Tuesday, March 23, 2010

Jam's Pick of the Week

Giving you the latest and greatest in free gaming news, it's Jam with his Pick of the Week! This week's pick is brought to you partly by Nintendo, and mostly by fans around the world of a lovely, amazingly designed freeware title known simply as Cave Story.

The least exciting thing you'll see in this game is the title screen.

Cave Story (or Doukutsu Monogatari) is a freeware action platformer made in the style of "Metroid-vania", emphasizing exploration to both discover what the world has to offer and to unravel the plot. In the game, you play as Quote, a boy who awakens in a small cave unaware of how he got there or why. As you begin to explore, you meet the inhabitants of your new home, the Mimiga - innocent and rabbit like in appearance, and fearful of being captured and turned into monsters by a villain known as the Doctor (no, not THAT Doctor!). Think Robotnik from the Sonic series (Eggman if you will), only less evil and more of a jerkface.

As Quote, you move from room to room helping the Mimiga by defeating baddies, completing short quests and jumping and shooting your way through enemies and even boss fights. You can discover items as you explore to increase your health, change up your firepower (mwahahahaha) and other things that'll help you kick butt. The more powerful you become, the more efficiently you can take out enemies and bosses and find out just exactly how you ended up in this labyrinth of interconnected rooms.

Look to your left. Now to your right. Now back to your left. All of these things want to kill you.

Developed by a team called Studio Pixel over the course of 5 years, Cave Story was a labor of love for the good ol' days of pixel drawn adventure games. Given a modern twist, tight controls and a slew of great additions to the classic formulas of old school platformers, Cave Story doesn't skimp on either gameplay or story. Everything, even down to the music, was done up to the best of its creators' abilities.

Thanks to the attention it garnered as just a freeware game, Nintendo chose to work with Studio Pixel over the last few years to redesign and update the game for a WiiWare release, which is now available through the Wii Ware Shop. Like the re-release of The Secret of Monkey Island, it was given a graphical overhaul, refined script and reworked musical score; and if you so choose it, you may opt to switch to play the game in the original resolution with the same graphics and music as when it was released. This is a nice option for the purist fans of the original game who would prefer to play it as is, and it doesn't lessen the experience any to do so.

Retro Gold :: New Hotness

Cave Story has received a lot of praise from fans and critics, and will hopefully end up becoming a big hit in the Wii Shop, if only for the original game's quality being on the level as some first-party releases. If you haven't yet jumped on the bandwagon, DOWNLOAD YOUR FREE COPY OF CAVE STORY and see what the buzz is about.

That's all from me today, tune in next week when I might talk about something other than free games. Maybe I'll talk about pizza! But I doubt it, unless there's a game about pizza.

Yo! Noid doesn't count.

- Jam

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

That sounds awesome. Nothing like a tribute to the old days. I may not have been there as an adult, but I still remember Atari and what came before... and Im still in love with my SNES games. Too bad I dont have a Wii... but one day, ohhh yes, one day maybe. lol.
-L