If I owned the internet I would program it to literally punch you in the groin right now, without provocation and without offering to give you something in exchange, just Baf! right in the meat-beans or the canoe. But not because I hate you, because I do not, of course I do not, have you seen you lately? Look at you. [expectant pause] No, I just want to make sure you don’t ignore the news that Cave Story has been ported to the PSP.

This news is important to me on a level that is nearly non-verbal, not because I own or even like the PSP, because I do not. If video game consoles were people, the PSP would be wearing a pucca shell necklace, detailing his Exterra and mentally compiling his all-Guster iTunes playlist. The point here is Cave Story, which I will write about explicatively, which I don’t want to do, because I really just want to run into traffic and upend a bus and yell “CAAAAAVE STOOOOORY” and have my shirt explode off of my wee pecs, little shirt tatters poufing everywhere.

Cave Story is possibly the finest entrant into the Metroidvania-style game field¹, period— yes I am including Tomba in that statement, MOM— which is totally insane, given that it was programmed by one guy over the course of five years. Five years might not seem like a long time given that a baby cannot even learn to drive in five years, but when you spend that time tweaking play control and making gorgeous, for-reals-emotionally-affecting sprite art instead of performing market research and tweaking the z-axial breast gravity index on your SPARC-rendered braless she-ninjas² and coding logic trees for bullet ricochet movement, then you get a game wherein it is genuinely pleasurable to just move.³ Let’s review the laundry list of great things about this game!!!

• Many, many guns. Not only many, but each interesting and useful. Hey remember that Halo game that everybody and their sister was clutching their weakened skulls over, electricity practically clambering out of their eyesockets, such was their ardor for the series? Half of the weapons in Halo are fucking dumb. Weak, boring, unrealistic kickback, excuseable to some only by virtue of the game they are wrapped in, like a bat-testicle tempura. In Cave Story, gun power is tied to your health meter, rewarding careful, thoughtful play. The deftest players will find their array of weaponry perma-staggering; the brute-force camp will get stuck with the wimpy Lvl 1 bubble-gun, poot poot pooting iridescent soap-globes at ravenous biomechanical horrors. Good luck, guys!
• A plot which is actually engaging; don’t ask me how it was allowed to be released into the wild since this might actually be a first in the post-1994 side-scrolling camp. Aided and abetted by a cohesive artistic vision which never leans on the crutches of…
  • Overused tenets of previous games (gritty urban streets; impossible alien futurescapes)
  • Jamming as much of the visible color spectrum as possible into the screen at once, then pooping lens flares all over everything
  • Co-opted, ugly carictarures of female sexuality as viable selling points (FINALLY)
  • Character design which pushes EDGY or HIP or WACKY or REALISTIC instead of just being well-thought out and effective
• …to make its point. The creepy parts are creepy and the fun parts are fun with minimal effort, just expert wielding of the tools in play. RELATED EXAMPLE: The end of The Pixies’ “Alec Eiffel” which should go on forever into infinity. Are they doing some ridiculous prog-fusion shit at the end there? No, they’re just plonking away like they always do, just being experts at their craft. Same diff, for reals.
• To Reiterate: The play control is literally a joy, not “literally” in the sense of “extremely” which is how 3/4s of any given college dorm will use it, hoarsely and hooting at 3 A.M., to describe the quality of one’s own fuckedupitude, but “literally” in the sense of “to move your character around the game’s map is an activity which produces a tangible sense of joy.” Think about when the last time that happened was. Maybe, for me, the notion in Grand Theft Auto that the city was contiguous, the cars were stealable, the walking and running and driving and shooting all pleasureable activities I could string together at will — and that was the last time I bought a PC game, such was my enjoyment. Perhaps another such game has induced this rush in you. Now: Imagine that sensation in a freeware 2D game, given unto you years after the side-scrolling market was supposed to be dead and gone. You (me), at 24, making a little man run and jump around a screen without purpose for 20 minutes. Exactly.
• The music is one bicycle-flip kickback to .SID-chipped heaven; the reductionist themes apply here too. No crappy DI-boxed Parker Nite Flys wailing over some Dr. Sample preset, encoded to Ogg Vorbis and set to play when you enter the laboratory. Just some peep boop beep boop bonka bonka vroww, like mom used to tolerate, except there’re more than four audio channels and the dude can stretch out his composition legs and he is really good at that, too. Who feels inadequate yet?

I mean, this could LITERALLY go on for days, this list, lovingly describing all of the perfect, glistening facets of this game-gem. I almost want to keep going, but more than that I want to discuss the ramifications of its confirmed journey to the PSP. If you will remember, I have already espoused my meaningful and worthwhile opinion on the Internet’s free games and how they could translate into a free money press in almost any developer’s hands. That this is Actually Being Done all of a sudden, with the best choice the internet has to offer, this means that (1) I am always right and (2) I am the smartest. Also it means some other things.

Like that maybe video games finally have their indie circuit, their equivalent of my tiny crappy band driving around the East Coast, opening for better bands who get paid for things and selling CD-Rs out of a suitcase, but eventually, hopefully, getting comped for recording time and finally getting something out of our labor of love. Maybe there is a reason that Hapland and Samorost and N and all the rest finally exist. Maybe if enough people buy the PSP port and bug Nintendo enough about it, they’ll see fit to release the VORPAL NINTENDO SEAL OF APPROVAL +5 for license and there can be a DS port (which is being actively sought for Cave Story, which I have already emailed Nintendo about, no matter how futile the effort). Maybe in the future we’ll see a WiFi-capable touchscreen-enabled port of Kingdom of Loathing, because isn’t it at least plausible? Couldn’t it hook into the same database as the internet-based version for trading, maybe, or mightn’t it use its own, with game updates and patches released when you log in, just like they’re distributed in the extant version? OK maybe I’m getting ahead of myself. Slow it down, me. Hooooooo. Phhhooooooooo.

My point is this: This move, in one fell swoop, vindicates the efforts of independent gamemakers, introduces one of the best games made in this entire decade to a mass market, ports the game to a platform for which it’s naturally suited, gives money to game authors and prescient developers who deserve it, AND allows everyone the chance to reward this taken risk and send a message to developers at large. It’s some 4-D Chess checkmate action, simul-winning in n separate dimensions, and the only thing I can do to push it along is to insist that you download this game immediately — it’s cross-platform, even — and get good and lost inside it. Say hi to Curly for me, alright?

¹ Relatedly, this might be the worst argument on Wikipedia. For my money, games where you hit things, get things, and eventually turn into an unbeatable, double-jumping tank should have their own genre, if only to legitamize the genre so that there can be twelve million more of them. See also: Eternal Daughter (another free download), many Castlevania and Metroid games, and uh. Well, Cave Story, I guess. GOOD THING YOU GOT ME COVERING THIS, GUYS~

² If you can watch Taki in Soul Calibur 2 for a full three-round fight without wincing you are probably a douchebag. I know the game is set in some cultural-temporal olio of European fiefdom/feudal Japan/modern-day rustic countryside, but what with all the hoofing around to remote villas in search of a sentient, vulgar broadsword you’d think somebody would come across a sports bra.

³ FOGEY’S ANECDOTE: This was cited as one of the ways in which the original Super Mario Bros. team knew they were doing something right! (e.g., when they moved Mario across multiple contiguous screens [l->r] in one of the first instances of horizontal platforming evar, and got a kick out of just jumping and hitting stuff.) I can’t remember which Nintendo Power this was in, but one of the developers mentioned it as a way of getting around to bragging about Super Mario World. HEY: Remember when game developers bragged and you could tell it was pride bubbling to the surface instead of just calibrated bluster? Makes me want to find the programmer who churned out parallax scrolling and force him to talk all cocky about it. “Yeah the mountains were like vruuu but the trees were like voooooom and then your guy was like WOOOSH and the whole office kicked over their cubicles to high-five.”