[DJ]

Breaking my no-intertron-until-move-to-Cali-is-complete rule to vote:

This game is fucking excellent.

I am almost done with it. I've pretty much played it nonstop for a few days now. Oi.

To people who are having problems, stick with it. This is probably the longest I've gone just chewing through a game since Symphony of the Night (and yeah, it is a lot like that game. Very cool).

But yeah. Really, really, good. Different vibe than Cave Story entirely, and while I hesitate to say it's better, it's certainly as good, and a fair bit longer from what I can tell.

For those a bit impugned by the difficulty, check the manual. It helped me get into the creator's heads a bit, and their advice is sound. The game was designed to punish wanton actions and test platformer skills. The latter you basically just need practice at, but the former? Just be careful. If you see something that's out of place, immediately assume it's a trap; it is.

This flies in the face of Commercial Game Design, where you're given training periods to test something out (think Super Metroid and Half-Life 2) then put to a live demonstration. Here, there is no test period, so bouncing around willy-nilly to get a "feel" for things will get you killed. Save often, move cautiously, assume everything is going to kill you; the game becomes much easier once you're suitably paranoid.

Also. I tried this with an Xbox 360 gamepad. Don't. Use the keyboard. The jumping mechanics get all fucked up if you use a gamepad due to lack of anything resembling analogue support, i.e. no diagonal jumping. Even the "second jump" didn't seem to alleviate this much. Sucks, but I didn't care after a while. The keyboard's not hard to use for this game.
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[DJ]