Kevin Nguyen – Idlermag.com

Cave Story: The right game at the wrong time

Kevin Nguyen — Wed, 20 Jun 2012 13:00:19 +0000

I have a friend that claims you can never love a book unless you read it for pleasure — “The right book at the right time,” he says. But I think it’s easy to appreciate the right book at the wrong time too. It’s certainly easier to love a book read at one’s own leisure, but even at my job, where I am lucky enough to have to read two or three books a week, I’ve found that I can still appreciate a novel even when I’m speeding through it to meet a deadline.

I can’t say the same for videogames, which is, to me, one of the ways it’s a medium distinct from books, albums, and movies. Cave Story is short by game standards — 6 to 8 hours of play — but with lots of work-related travel over the past month, I’ve struggled to keep up with Daniel and Gavin. Last week, I had “beat Cave Story” on my to-do list, underneath “fold laundry” and “clean disgusting fridge.” (Needless to say, I did my laundry and cleaned out my fridge first.) It’s easy to power through a book by giving it all of your focus and attention because there are a finite number of pages. With videogames, there are a set number of levels, sure, but an infinite number of movements. One’s interactions constitute “playing,” and Cave Story beckons to be explored. Yet I simply blew right through the game, feeling frustrated every time I had to backtrack and trying skip as much dialogue as I could, all the while recognizing that I wasn’t giving Cave Story the attention it deserved. When Curly Brace sacrifies herself, I really didn’t care. I barely remembered who she was.

Having read Gavin’s extraordinarily thoughtful post on the narrative’s emotional resonance, I found myself wondering why I didn’t get the same satisfaction out of Cave Story. I often beat games as quickly as possible — most recently Mass Effect 3, so I could see what all the hubbub was about with the ending — but Cave Story feels different. Perhaps it’s the kind of delightful game that doesn’t need to be completed so much as savored. It’s designed to give the player a lingering sense of wonderment and nostalgia. In my haste, I only picked up on hints of this feeling throughout the game. The only true nostalgia I felt was a longing for a time in my life when I had all the hours in the world to play videogames.

Or better put: For me, right now, Cave Story is the right game at the wrong time.

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Kevin Nguyen is an editor at The Bygone Bureau. His only marketable skill is an above-average knowledge of European geography. He has been useless since the introduction of the atlas in 1477. Find him at Twitter at @knguyen.

Cave Story: Nostalgia, celebration, and exploitation

Kevin Nguyen — Thu, 24 May 2012 13:00:18 +0000

I have to admit that I am way behind Daniel and Gavin in my playthrough of Cave Story because I have been clocking a lot of hours into Diablo III, which actually makes for an interesting comparison.

Like Cave Story, Diablo III is a game that panders to one’s nostalgia, in this case nostalgia for Diablo II, released way back in 2000. I remember coming home from summer camp and pouring all of my time into accumulating new weapons and armor for my Amazon. The point of the Diablo games isn’t to defeat monsters; it’s to collect more stuff, which is good for helping you collect more stuff. Diablo III is certainly a vast improvement upon its predecessor, but overall, it’s really the same game built for 2013. I won’t say too much more about Diablo, since I’m supposed to be talking about Cave Story, but basically Diablo III has all the talent and polish of a triple-A title. And for those reasons, it basically has no heart.

Few games have more heart than Cave Story. It was painstakingly hand-crafted (so to speak) by Daisuke Amaya, who designed and developed the game by himself over the course of five years. There’s a decent interview with Amaya, where he explains that his work on the game paralleled his life: “At the time I started work on Cave Story, I was a student, but now I’m an office worker. My entire life had changed by the time this game was finished.”

That’s right: Amaya is not a game developer by trade, so he created the art, music, and story, as well as all the code, in his free time. It may be a nostalgic platformer, but Cave Story feels like the personal expression of one man. We all love the game’s weirdness (or in Daniel’s words, the “WTF factor”), which is something that can only come from the vision and imagination of singular vision.

So why am I not compelled to play more Cave Story?

For me, the appeal of Cave Story is its charm. Sure, it’s fun to jump around and fire rockets, but I love uncovering the uniqueness buried beneath the Metroid and Castlevania-inspired platforming. Diablo, on the other hand, is designed to be addictive. And it is very good at that, almost to the point of blandness. The game says and means nothing.

While both are designed to make you think about the good old days, I think there’s a single key difference between the two games: Cave Story celebrates nostalgia, while Diablo III exploits it.

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Read Daniel J. Hogan’s week 2 post
Read Gavin Craig’s week 2 post

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Cave Story: Platform mechanics

Kevin Nguyen — Wed, 16 May 2012 13:00:32 +0000

For me, platformers have always been nostalgic. Sure, my first videogame console was an NES with Super Mario Bros. 3, but I was too young in those days to have a valuable opinion about it (I know this because my favorite NES game, at the time, was Batman Returns). The first game that made a true impression on me was Super Mario 64. It was also the first game I really immersed myself in and played thoughtfully. All that to say, I belong more closely to the first generation of 3D games than I do the Golden Age of 2D cartridges.

In contrast to Dan (who I believe is about 100 years old), by the time I was in high school and college, platformers were already nostalgic. Now that I think about it, I’ve played through more side-scrollers using an emulator than on an actual console.

So here’s Cave Story, which I am playing on my Mac (it’s only $9.99 on Steam), a platformer designed deliberately to evoke nostalgia. The Kool-Aid Man reference, as Dan pointed out, is a great example of Cave Story‘s bizarre sense of humor and its playful self-winking. I’m not much further than the Balrog — ostensibly the first boss — but I’m guessing that’s just the first of many nerdy inside jokes. And I’m looking forward to them all!

One thing that bugs me is that the physics of Cave Story seem a little off. The jumps feel sort of loose, almost floaty. Of course, platformers don’t have to adhere to Earth’s physics, but it has to feel like there’s sort of predictable gravity. When I jump I want to know where I’ll land.

I have a friend who has this theory that the original Super Mario Bros. has the perfect platformer physics. I believe that. There’s something natural and predictable about the way Mario jumps. Is it because Miyamoto engineered the jump perfectly, or because Super Mario Bros. defined what that perfect jump is supposed to feel like? I don’t know. But I’ve seen people who don’t play video games give a spectacular run through Super Mario Bros. for that reason.

Outside of pure nostalgia, I think that’s the ultimate appeal of platformers today. If you’ve ever tried to teach someone all the buttons to play Halo, you realize just how complicated games have become. Platformers have a familiar linearity to them. Cave Story is a largely two-button game, and I find its simplicity comforting and endearing. So while I’m charmed by Cave Story‘s idiosyncracies, I’m waiting to fall in love with its mechanics.

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Read Daniel J. Hogan’s week 1 post
Read Gavin Craig’s week 1 post

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