up to him on a stage, but also metaphorically looking up to him, like, oh, there's a guy who made a game that probably made me want to make video games, that's why I'm here in this room, and none of that emanated from him.

It was all just people looking at him, and then you talked to him, and he's like, yeah, thank you very much. It's like, okay, very nice to meet you. Yeah, and that kind of thing just makes it easier to love a game like this, because this game is very earnest, and knowing that it was created by someone so earnest, just makes it feel like, you know, this is authentic. This is like a real work that someone put together sort of, you know, from their heart. And that's not the only thing that makes a good video game, but it makes a good video game even better. So let's talk about Cave Story, now that we've sort of talked around it for 15 minutes. Jeff, do you want to take the lead here and tell us what is Cave Story?

Let's pretend that someone has been living in a cave and has not heard the story of Cave Story. Please share the gospel. Sure. Okay. So you play. It's a little guy. A little guy who has nothing, no name, no memory, just in a cave. And you can walk around, you can jump.

but that's it. Oh, maybe investigate, like, the little computer that's in the room with you, and it just fills your health up, which is kind of weird, right? But then you go out the door, and all of a sudden there's cute little bats and rabbits around all in this cave. You find a gun, and now you can shoot things. That's kind of neat. Like any other video game, right? You jump and shoot. and then you just keep going and you find a village full of cute little rabbit people who are very nice and some not so nice.

You find giant eggs in a corridor breeding dragons. You find out that you're on a floating island. It just grows from there and tells a story along the way that's captivating. emotional and awesome. So that is, yeah, that is kind of the experiential view of it. In more of the sort of clinical, descriptive Wikipedia breakdown terms,

I would call it a retro-style 2D platform action game that seems to have just a little bit of everything in it. Like, there's all kinds of bits of this game that remind you of bits of some other game. But there is no single game that Cave Story is completely aping.

It takes a lot of inspirations and then choose on them and processes them into something that's distinct and all of its own, all its own. And, you know, I think that's kind of the best way to sort of approach retro is to like say, hey, there was a thing that I saw in this one game and it was really neat, but what if you mashed it around with this other thing and then threw in some new, fun, original ideas? and kind of come up with something that is instantly familiar, but also feels fresh. And, you know, again, Cave Story was one of the first games to really do that. You would occasionally see, you'd occasionally see, like, retail releases on handhelds that were pretty good about doing that. Like, the one that always stands out to me is the Lilo and Stitch game that was basically a metal slug clone of all damn things for Game Boy Advance. Have you ever played that one?

It's completely wild. No, there's basically a metal slug clone that is a Lilo and Stitch game. It's balls hard, too. It's like crazy hard. But it's, you know, someone recommended that to me when it first came out. I was like, really? Lilo and Stitch? Okay.

And I tried it and said, this is actually amazing. Like, who would have thought that this game would happen this way? But it did. And Cave Story really sort of channels that. It's got, you know, shooting and jumping. that's very reminiscent of Contra, especially in some of the corridors where it's very manic and fast-paced,

but it also has a Metroid-style power-up structure. But then the layout is, I would almost compare it more to Castlevania 2, where there's sort of like a central world, and it has a lot of kind of self-contained branches off. But, you know, when you go into the corridors, you end up looping back around or backtracking into the main world. So you're sort of going through the,

the critical path, but you have to duck around into the quarters and achieve various things and sometimes backtrack, not a lot of that, but some. You know, even when you fight an enemy, when you blow up an enemy, it spills little power of crystals, little triangles that scatter to the ground to remind me at the boss coin showers and fantasy zone. Or, you know, I guess like when Sonic loses its rings, but I feel like Fantasy Zone is probably probably the safer connection there. Yeah, they're very, even have like...

They're very small and they don't, like, they don't go flying everywhere. They just sort of drop down and bounce around for a fine amount of time before eventually vanishing. So it's very much like, hey, yeah, yeah, usually, go get those. Usually into the damn spikes. Yes. In the spikes, always, yeah. God, especially in the hell level. God, that made me nuts.

And, yeah, then it has conditional multiple endings, like Symphony of the Night. Even kind of like the NES Rambo game, where by not doing... certain things, not taking the obvious compassionate approach and talking to someone who's hurt. That's how you unlock the best ending. So it's just doing a lot of things that if you were steeped in eight and 16-bit games, you'd be like, oh, yeah, yeah, I see what's happening here. But it never feels like, Cape Story never feels like it's just, hey, I made a game that's like Mega Man.

It's no Creon Conquest, is what I'm saying. Right. No, it's just definitely its own thing. It's a great synthesis of a lot of different stuff. It was, I don't know if we can get to this, but it was impenetrable when it, when it came out. Like, I, I first played it before it came out English, or at least before somebody made a translation patch. And trying to suss out what you had to do to find the alternate endings was baffling. Like, no, that guy fell down and you could go get a rocket pack.

No, don't do that. you have to do this one like impossible little jump and then move on from there and pretend that that didn't happen. That wasn't intuitive. Yeah, I can only imagine. Even if you understood Japanese, that wasn't intuitive. That was a weird thing to do. It's hard to figure out in English. It took me a long time to figure out to get to the real ending.

Yeah. Chucky, how did you figure out that there were multiple endings and how to get those endings? things. Oh, God. Well, this would have been 2004. It was within like a week or so of it coming out in Japan. And I think it was my chat that that clued me onto it. Back in the day, as IRC channel

still exists, same people still in there. And we were all kind of our own aspiring little game makers. And a lot of us tinkered around and made little demos. And honestly, that was kind of the state of things when it came to indie games in the early 2000s. Like a lot of them were great, but a lot of kind of felt like teched them.

And they were the ones who first kind of passed that on. And we all lost our minds for at least a couple nights in a row, just trying to, trying everything. So I was writing a fact at the same time. Like I just finished whatever I was doing at my video store. And I had like a day or two. And I just, I played for 24 hours straight just, just to get through it. And then somebody was like, oh, no, there's this whole other route. It's like, what are you talking about?

and then somebody like, somebody like partially translated like a, like a forum from Japanese. And it was, uh, I remember they had that hint because there's like a little red dot on the platform you have to jump over. That's like your key to like if you jump at that point, you can make that jump. But otherwise like you think you're supposed to run right up to the edge. And if you do that, you fall every time. And just puzzling that shit out, sussing it out with a bunch of people are all kind of discovering it at the same time was that was a blast. and then there's like three or four more decision points as you go along where you know there's either a dialogue option or you can choose to leave earlier or whatever you have to grab the toe rope in the after the core of the toe rope in the water yep you have to grab that you have to not leave with what's his name you have to go back and fight a little mushroom after first you have to get a thing from a mushroom you to examine it in your inventory then you have to talk to them again and then get the thing and then carry that back and it's just like trying to try to trying to figure that out without having the language there was something else.

And then just the absolute fuck you of that Celeste ass jumping final area with the little fucking angels. I'm still traumatized by that. Yeah. It's still one of the hardest things I've ever played through. I feel like that's that's kind of a lost art in this, uh, this day and age of fairly rapid localizations is, um, you know, people who. have no business importing

secret packed Japanese games bringing them over and saying, I'm going to play through this. By God, I'm going to write a fact about it. And I certainly stumbled across my share of impediments. You know, I imported

Symphony the night when it first came out in Japan. I got my PlayStation modded for it because I was like, that game looks incredible. It's Castlevania, but I had never imagined Castle Vena looking like this. I have to play it. And I had a good time with it. It was like, well, the ending was a little, it just felt a little kind of underwhelming. So I poked around

online and discovered, oh, oh, that's why. Okay. You were only halfway done. That's right. That's right. I had to go listen to the infinite to Codado over and over again. So many people return that to my video store. Like, that was really short. It's like, oh, did you get to the second castle? What are you talking about? It's like, take it back home. Yeah, and then a couple of years later, I imported Chrono Cross and wrote a fact about that, which was, you know, there's a lot of, a lot of variability within that. But then you get to the final battle and you have to have memorized like a sequence of chimes and colors. And I, you know, like, what was I thinking? The folly of youth.

I can imagine trying to figure that up in Japanese. I'm still mad at Chrono Cross because it doesn't have any dial. for the Harlequin girl if you re-import her after she leaves. Like, she turns into a dragon fucks off. And then you can bring her back in. And she just has a blank dialogue screen. It's like, well, screw you that. They didn't think anyone would be nuts enough to do that, I guess.

I really like the clown. Yeah, so that's kind of the cave story thing, the vibe. Jeff, how did you discover it first? When did you discover it? Um, so I was part of a, uh, a group of people who would like to, uh, talk about, you know, various games that they're playing. We were in, uh, very much into, uh, music games. Um, and someone had mentioned that this game from Japan that had just gotten a localization. Um, someone made a fan, uh, or a fan sub of it as, as they said back then. Um, and I was like, okay. So I was looking at pictures of it. I'm like, oh, this is very much my, this is very much my thing. Like, I need to play this.

So I played it on my keyboard as a controller because I didn't have a way to connect, like, a PlayStation controller to my computer or anything. And just blew through the game as fast as I could. I just loved every second of it. That's kind of how I, yeah, that's. That's how I found out about it. Okay. Yeah, it looks like Aon Genesis was the team that did the translation. They were pretty big stuff at the time.

They were prolific, man. They did all the Final Fantasy thing. I think they did Psychon Kinsetsu 3 at one point. Yeah, I think. And that was probably my first time playing through that. And they did such good work. Like, this is a really well-localized game. It's shocking how solid to work

was if you're aware of how bad it was otherwise. Because I remember playing like so many, like, translations of like Final Fantasy 5. Yes. And it had like emojis and shit in it. Like, it's just dreadful. Or, you know,

the famous was a Tales of Fantasia. Yes. Where they're just like, everyone should curse and have sex. Because that feels really authentic. You know, really, really true to the original,

to the original spirit of the work. Yeah, so they did a great job with this one. And the localization actually, I think they released their first version of the localization within a couple of months of the game coming out in Japan. So they jumped right on it and turned around something that was at least, you know, functional and playable pretty quickly. Oh, it was really quick. I thought it was within a few weeks. It was within a few weeks of when I played it. It was really fast.

So it first came out in December, 2024. Is that right? It's something like that. I was playing it in spring. Okay. Yeah. So their website says January 2020 or 2005. So yeah, within a month.

Yeah, by the time I discovered it in later in 2005, because I was in Japan for the first time as an exchange student. And I didn't bring any games with me because I didn't have any mobile stuff with me at the time. So I remember I would seek out a lot of free games, anything I could play on the computers in the dorm rooms. There was a computer lab that were ostensibly for, you know, doing homework, but also for just browsing the internet as much as you wanted. And I remember once I found this game, which might have been through Scott Cherokee's blog, I don't know,

but I found the game, I found it in English, and remember I put out one of the machines in that room, and just whenever I could, I would go and find it in that, find the one machine in that room where I know it was, and I would play it and say, it. And of course, no controllers. I'm all on the keyboard. But the game is just so inviting from the start. And it really, it's, it would have been so easy to just start off with action or start off

with a huge text crawl. It's like, no, no, no, it gives you just enough narrative and just enough characterization to say, oh, what's going on here? Where am I? Where am I going? And then that only makes it more exciting when you learn stuff later on, even if there is perhaps almost two, much story in the game eventually. Like, you have to dig it up. So by the time you get, by the time you get so far in the game that you're learning about, you know, robot armies and the doctor and surprise siblings that are witches, like by that point, you're already, you're already full investing, so it's fine.

It breadcrumbs it along really well. Like, when you first started, it doesn't give you anything. You start off as like, well, there's a gun and there's an old guy. It's like, I guess I'll steal from the elderly and then you just walk on. And it doesn't, I'm not going to say it info dumps, but most of it is kind of saved until like the third act. And even then, like you don't get most of it until like the optional ending where it fills in that background. Yeah. Like you can totally finish the game and you get the normal ending and still not really know what the hell's going on.

The best part is when you're in hell and it freeze frames and starts info dumping at you when you have parts of the ceiling about to fall down on you. That's really good. Good timing. Yeah. You just get to wait for that inevitable hit while that finishes. God, that was maddened. There are a few things. Like, I'm going to say it's a masterpiece.

I adore it. There are definitely a few spots that can be improved. And from what I hear kind of were, like when they did a later release of it, where you had a, there's that bit where you have to like ferry dogs back and forth. Like, I remember being really annoyed by that. And every bet you get a little bit more dialogue and go back in another dog and do the thing. Apparently in the plus version. that I haven't played. You just do that all this one go.

And that's fine. I don't think anything was lost. You flikium? Yeah. And there's another bit like right before in the waterway where you have to have that one like pixel perfect thing where you have to go through there. Apparently they add a block now there that'll stop you if you go too far because otherwise you have to do it over and over and over again. It's so, you know, it's one of those things where I think it's obviously this person had. people to play it for him,

but you ended up in that trap of like, you're playing this as the developer of this and you don't realize how stupidly difficult it is sometimes. Yeah, I've been working through some color dreams NES games lately, and my understanding is that they had like two weird little grimlins who did their beta testing for them and their QA and were like video game savants. So everything was skewed toward their,

their extreme skill and not actually skewed toward what normal people can do, which explains a lot about some of those games. I was going to say, does that explain Sunday, Funday? I'm sorry, no, that was Wisdom Tree. I'm thinking of Menace Beach. Or Miss Peach World, if you will. Oh, God. You know, it took me like a year and a half, maybe longer to play Cave Story because I'm, you know, I've always been a weirdo. he uses a Macintosh.

And at the time, it was really hard to play PC games if you did not have a PC. There are many options available. But I might be the only person whose introduction, or at least in America, whose introduction to Cave Story was on a Korean handheld system called the Game Park GP32X. For whatever reason, someone was like, wow, this little handheld system just came out in Korea. I'm going to port Cave Story to it. and so I had like NES emulators and cave story

and that's what I played on that little thing. Wow. And so yeah, my first experience was like Cave Story is a handheld and it just fit right in with like the vibe of Game Boy Advance and DS. So you know, PSP.

It worked pretty well. But you know, it has come to mini, mini systems. Yeah, basically everything. I guess there was also like, wasn't there like a two and a half D like remakey thing at some point?

I don't think about it. I saw pictures and I was like that looks like ass. I don't want that. It's fine. I mean, it's cave story, but it doesn't look like it loses the visual charm for sure. And I think I,

you know, when I was reading up on this, my reviews were quoted a lot in some of the articles. And I believe I called it pleasant but inessential, like unnecessary. So that's pretty much it. Was that the whole quote that they used? like that was the most flattering thing.

Yeah, pretty much. Oh, God. No, that wasn't a pull quote. Can I, can I digress for like the worst poll quote I've ever had from a review? Was Tron 2.0 for the Game Boy Advance? Where the nicest thing I said was like, it's got the original arcade game on there and that's kind of cool. And that was the nicest thing anybody said about the game. So that went on the back and pause.

That game was kind of a mess. So that's understandable. I think that might have been one that I started to review and was like, no, I'm going to freelance this out. Oh, is that why you handed that awesome? Thanks for that. Pretty much, yeah. That's editor privilege. No, Case Story 3D, the one thing that really stands out to me is that when it came out, I was in Japan and shopping at a game shop in Akihabara and turned the corner.

and there was a big poster for Cave Story 3D. And my first thought was like, oh, man, Cave Stories really made it if they've got this big poster in Trader or whatever. But then I looked again and I was like, oh, it's this really weird, like out-of-place American artwork that just doesn't quite work. And I feel like it's not really going to do any favors for that game's fortunes in this particular context. But I kind of consider Cave Story Plus the definitive version. Cape Story 3D is a weird side experiment that, again, totally inessential. A CaveStory Plus does a lot of remixing and a refinement and takes the game and, yeah, smooth over a lot of problems. I just skim it's like, what are the differences?

And I was like, oh, you know what? I could see that. I should probably have done that. I fired this up just for this, and I'm just playing the original. Also, weirdly, the first time I played this with a controller. and I ended up going back to the keyboard just because I have the muscle memory still from the keyboard controls and you kind of have to keep in mind

like if you were playing PC games back in the day like controllers were kind of a pain in the ass they weren't really all that available especially if you wanted like I had at one point like a super Nintendo controller but I had to wire it up through like the serial port and I had to get a bunch of germanium diodes you know make that yourself if you didn't feel like buying it overpriced one that didn't work

but like we were always playing games on emulator and shit anyway. So you were kind of just used to that layout. And it's kind of funny how it just comes back to the point where it's like, now throw the controller away. I'm just going to go back to doing this. I could not... My go-to PC controller for pretty much all the 2000s, really,

was a oversized, basically a two-player joystick. A beast of a thing. The idea is that you and your friend could both play it with it. But in reality, all it was was was you plugged it into a key. keyboard out, so it was basically each key and the directions on the joystick were essentially keys. So it's like you were basically playing on a keyboard that looked like a joystick. And like, that's how I played Mugan. That's how I played a ton of emulated games.

And if I had brought that to Japan, obviously I would have played Cave Story with that. But of course, that would have required a seat unto itself. So I did not bring that to Japan with me. Was that the X arcade? Maybe it was really big and purple. That sounds about right, yes. Yeah, I was given one of those as a gift, and it was just so huge that I barely ever used it. I feel bad about that, but like, where do I put that thing?

I don't live in like a mansion. So, yeah. All right. So anyway, let's move on to talking about how cave story works. We talked a little bit about how it has kind of a Metroidvanian structure-ish, though not really. has like a sort of a linear path through the game and then little branching asides. But people do, I think people do tend to kind of think of it, you know, in the same space as some of the Metroidvania games of the era. So it does a good job of sort of covering over, like wallpapering

over its linearity by giving you the impression that, you know, you've got more freedom, there's more non-linearity to it. It's a pretty interesting trick. I don't know if anyone has any thoughts about that. Yeah, it kind of, it gives you that impression of it because you circle back to, like, the village a couple of times. Or you loop through the outer wall potentially a couple times as well, just giving you that taste of, I'm backtracking, but maybe not really. More of the backtracking is happening actually in those self-contained areas, like the bushlands. or grasslands, whatever you want to call it, where, like, you have to get the parts for making a bomb. And it's sending you all over the area multiple times to try and get all the parts you need to do it. Or in the plantation where you have to assemble parts to make a rocket.

And you're having to go around all the plantation multiple times to get all the things you need. I've been thinking about this for a few hours, really. And I came to the conclusion that it's not a quote-unquote Metroidvania in the traditional sense because you don't really need to go back and forth so much, except for a few things that even those are optional. But it is a Metroidvania in the sense that you as the player, if you're intrigued by the game, which I think you probably will be, you are going to explore this game more than once. You are going to backtrack because you're going to play it again and again, and that's how you discover some of the stuff

because there is no 100% version of this game because you can't get everything. It's impossible. The only way to get certain weapons is to trade them for other weapons, you know, and the only way to get access to that final hell level is to know about multiple things

and do them at the right times. Like if you don't save Curley, you don't save Curly. You can't go back to save Curly. That's it. You missed your chance. And so in that sense, you are replaying it, you are backtracking through the game as a player on the outside. But, quote, our robotic hero doesn't do nearly as much backtracking unless, except for a few

oddball things. And honestly, most of them are just weird, like really weird little things, you know, like the- Really weird little things. The storage room in the graveyard or the tiny family. It's like, oh, I think I met a small person hours ago. I better go find that small guy again. That's about it. God, I almost forgot about the tiny little people.

The tiny little people. There's a lot. There are weird little things that you can find if you go back, then there's not really any reason for it. I think the stupidest, weirdest one is like you could find Curly's panties. Like, they're hidden in a ceiling, like, through an invisible wall, and you can pick them up. And when I was skimming the plus version, apparently that unlocks it, like, a version where

you just play as curly. In the original, that didn't do anything. It was just there for creeper value. you, I guess. I mean, don't, don't look for, like, curly brace full stop. Like, it's all going to be Rule 34. Like, it was, it was that back in the day, like, everybody wanted to draw a port of curly brace.

And I don't think the panties hidden, the ceiling held. Yeah, I mean, robots don't traditionally get pregnant, but I'm sure if you look her up, you'll, you'll see plenty of that. Is that Rule 35? You know, we debated this on the, on the earlier. Yeah, I forget. I forget which one of a pregnancy. Oh, God.

I'm out of my depth when it comes with the rules, so I'm out of this. Not a four chanter back of the day. Oh, well. It's funny, though, because there was that kind of indie game community before that was like a thing, really. And it was mostly people aspiring to make stuff. And the fact that this was so inspiring to people is like, no, you can do this as an orpour. You can do literally everything. And I don't think it could be overstated just how much the music worked.

I think people were intimidated about that. Like, even back of the day, we would just take things off mod tracking websites and just slap them on as placeholder. And the way the music works in this and the way it changes mood, especially when you revisit areas, you like, you know, go back to the rabbit village and whatnot. And it's like, there's nobody there. Now the music is kind of somber. Or that bit when you're climbing the outer wall and you're at like, you know, your third act nadir. basically everybody's dead as far as you know and everything kind of sucks and it like has this kind of rising tone to it as as you climb up like that that was that was all incredible i i remember thinking i was actually kind of turned off by the music in like the first 30 seconds because it has like those really harsh like triangle waveforms to it it's kind of it's kind of the almost like genesis like buzzing and within a few minutes i was kind of won over by it um but the composition is incredible i'm still kind of annoyed that one of them was titled like well was it meltdown two and there's no meltdown one.

Maybe the meltdown took place 10 years ago. Right? Maybe that's the implication. Or maybe he had a composition he just didn't use, but the one is meltdown two. It's like, well, I want to hear Meltdown One now. Anyway. So we've talked about,

we've talked about kind of the unusual requirements for getting the best ending. But there are actually three endings. one of which is basically just like, yeah, I'm not going to finish this game. I kind of love that one that exists, you know. It's very clearly not the right choice. But, you know, as part of the finale, you go through all the dragons stuff, the dragons finally hatched, that guys are like, I mean, we can just leave and, like, use the players. It's like, I could leave.

I know it's not going to, I know nothing will change, but I could do it. And I'm sure at one point I got that ending just to see what happened. And yeah, well, you run away. Yeah. also the composition for that I can't remember what the title was there's something like the end of hero or like heroism fails

or something like that like it's it's clearly not the right thing to do and the normal ending is good enough too but god that actual ending path is still like just burned into my brain I remember like playing that 3 a.m. delirious and I don't think I could do it again

I don't think I've finished it since that first time I finished it because I was just like in a locked in state. And I don't know if I could reproduce that. Certainly not now. I don't care about anything that much. That's video game's biggest danger, I think, is nihilism. Yeah, I've never...

It starts you over from the beginning of that entire segment. If you fail at any point in the boss fight, you have to go back to the entire, like, hell level. The run back. It's psychotic. No, I've been playing... I've been playing Color Dream games. I get it. Yeah, I've never actually

gotten the best ending in Cave Story. I just it just was too much for me to deal with on that little handheld. And I said, ah, wow. And even though I've enjoyed playing like the Cave Story Plus version,

I just, yeah, that's just not my kind of relationship with video games. Maybe, you know, if it had happened when I was a teenager, like during the NES days, I'd have been like,

yeah, I'm going to do this. I'm going to, I'm going to get through this. It's going to be awesome. But I definitely grew out of that when I started having to play video games for a living, I think. Well, this is right on the cusp of me playing video games for a living. So that was probably my last one song. I'm quite sure that at some point, Dyeske Amia said out loud that even he can't beat the hell level anymore.

So it's fine if you don't play that part. It's fine. I think he's okay with that. I just did it again recently. We're not 23 anymore. Oh, no, really? I, um, it, I, I, I, it, I, it, you know, the whole dark souls thing, right? Like, you have your boss and the boss is really hard and if you die, you have to run back through all this bullshit to get to it, right? This was my, I, obviously pre dark souls. This was my dark souls thing, right?

Like, I'm like, I love what this is trying to do, what this is trying to make me, uh, accomplish and the music in that area was just so incredible. So I'm like, okay, this challenge sounds intense and hard and I'm in. All the little bits of story and stuff as well, even as annoying as it is, that it freezes everything when it happens. I needed to know. I needed to find out what happens. So I chipped away at it a little bit at a time getting there to the end.

And this was in the original release on PC with keyboard and all that. So I did it. And I was like, oh, my God, I did it over and over again and got really good at it, trying to get my time down before they had added like, or they had the timer, right? Because you have to have the timer to get there. Yeah, you pick up the timer right before. So I was trying to get my time down and stuff. But I always did it with one of the best upgraded weapons, the spur.

And that made it like really easy. So I just did it recently with the machine gun, which was insane. It was very hard, but I did it. It's a lot of fun. I'm impressed that's even possible. That's amazing. I love they mentioned Dark Souls. It is definitely kind of one of those self-challenging things.

It reminds me of like the Sands Fight and Undertale. Yes. And I half suspect that's part of what inspired that. not least because what's the guys Balor Balor? Bobby Fox

No, in at the end of Cave story Balrog Balrog Not Balos Yes Not Balrog Baloos

Thank you Sorry I see a guy with one eye I figure is Balor Like I don't know Belos I don't know why Belosh Yeah

I don't know why that's got such influence in Japanese games but so there's a big toothy grin guy with mismatched eyes that's a complete bitch to fight at the end of the gauntlet. Like, that is too much to be a coincidence. Just saying, I'm blaming this for the Sands fight. I think that's totally fair. I mean, the influence is obviously there. Yeah.

So, Jeff, you mentioned something about beating the game with the machine gun. And do you want to walk us through the weapons? There's like kind of different categories of weapons. There's the basic, you know, the basic gun, the missile launcher, the limited ammunition projectile and the blade. But they all have their own kind of thing. They have upgrade paths. They're optional sometimes. You have to do trading.

It's all over the place. Yeah. Like Diamond was mentioning earlier about trading. Like the very first weapon you get, the polar star. Yes. You can potentially trade that for a machine gun, which you get after you fight Curly as part of that whole, oh, you're a bad guy, you're a bad guy, and you start fighting each other. And she gives you the option to trade the weapon. And so the machine gun, cool.

You can use that to, like you said, limited ammo, but it recharges quickly. and if you get it up to level three by collecting all the little things that drop out of enemies, you can use that to shoot down and shoot yourself up into the air, which is pretty cool, right? That's how I finished the game the first time.

I didn't know about the spur. Yeah. Like, obviously, none of us did. You know, we just always got the machine gun. That was the thing that came along later. Right. And so the spur was the final form of the puller star, which was what,

the weapon maker that you stole the gun from in the beginning of the game was trying to make. And that weapon is just, it starts out with the first, very first shot at level one is the upgrade, the full powered version of the polar star. But then it can charge up. You hold down the shoot button, and then it shoots these long beams of energy that do damage over time as the beam it passes through enemies, which is very great for the final, final boss where you can shoot the beam right through the eyes of the giant rock face and it does a ton of damage.

But anyway, that's the polar star branch. You also have a gun called the fireball, which is like a little, it bounces the fireball along the ground. It's basically Super Mario's Fireball. Exactly. But then you can combine the Polar Star and the fireball into the snake. which is a kind of a wave-beam weapon like in Metroid where it passes through walls. And it, but it's, it's not that great.

Meanwhile, I also, I appreciate that they introduce like the bouncing weapon right before they add the jellyfish. Yes. Which, which is basically useless against because they're just sort of hovering. Right. They're not, they're not particularly tough enemies or anything, but it's like, oh, no, this is an encouraging. you to swap weapons because this weapon you just got that's actually really great kind of sucks for this task. And anytime I got a weapon, I was always like, okay, well, now I got to try and upgrade this thing, get it up to level three as fast as possible. So I'm like constantly swapping weapons.

It is my personal belief that the reason the fireball exists and it bounces around is because the area where you find it is very hill-based and has some invisible holes in it with spikes. So it's like much like the bubble lead, not lead. lead in Mega Man 2, you shoot that in front of you, and it will show you where the holes are. Exactly. And there is a bubble gun in this game, but it does not do that. No, no, no, that one goes out. Bubbles go.

That'd be too much like someone else. Too on the nose. And speaking of the bubble line or bubbling, it's the bubble gun. It has limited ammo as well. if you hold down the button, it makes bubbles appear around you kind of like a, it acts like a shield in a way. But then when you let go of the button, it shoots a bunch of the projectiles that are around you in whatever direction you're facing. The blade, that's the weapon you get from one of the amigas. It is a very short-range weapon with a high amount of damage.

and then when you level it up, the soul of the Mamiga who gave it to you is there as well and is slashing all over the place. It looks really cool. It does a... I love that bit. If you weren't going to say it, I was going to. It's like, King is best boy.

Yeah. Like, we can spoil it. This is a 20-year-old game. But yeah, like, King's soul coming out of the knife and slashing everything. I kind of lived and died by that weapon for the entire rest of my playthrough once I got it. Yeah, it's a, it does so much damage in a concentrated area and kind of going along

with that speaking of damage right the missile launcher another limited ammo weapon you can collect missiles as you go and stuff but and get more missiles with missile upgrades but it's it's your main like

damage as fast as possible for a boss yeah fuck this thing forever that's the gun you go to except except I love how this is so well crafted is like the first fight you have with Curley, it doesn't work

on her. Right. Because she has that shield. Yep. Which comes up later in the drowning scene. Yep. Like it's just like that connects again. It's like it's not a surprise when it shows up again if you tried that. It's brilliant. And then, and then with the blade,

the final weapon here is the nemesis, which you trade to the little man who you have found in the cemetery that you brought back to his family in the outer wall. And he could swap the blade for the nemesis. The nemesis being the tricky one where it is more powerful at level one.

So if you collect any of the power-up crystals that drop from enemies, you've downgraded your nemesis, and it becomes a weak little pea-shooter. But the cool part is the nemesis. I vaguely remember this. The nemesis is the weapon that Curly uses while you're in hell. Oh, right. When she's strapped to your back. Yep.

Yeah. And that's all the weapons. That's fantastic. It does bring it back to, like, this is also, like, weird for a platformer, a game that does an escort mission well. And that, like, when you play with Curley, like, that one sequence where she actually just opens up, like, she's like a fire hose. Yeah. Hopping around and shit. And then later things go south.

And then you're kind of passively carrying her around only until the final bit when she wakes up and she's just like firing out the back of you. and this this team fight. And that that was that was really good. At no point are you like annoyed with this other character. Like you you want to help them and then they help you at the end. And they help you early on. And at no point are they a liability really. Other than you have to find a tow cable to literally carry them.

It's a shame that the hell section sounds so demoralizing because it sounds interesting as well. It starts you off immediately. with, I'm going to kill you. It kills all your weapons. Yeah. And then it degrades all your weapons, like immediately. Yep. You lose all your weapon power-ups.

And then it's just instant death spikes, almost like the first, like, five feet down or the five screens down. Right. And so it's like... Yeah. It's one of those dodge spikes on the way down, like Mega Man kind of thing. You have to know how to use your jet pack super well. And that was probably my biggest. wall was getting past that first part.

Once you get past that, you can't get locked in. I did it all in one night. Granted, I was like sleep deprived, Isaac night. But like, by dawn, it was like, oh my God, I actually finally got through this. And then the boss fucking slaughtered. So, and to start all over again. I don't know. If I play it up to that point again,

I wouldn't be shocked if I could get through a lot of it by muscle memory. Just it trains it into you so well. I'm not kidding when I compare it to like Celeste or something. Like, that that kind of precise, weird jumping stuff. I'm sure, yeah, I'm sure Celeste took some inspiration from... Had to have. Yeah, I mean, this is another, you know, Maddie Thorson was probably inspired by Cave Story to a certain degree.

It's just got that same kind of like retro vibe, you know, a particular approach to platforming, its own kind of, the game has its own message and story. and explores its themes and builds on the challenges, just in a lot of, you know, even if it's not like directly, oh, I love Cave Story, I'm going to make a game. It certainly comes from, I think, the same place as Cave Story. I think this thing got its DNA into basically everything at that point. Like, whether it's acknowledged or explicit.

I was talking about, like, my chat. And, like, among the people I was playing, playing this with like Kian was playing this. They went on and made I want to be the guy. Yep. Like within a couple years of that, Zarathustra went on and did a inversion. Like, there was a lot of influence from this.

Just whether. Yeah. Yeah. So this is the people I was playing this game with back of the day. And they went on to do a lot of these things. I think, again, it wasn't directly inspiring things, but ideas were incorporated. So let's take kind of a side note here. we've talked a lot about the characters about quote curly brace you know the the the mimigas etc

the doctor but not really and of course ballrog but we haven't really talked about who the characters are and how they kind of fit into the the whole framework but um there is a pretty significant cast of characters i put together notes and just touched on you know kind of like the high points i didn't include all the different mimi gas all the different members of the witch family and so forth but there's a lot of folks you play as quote although I don't think the name is ever given in the game no he's named but only after like the third act

you don't get that until near the end of the game okay it's been a long time so yeah oh there's also there's also the colons is that the third round out to the colons no they're the little rabbits that help curly in the first fight oh okay which you can shoot down but they keep getting up and they just there's sort of a oh yeah yeah yeah okay

I didn't know they had names. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. They're right below the curly brace on your keyboard, so it makes sense. There you go. Okay. Wow.

How about that? Yeah. So you play as quote, the other, you are a robot. Curly brace is another robot and everyone hates robots, but not for like the 2026 AI way of hating robots. It's more that robots actually came to their home and slaughtered everyone. and they assume that you're up to more of the same shenanigans. Tarkey?

No, it's interesting because that's kind of recontextualized in the ending that the robots came there as like a rebellious force because this was being used as like an instrument of conquest or whatever. And the implication being that like somebody always gets the crown and then they always try to use the island of the mimicas to conquer everything. And the last person to do that, they sent the robots. and that probably wasn't great. I'm not going to call it a just war,

but it wasn't like solely, we're just here to genocide everybody. And that's why when you finally get the good ending, it's like, oh, we can finally stop this cycle of like everybody gets the crown and does this thing. There's actually like in the help bit, there's like one respite where there's statues of all the people that had the crown

with the doctor at the end. And these other characters you never see that all have the crown on them. And like that they must have done something. You can shoot them up and like turn them the different statues. It's like the one place you'd get power-ups in the hell levels. But the implication is that this is a cyclical thing unless you actually go in and kill, not ball or ballast. Thank you.

Anyway, yeah. Well, so the crown, right? That's an important character, if you will. That's your one ring. Yeah, yeah, exactly. It's the thing that people have been trying to use to conquer the world or whatever, right? It gives them magical power. was created by misery, one of the, the witch character that you fight throughout the game. And the doctor is this person who came with this family called the Sakamoto's to the island to do research, but he knew about the crown. And so he went and got it. And now he's using it to rule the world from this floating island by making the amigas.

the little rabbit people eat these red flowers which causes them to turn into rage killing machines. Yep. And that's like your second act downfall is like, oh, you're just trying to rescue this one rabbit girl before, you know, bad things happen.

No, they force them to eat the red flowers. You have to fight and kill them and the king kills himself. And just like, this is a bleak game for a lot of it. Like, no matter how peppy the chip tunes are, it's God is a huge doubter. Yeah. Yeah, the moment, the moment when you get back to the village and no one's there and the music

is very quiet, it's a very, it's a very powerful moment just because you're out there and you're like, man, this really was a village and it's really not really a village anymore. It's just a bunch of empty houses. And it's only offset by me as a nerd because at this point, I'm 87% convinced that the music that plays during that scene is just the eye. platform music from a nearby train station. I don't know. I can't prove that. I can't prove it, but it sounds so similar.

I think it's the reason. I think it's where it comes from. I would doubt that. That weird persistent town music. Yep. It's the same music. If you send in this train station and there's no trains around, there's just a little tune plays in the background, I guess, maybe to let people who can't see, like,

oh, just don't run around. It's a train station. and yeah, it's a little haunting. So I'm just there. I'm like, oh, boy. Okay. Act normal. So quote is a robot, but he's a robot who kind of dresses like a, kind of like a hipster from that era. He's got the trucker cap, but also a scarf.

And curly brace, I feel like she looks like if the girl from the Guardian legend were a metal slug character instead of a space. ship. That's kind of what Shirley Brace looks like to me. Fio, right? Kind of like Fia? Yes, exactly. She's Fio, but she can transform into a spaceship maybe. I don't know. So the character design, there's actually quite a bit of detail

and unique qualities to the characters, but they're designed in a way that they can compress down into very recognizable, distinctive, tiny, low-detail sprites. It's really good character design work. And again, this is all the work of one person. Like, he's got great character design instincts.

He writes good music, makes good graphics, good gameplay, good physics. Kind of a one-man wrecking machine, really. It's worth repeating that at this point, you know, 2004, I'm going to say we were in maybe year eight or nine of the delusion, really. just incredibly stupid belief that permeated the games industry as a whole, that 3D and polygons were new and therefore good, and pixel art was old and therefore bad. And just every game on every level was moving further and further towards 3D imagery and higher resolution polygons.

And something that came up in pixel art, people would look at that and say, oh, that's old and stupid. Like, what are you talking about? What are you talking about, coworker who complains that Castle Venus if the Night has pixel art? Yes, I'm still mad about that. But here it is Cave Story, and really we can't oversell this. Cave Story is such a masterpiece on a pixel art level, because not only are all the characters appealing to look at, not only are the enemies appealing to look at, not only are the backgrounds interesting in their own way and distinct.

Like, even though everything, almost every part of this game takes place underground. It's called Cave Story for a reason. But all these areas have different colors and different patterns and different elements to them, so you never feel like you're just running through the same areas over and over again, which, you know, if we're going to compare this to a Metroid, like, holy shit, Metroid does that, like, way too often. Cave Story is loaded with details and little quirks. And so much love.

And it's so, it's, it's, it's, it's so appealing to look at. I honestly think that the success of this game helped realize, helped snap out a lot of people. It's like, oh, wait, you can do more with pixel art than we thought previously. It's like, yeah. I mean, in part it's because a maniac spent five years of his life doing this. But also it's like, no, you can. Maybe, maybe if you hire more pixel artists and have the work as a team, it won't be, it won't take so long. But still, Cave Story felt rebellious in that one regard.

Because we were, you know, I was, I don't want to complain too much, but I was so exhausted from witnessing every game I liked becoming the same 3D kind of game. Like, they try to different things, you know, I give credit to some games for doing different things. But for me, as someone who grew up with the pixel art, I was like, we can't do pixel art anymore. Is it illegal? Did someone pass a law? You can do it on handhelds. They're for babies. Yeah, exactly.

Like, you know, the handheld Castlevania games, which were good. But it's like, okay, that's fine. That's for the freaks out there. Here's our new mainstream Castlevania. And it's all in 3D. And it's all got voice acting. And it's just not as fun. I'm sorry.

Well, now it's got a war. Yeah, yeah. It's, bear in mind, when he started making this, though, it did take like four or five years. So he was starting this in the 90s. Yes. And it is fun to think that like somebody went through like his university years. He started a family, like all of that while doing this in the background. And I love seeing like some of his early concept art.

Somebody shared that a while ago. And like I didn't realize that the toaster oven was was supposed to be a bar of soap. Yes. It looks like a toaster oven. It does. But until I saw like some of his earlier. sketches of them where it was like a bar so but like side on with arms and legs. It was like, oh, okay, that's how we got there.

It got pretty far removed from that. Like at what point does it stop being inspired by something? It's just his own other thing. Yeah, so just for a little bit of context, this game came out a month after Halo 2 and Grand Theft Auto San Andreas. So that's what people were gravitating toward in at the end of the year, 2004. And that is what that's what Cape Story kind of struck a blow against, really, and said, yeah, you know, that's not the only way you can do this.

And it costs several tens of million dollars less. And to close the loop here on this toaster oven, who my kids called him a lunchbox, that's that's a ballrog, the very cute, very big-eyed bad guy that you fight that actually is a friend just wanted to

close the loop oh yeah no I love that character I didn't have the translation when I first started writing the facts so I was making up all the names

for everybody my fact stops right at like the hard ending of like if you do these things you can go do this thing and fuck you I'm never going to finish writing this fact

good luck but that one I just I called it like Toaster Oven, right up until the point where it like gets frog legs and start hopping around. And I called it Toaster Frog. Yes. Because of this guy. So. Yeah, I saw that in the fact when I was editing it.

And I was like, is that, is it too self-referential to leave that in here? Ah. Bear in mind, this is like the dozen iteration of that fact. I wish I had some of the early drafts where I was just trying to figure things out just like putting this on my website. like every, you know, few hours. And then people will be like, oh, but you can do this. And you can do this. And it's like, oh, if you do this, you can trade that gun for a different one.

It's like, well, fuck, you already got the machine gun. I'm finished. Like, it was just like a building process. I kind of miss that, that social aspect of like playground trading hints kind of gaming. Even though this was on the internet, you know, it's, it's, this was through forums and IRC channels. But it still kind of felt like that word of mouth, like I have to call my friend, like, how do I get through the lost woods kind of shit?

Yep, and that's the same thing we were doing in my music game group. We were trying to figure out, oh, hey, did you find the $290 counter? Yeah, it was right here, but you had to have Curly, and you had to have the tow rope, and you had to get the water out of Curly. Like, we were sharing all these hints. It was very exciting to come together to figure out how to get to the true ending. It was so much fun. And then you have that one friend that could read Japanese, but they're not actually playing the game.

you're just setting screenshots. Like, what does this say? So you meet a lot of characters throughout the game, including the Mimigas. The very first character you see in the game is the only, I think the only human you encounter in the game besides the doctor. Is that correct? No. No. Oh, yeah, you go on.

Yeah, you got Sue as well, even though she turned into a Mimiga. And then you have Ito who'd been turned into something like a dog, Mamiga. And then there are Cosma and Sue's mother, who is the rocket scientist that helps you get to the top of the island. I can't remember her name now off the top of my head. Also, there's a weird little cut scene in the final credits of the good ending where they'd show you, like they're trying to fix the mimigate humans. and it doesn't work because they sneeze and they just change back. I don't know. That's just cute as hell.

They don't really explain how the humans turn into other creatures, do they? But at some point you meet witches and there's a lot of magic being discussed like with Balos. So I think you just don't think too hard about it and say, okay, they turned into mimigas. And it's not like a plot element. It's just Sue used to be a human. Now she's like a rabbit guy, kid. again, are the little people, were they once normal-sized people, the became small people? Who knows?

Ooh. So many thoughts. So many, so much lore. It's a floating island in a Japanese game that leads to the end of the world, and you probably shouldn't ask questions. That's usually how it goes. So you do have probably the most significant human in the game is the doctor, who is more or less the villain of the piece, as long as, you know, if you're not going for the true ending

and fighting Ballos, then the doctor is the bad guy. And I mean, Ballos is barely the bad guy. He just wants to die. Like, he actually begs you to kill him at the end. Yeah, but he makes it really hard. Yeah. Four phases. He wants to die.

He's not very accommodating to the task. The doctor is the most openly doing. Certainly. He's the one. He's out here. Show, you know, the first people you meet in the game are, you know, the mimigas essentially and the doctor's presented as anti-mimigua and you see the doctor forcefully kill mimigas so it's like oh i hate this man i want him to die yeah he doesn't get a lot

of characterization yeah he's got a dumb hat and he's a twit and nobody likes him and that's basically the characterization he gets he showed up with the rest of the humans and then he turned into a dick he's very persistent though you can kill him and he doesn't actually die he turns into like a blood miss. It's like a vampire, but way grosser. Yeah. And then the blood mist shows up again. It's like, I'm fine, actually. I don't care. I don't even

care. And then you have, you have the witches, primarily misery, who's kind of a jerk. She's kind of, kind of, like, if you look into the story, she's kind of responsible for this whole thing happening because she's the one who forced Balos to create

the demon crown that is the source of power. that everyone's after and that the doctor is using to create his mutant Mimega army. So it's kind of hard to... All things get shitered. Yeah, she gets off kind of easy. Yeah. It's, uh... Yeah, like, there's not a lot of a reckoning for her. I mean, she does live under the doctor's mind control for a long time because Balo's cursed her, but even so, like, at the end,

you know, it's not like she was a nice person who got cursed. It was like she was actually kind of an asshole who got cursed. And at the end, you take off the curse, so she's just back to being an asshole, basically. Pretty much. Yeah. I mean, the toaster of it also got mind control, but he turns out to be a pretty nice fellow. Yeah, he seems okay. Like, she's really mean to him.

So that kind of, I think, you know, there's like a transitive property. He's probably, he's probably an okay kind of guy. Yeah, he just got caught up at this. Like, there are multiple places where he actually kind of helps you. And it's like, well, don't tell anybody I do. did that to move that big rock or whatever. And then he rescues you at the end of the good ending. And yeah, misery didn't really do anything to redeem herself.

She's still just sort of an asshole. Now, maybe we could have a sequel. It's just like, yeah, misery's still being an asshole. Let's not do that, actually. Maybe you could have a game where it's just kind of like an animal crossing sort of thing. It could be like do kutsu, no doobutsu. I don't know. Anyway.

It could be delusium on a guitar. Yeah, you're rebuilding the town. Rebuilding the town of misery. You can be called misery loves company. Boo. Also good. See, it just lends itself to great titles. To Mutu Monagatari, misery loves company.

Yeah, we have to combine the two. I'm going to write to Amaya Son and say, hey, I've got a great idea for you. What if you make this into a life sim? Yeah. That's, that's, given some of the crossovers that have been inflicted on this game, I've heard worse ideas I mean he inflicted some of the crossovers on himself like some of this is based on

it's not really your stuff like we can talk about that in a little bit but he's not the drive oh no no I meant no I meant like his earlier games oh okay um like that one with a little squid guy oh he could John him that's that was it yeah uh like the the the fish boss

in that one zone can you remember Ironhead where it was Ironhead that was it yeah that was from the little squid game Yep, and there's even an Easter egg with that where Ica Chan will appear if you don't get hit. And you can know to do that. No shit. Yep. You'll know to do that if you turn on the map during that sequence and it says no damage and it shows Ika Chan on it.

Oh, I had no idea. I'll be damned. Like I recognize that for me because I played that because it's like, oh, it's like, I make a cage story. It's a weird little squid game. No, that's fantastic. Sam's still learning shit. Wow. Also, did you know he like threw out most of his code like three or four years into it? No.

Like when he was making Cave Story, like apparently like he had been tweaking things for for so long, especially with like the movement code and whatnot. Like it was just getting like ridiculous slowdown. Yeah. And he basically discarded his entire code base and rebuilt it from scratch. Like within a year or two of the game actually finishing. Like it was just like that takes guts to do that. Like makes a lot of sense. though.

That would be like me crawling into bed for a month and saying, I'm done. Yeah. I think we've said all we really need to say about the characters and about the world and the story. I do want to ask if there are any interesting secrets that really stand out to you as personal favorites, because this game does have a lot of, you know, like the hidden path to get the true ending, but also just like other little secrets, like the Ikechan. Another one that I said that that was, I, oh, you've got one. Yeah, I got another one. I threw out all mine. It's like, you already found Pearlie's panties, so we're good.

There's also one of the Mamigas, her lipstick you can get. So there's, I think her name is Chaco in the Grasslands. She tells you you can go through her fireplace if you get some grape jellyfish juice. You have to get the jellyfish, yeah. Well, after she tells you that, if you use her bed, you wake up and she, you wake up and She's in bed asleep and you have her lipstick in your inventory. What the hell? And then also, you can beat the game with the little man in your pocket.

You never take them home. If you go to the true ending, he says, he's laying there like this. And he says, are you forgetting something? And then the game ends. I had no idea. I feel like that's kind of a little riff on the Etacoons and what's What's it called in Super Metroid, where they escape in a tiny single pixel spaceship? Yes.

And I only learned this because I did the retro achievements set on the We Wear version of the game. And that was like a thing. It was like, beat the game. We'll have him the little man in your pocket. I was like, okay, I guess. And then sure enough, there's a little thing at the end. I'm like, oh, that's hilarious. I low-key hate retro achievements, but that's actually it.

That's okay. I understand. All right. So one thing we should probably talk about is the difficult Nicholas conversation. I mentioned that, you know, the crossovers and things that have been inflicted on Cave Story were not Amaya's doing. And I believe he sold the rights to Cave Story to the publisher Nicholas a while back. And, you know, I'm pretty early on, actually. Yeah.

Like, that was within a couple years. Yeah, because they were responsible for taking it to, um, we wear DSI wear 3DS, Cave Story Plus, etc. But then, you know,

they, Nicholas started kind of picking up a lot of these indie projects. Like they, they picked up Umihara Kawase and a few others and started making, you know, crossovers. So there is a fighting game called Crystal Crisis. Uh,

is that the one I'm thinking of? there might be there's a couple of crossovers maybe crystal crisis that sounds more like a puzzle game now that i'm thinking about it it's been a while since i paid attention to these sorry uh um but yeah they they've had some crossovers that some of them seem a little ill-considered and also sometimes they're just like why why would you put these characters together that doesn't make sense to me but okay it sounds like apy farming shit and i'm not familiar with this but it doesn't sound like great. I would say if you're at all on the fence about playing this game and worried about

supporting Nicholas, don't just play the freeware version. That's still out there. It's still the same freeware version. You can still download it and play it and enjoy the original fantastic game without giving a dime to Nicholas. Also, the, uh, the, Genesis translation is fantastic. Absolutely. Yeah.

The fighting game was called Blade Strangers. the way. Oh, that's right. That's right. Yeah. So, yeah. Strangers. Yeah, that one had the coat of princess princess in there. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, it did. So really... It's the classic conundrum of like, don't jump at the first offer. So, I don't know. What has he been doing lately? I don't know. He had a game. I looked this up. It's called,

crap, I remember what it was called. it was a mobile game that has come to a few different platforms including most recently a couple of years ago Macintosh

so I guess I have no excuse for not playing that one unless it's like a classic Mac you know can't do that but anyway yeah there's like

the freeware years and then there's the property years for Cave Story and again Cave Story Plus came out of Nicholas and is really great.

It has improved, you know, like upgraded graphics that don't lose the charm of the originals, which is kind of a rare accomplishment. It's got really good music. Just like everything,

you know, the gameplay is refined. There's a lot of minor improvements and big improvements. It's a really good adaptation of Cave Story. And so, you know,

regardless of everything, you know, that did, come out of the acquisition. And I definitely do not think that game would have happened, you know, the Cave Story Plus would have happened had a Maya not been making money off of it. So, yeah, I don't know. I'm glad he got to make a living.

The world was a different place in 2004. Yeah, yeah, I mean, there's that. Just, you know, it's always a bummer when the conversation around something shifts from being like, this is so wonderful. I love this too. Well, do you hear about this? And that's kind of the direction that I've taken this podcast. So I'm my own worst enemy. Oh, well. Let's talk about the Cave Story legacy to wrap us up. Because I think that's extremely positive. Cave Story is, I would rank it as, you know, one of the 25 most important games of all time. I don't know. Is that, you know, in terms of influence, yes. I think that's absolutely fair. I think what it represents, we've talked about that some, actually a fair amount on this episode, but yeah, like it's a big moment in video game history. And it seemed, you know, it had such a humble beginning, but that's exactly why it was so impactful. The fact that it had an international audience within a matter of weeks, like, that's not to be understated. And not just among like, you know, grognards and nerds that want to make their own little video games.

that's where I got it from. You know, we, we had that in print. Like, that showed up in the computer gaming world, like, within that month. Like, that didn't happen very often. And a lot of it was, because it wasn't just like, yeah, people made some great games, but they were kind of tech demos compared to something as like, I can sit down and fuck with this for like 13, 20 something hours without scratching the surface of what you can actually do in it.

That was, that was unreal. And it was a full and complete. elite experience. Yeah. Yeah. It wasn't partial. It wasn't like, you know, subscribe to this thing and I'll, maybe I'll finish it. It was like, no, this was done.

Like, this was fully formed when it, when it hit the internet. That, that, that, that was unreal. Like, I'm going to confess, I found it discouraging. It was like, oh, maybe, maybe I could do this, but I'm going to spend five years of my, you know what? No, I'm just going to go, I'm going to fuck off. I'm right about video games in California. That sounds easier.

There's an alternate universe where I actually finished my stupid little adventure RPG or whatever. It's not too late. Is it? I was, I had, um, I'm a big fan of La Moulana and I had been under the impression that maybe cave story was so impactful in Japan that it like caused Nogoro to go. hey, we could release Lava Milana. There's an audience out there who wants this. I did some research and asked some friends. It turns out, well, they were kind of in development at the same time.

So it's not necessarily true. But, like, I really want to know, was, was Cave Story as impactful in Japan as it was here? I wonder about that. I think so. I honestly, I think, I think, I think Daiskaya Amio's presence at the very first Bid Summit is kind of acknowledgement of that. I think they had speakers at that first show, which was not open to public. It was only open to other developers and members of the press. So I still feel very honored that I got to go there in the first place.

But I think his presence there, you know, and Sweary and other people were just like, hey, here are people who made a name for themselves. They drew a big audience. We've probably all seen or heard of their games before. I think it's an acknowledgement of how how broadly their games hit. And yeah, I do believe, I think top 25 is fair. I think if you restrict yourself to the 21st century, I think it's probably more like top five

because it is just, it arrived early on and I really do think it opened so many doors that I think people had closed by themselves. Like, no, no, no, don't close the door on pixel art. It's fine. Open the door again. The people know how to do that. It's okay.

Bring it back in. They're still working. You can do your own composition. You can just fire up a mod tracker, bang out some tunes. Like, yeah, the fact that one person could do all that. The building an engine from scratch is something else entirely. Twice. Yes.

Twice. Yes, after throwing it all out, like years into it because it's just like you piled on so much crap because you were fine tuning it. That I can understand, too. You look at some of the biggest games with the past 10 years or so. and you have indie games, you have very similar, not necessarily one person show, but very small teams of two,

one, two or three people, like, Undertale very, very, like, it had to have been inspired by Cave Story. The narrative has so much in common. Oh, there's no way. With Cave Story. But also the aesthetic. You don't have to be,

you don't have to be living in Andrew Hussey's basement to make that happen. Axiom Verge, which was really one person. And then I think for Axiom Verge 2, there were some additional musical contributions. But really, it was just Thomas Happ. We mentioned Celeste earlier, which was designed and programmed by Maddie Thorson. And Leonard Rain composed the music for it. And that's one of the most popular and successful indie games of the past decade.

all very much kind of in that same vein of Cave Story. But again, like Diamond was saying, just making people realize, hey, pixel art is okay. It's not, you know, you're not slumming it if you can see squares on the screen. It's fine. It's just a form of art. And it's a very practical form of art.

If you are one person working by yourself in your free time, coding a video game, you don't necessarily have access to, you know, Unreal Engine and the whole development graphical pipeline, but you can draw little guys who have, you know, three colors and work really well at that tiny scale, and that's fine. And, you know, that approach has definitely been misinterpreted. People looked at that and said, oh, we can just make crappy, low-rescentrales. resolution graphics and we're fine. Or, you know, a problem that you see a lot in pixel retro style games is mismatch pixel aspect ratios, you know, like, or pixel scales, I guess, where you get like really, really

detailed character sprites over like backgrounds where the pixel sizes don't match up. Or even things like, it's kind of a subtle thing, but I've seen people point this out and now I can't not notice it, where when you have scrolling and it's actually per HD pixel as opposed to per perceptual pixel. So just like little tiny things like that. But, you know, when something comes together, like with Yacht Club's games or Way Forward's games, you know, they really get it. They understand good game design and good art design. And they really kind of take they take the opening that was presented to them by Cave Story, and, you know, those developers are bigger teams, but they still kind of have that sort of driving spirit of love for the classics and a determination to do something new and different with them that I think really, you know, really captures the essence of Cave Story in a lot of ways. There's something to serve for a limited form of art and limited expression.

I'm going to work within these constraints while actually respecting those constraints. That's when you get weird stuff. When you're playing Minecraft, you have like 3D models instead of like pixel objects. It always seems weird. It doesn't match the resolution of what you're looking at. Or, God, there are so many examples. I think of trying to mimic a style while wandering outside of it. I had a thought and I lost it.

No, it's okay. It's looking at the surface appearances of a style and saying, oh, I want to do that without understanding the foundations of it, without understanding the underpinnings. And, you know, when I studied graphic design in college, It was right around the time that computers were taking over as the primary tool for graphic design. But our professors made us spend a semester without a computer. Like there was a class where we did not get to use a computer at all.

It was verboten. All we had were protractors and compasses and repeatographs and paper and pencil. And they said, you need to understand the fundamentals. You need to understand what all those tools on the side of Adobe Illustrator or Photoshop are symbolizing. You need to understand, like, what the metaphor that they're working with here is, because that's going to give you the foundation to work effectively in those tools. And they were right. And I think, I kind of feel like if you're going to make a retro style indie game, you need to have a,

like, someone should sit you down and say, you need to understand, you know, the NES and the Genesis. and even the PlayStation, and get why these things did the things that they did, like why NES Sprites only have three colors and why there's Flickr when there's, you know, A to them on a line, and why the backgrounds have, you know, like, kind of areas where you have just a certain number of colors. Like, these were all built-in limitations. And if you're going to imitate an NES game, you've got to understand, like, what that machine was actually.

restricted to to be authentic. Otherwise, it's going to come off as not quite right. Like, the people who lived it are going to say, this is nice, but it's not, it's not authentic. It, you know, it doesn't, like, something about this feels off. I can't put it into words, but something feels off. And, you know, Cave Story wasn't really imitating a specific style or console. It was just kind of doing its own thing. And I think, you know, it was very PC98-5, though. Yeah, yeah, kind of. But even then, like, it's not the same color palette. It's not the same, like, the same line resolution.

You don't get the crazy interlacing or anything like that. You can imitate a vibe without, like, conforming perfectly to the technical limitations. Right. Like, shit, like, I don't know, like, shovel knife or something. Like, that is not, like, slavishly aping an NES style. But it gets the vibe. or the, oh, what the hell was it? Igarashi's weird spinoff, like the NES version they did.

Oh, yeah, yeah. Thank you. Yeah. Like that nailed the vibe really well without respecting the limitations. Yeah, Blastermaster Zero, I thought, you know, instead of trying to go for the NES, look, it feels more like turbographic 16 to me. Like with the color palette and the visual depth and the number of sprites and the size of the sprites. Like, it's not NES, even though Blastermaster was an NES game. It's like they said, what if we went, you know, a step beyond that?

I haven't played that. Oh, you haven't played Baster Master Zero? No, no. I played like the PlayStation Revival way back in David. No, no, no. Oh, you've got to play Blaster Master Zero. I think you didn't enjoy it because it fixes a lot of the problems, like everything that's horrible and stupid about the top down sections, it fixes those.

And you actually get that white bonds. That they kept on doing over and over again. Yeah. Like for some reason, Hudson's like, yeah, let's just do the top down section. It's not the weird sideways tank sections that everybody fucking loves. So let's do that for grappling. But Blaster Master Zero fixes the power up and power down system in the top down sections and then actually gives you bosses in the tank mode.

So it's much more the experience that it should have been. But it's not trying to be an accurate NES game. It's trying to be something that is kind of in that vein, but its own thing. And yeah, Cave Story does that. And, you know, the important thing is to be kind of consistent. and again to understand what were the limitations of these old systems

and where should you stick to those where should you sidestep those to create a better experience and I don't know that Amaya necessarily sat down and said, you know, take meticulous notes and say, here's how I should express my old video game system.

I think it was just more instinctual and he had good instincts for it. It was the late 90s. so it probably helped. Yeah. I don't know. It's kind of like horror movies that go for a VHS aesthetic, but they're still like 16 by 9.

Like, you know how scan line works? I can see that, but what the fuck are you doing? That's okay. I mean, I did have some wide-screen VHS tapes. No one, no one ever wanted to watch those because you were wasting so much space on your screen. I pay for this. I want the full picture.

Speaking of 2004, yeah, that was when I had my video store. And I had widescreen tapes. And people would bring them back. And this was in Maine. So they'd be like, I want to see what's behind those bars. It's like there's nothing behind those bars. Give me my pan and scan. They're going to have a great time when Zach Snyder creates the open, the open, what is it called?

Not open canvas, but open frame format. Open mat. That's it. Yes. Oh, someday. Anyway, we've kind of gotten off topic here and just talking about technical things, but that's just the kind of madness that Cave Story inspires. This is this is me like what happens when I eat a red flower. I don't go into like a furious physical rage.

I just start ranting about graphical fidelity and classic games. Everybody should use their protractors to make their graphics. Just to start with. You need a graph paper and you have to count bits for each one. line. Yeah. Exactly. Exactly.

I'm going to make the world's best Commodore 64 adventure RPG. Fuck all y'all. No, I saw your screenshot the other day. I'm working on it. Oh, seriously. Okay. I'm excited. Yeah, this is awesome.

I think it's going to be great. There's a world of potential out there for people to make cool video games. They just have to find the time. That's the challenge. All right. Any final thoughts on Cave Story? wrangling it back into the topic at hand before we call it a day. Diamond.

I just want to tell the story again of Diaskiy. I'm speaking a bit of it. I know I've told the story before. I'm sorry. But I think it's very important because as much as we celebrate Amaya for spending years of his life making this game, making the game he wanted to make, and releasing it by himself, even he will admit that he's not alone in this matter. because he made the game and then who translated? Fans. Fans come to say, hey, I want to translate this English, translate in Hispanic. I don't know how many translations are now, but it's always going to be a fan who approaches him and say, hey, let's translate this. The subsequent ports

and all the variants that came out later, that was, again, a third party came to him and like, hey, we want to do this. Can we do this? Yes, you can. So even though it is a little intimidating to think about someone making a game over so many years. It's also important to remember that even if you make a game all by yourself, you're still going to have to reach out into the world and collaborate other people to enjoy that success and get your game out into the world. There's no such thing as a...

There really isn't a one-man show anymore because someone's going to help you get it out there. And I just think that's... I think it's a good lesson to take away. this, because this, even though we can say this man made this great game and we can celebrate that, he'll be the first to tell you, yeah, I did. But then look at all the people who got it and took it to the world. Yeah.

And also, he lived his life while he was doing. Yeah, that's true. And to echo to Diamond's point, like, I've heard, I don't know if this is, you know, factual 100% or not, but like, like, the Genesis port of Cave Story or other platforms that has been ported to. If I recall correctly, I've heard people talking about how they would display a proof of concept to Amaya and go, this is what we want to do. This is the platform we want to put it on. And then Amaya would give them the source code so that they could actually finish the port. like that's the the shows like his nature of just kind of giving his his pride and joy to the

world to let people put it out there as much as possible it's it's it's incredible he's a incredible person I'm so happy that he made this thing and has inspired so many to make their own things or put it out in other forms and fashions for people to experience Mark, any final thoughts? Oh, I'm done. I know. You're champing to get back to the Commodore 64 game. Well, also, the potato is really, really anxious. Oh, yeah.

I've been talking to people that aren't him for like a whole two hours. They hate that. You don't know what to do with that. Yeah. Okay, so we will wrap here. This has been Retronauts. You can find us at Retronauts.com. support us on Patreon at patreon.com slash retronots.

There's cool stuff if you support us, and if you support us for more than the base level, there's even cooler stuff up to and including getting to sit in on an episode with us and talk about one of your favorite games. So please check us out, patreon.com slash retronauts. Check out Diamond's cool stuff every weekend, including the community podcast that we do once a month. And thank you for your support because we would not be able to do this without you because, yeah, it's a rough world out there.

Anyway, that is the retronauts pitch. Very bleak, but seems appropriate for the world of cave story. Jeff, where can we find you and your work online if you would like to share that with us? Yeah. So I'm Jeff, a lifelong video game player and more recently a speed runner, of all things. You can find me on all the things as BD, Jeff E.P. I've been speed running Final Fantasy and East games lately, as well as getting retro achievements in various others, like Cave Story.

And you can see me doing that on Twitch.tv.tv. And finally, trans rights are human rights. Thanks for having me here. That is correct. And what is your best time on Cave Story as a speed runner? Oh, I'm not speed running Cave Story. No. I stick to RPGs mostly.

so fair, fair, fair. Sharky, where can we find you on the internet? Not anywhere, really. Sharky. Blue Sky. social is basically everything. I technically own sort of sketchy.com, but I've never put anything on there. So maybe someday.

Diamond. Yes, you can find me around the internet looking for Fight Club. F-E-I-T is my last name. CLU-B is English word. And as long as we mention the column, I did write a column for Cave Stories' 20th anniversary, and it's definitely one of my, one of the things I really like,

so I would encourage people to go back and read or listen to me, read it to you to further enjoy Cave Story. So it's the second anniversary of Diamond's 20th anniversary column. That's what this is. Okay. And finally, you can find me, Jeremy Parrish. You know, I'm on the internet.

I'm on blue sky as Jay Parrish. I'm on my YouTube channel, which is a thing that I do. You can find me here on Retronauts. There's other stuff I do, but that's the important stuff. Yeah. So come find me and enjoy me talking about old video games, because I sure do that a lot. And if you come back in a week or so, I'm sure you'll hear me, and maybe some of the others of us here, talking about old video games some more.