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Did you know Cave Story has mods? I only found out about WTF Story by chance. As you might be able to guess, I only just now got around to playing and beating WTF Story, and it actually starts off pretty good: you’re just jumping around spikes, and the game goes out of its way to teleport you back to a nearby checkpoint if you die rather than use the regular Cave Story death. Really, my only issue was with the momentum that’s already part of Cave Story and Kero Blaster…but then I made it to the end of the room and only found a puddle and a locked door. Thing is, this game’s entire first area is strictly linear, outside of the secret path that gives you +1 max HP, which I already went through. I looked up a walkthrough, and it turns out you have to drown yourself on purpose, which teleports you to a large room with several rows of chests and a door that leads to a spike pit. Now, you have to talk to the NPC in the room so the camera will pan over to the general area of which chest you need to check next, then you gotta keep checking every chest until you get the right one and the camera pans somewhere else. Once you’ve examined the last chest, a new door appears, but it’s a fake door that’ll kill you on contact, so what you actually need to do is speak to the NPC another time to get an item, then enter the spike pit room, at which point the item activates and lets you progress. WTF, indeed. AFAIK the game never gets that arbitrary again, but you also never see the quick-retry spikes again (it goes back to regular Cave Story deaths). Plus, it still has a bunch of cheap hits, like with the Tetris level where you’re just waiting for the first half to be over and can only memorize (not react) to where the pieces fall in the second half, or like the flooded pipes room where if you don’t hit the correct one of the identically-looking switches last, you’ll get trapped underwater and have to wait 100 seconds to drown and restart. Then there’s the snow area, which isn’t so much hard as it is long and repetitive (and while I don’t remember if the snowmen are spirte-swaps of an original Cave Story enemy, I did notice they share the same problem as the wrench-throwers from Kero Blaster), which is then followed by a town where you just run back and forth doing trading-quests. The bosses are okay, but after the first two, they all seem to be designed around the block gun, because trying to avoid all the stuff they spawn using the original Cave Story machine gun is near (if not actually) impossible, and the final boss is no exception. Overall, I don’t think I’d recommend it due to all the cheap and arbitrary stuff it does. Do any of you have a better Cave Story mod to recommend?

After that, I beat Iji, and wow, this game has almost all of my pet peeves. Bland, flat level design, RPG mechanics, reload times for every individual shot you fire (and a similar-if-not-longer delay every time you so much as switch weapons), instant shots instead of avoidable projectiles, NO foreshadow animation for said instant shots, and worst of all, said instant shot is a spread shot, so you can still get hit even while ducking behind cover, and that’s all just from the first enemy! Later enemies have machine guns, and while they don’t spread, they fire much longer, so you’d be stuck waiting behind cover before you can retaliate. Yeah, the game teaches you very early on that this isn’t a game where you can avoid damage, so you might as well put all your points into attack and health, then just go in guns blazing. This strategy is further enforced by how many health pickups the game showers you in (at least on Normal mode); even though the credits said I took over 200 points of damage, I only died maybe twice or thrice, and one of those was because the boss was a riddle instead of an actual boss (you only needed the kick to open doors until that point!). Ironically, the game slowly gets more good design ideas as you progress: there are weapons that not only have foreshadow animations, but an actual, visible projectile you can duck under (though the different enemy appearances don’t indicate which weapons they have), and the final boss could work in an actual good game since it’s all different shot patterns and foreshadow animations for the attacks that’d otherwise be too fast to dodge (though part of that might’ve been the severe lag, which also started happening in the last couple stages). This is in contrast to previous bosses, like the “bait the metal orb into the electricity” boss, where the only time it moves from the middle of the arena is when it’s rubber-banding to you. By the way, the level design never goes beyond its bland, flat halls, so all combat against regular enemies is exactly the same and gets pretty repetitive. Also not recommended.

But still, if you know me, you could probably guess those wouldn’t be games I’d like much, so let’s focus on another game:

This is an action platformer. You can move left or right, you can jump, and you can wall-jump, but each jump spins your character 90-degrees to the right, and since you’re a cube with different colors on each side, the jump button also changes which colored-side faces which direction. At first, this seems like a neat concept: colored tiles are only solid if you’re touching them with the correct side of your cube, and enemies only die if you touch their colored side with your like-colored side. The problem comes in when you realize this isn’t a puzzle game, but an ACTION platformer; you’ll need to spin to the correct side with split second timing, but even after 90 levels of precision-jumps, it’ll never become intuitive which color is after which (especially when you need to switch which side you need to keep track of). You’ll need to push the jump button to spin to the correct side, but if you let go of the jump button so you CAN push it again, you won’t get your full jump height because that’s how platformers work. Ultimately, it comes across as clunky, and the loading screen’s implication of having a different color assigned to a different button would’ve made this game SO much more manageable.

And that’s just the conceptual problem. If you actually play the game, you’ll start to notice that the controls seem…slippery. Sure, your character’s forward movement is pretty brisk, but it’s more than just not being able to react in time; you can swear that your character is stopping after you let go of forward, sometimes almost an entire unit after you let go. After playing over 90 levels of this game, I have come to the conclusion that the game DOES HAVE FORWARD MOMENTUM. You won’t notice it just by watching the trailers since the player’s top speed and deceleration are quick, but it’s there just enough to screw you over during key moments, and it’s worse in mid-air. Even jumping isn’t immune: if you let go of the jump button, you’ll still go well over a unit above where you let go, making it next to impossible to be precise when jumping below low-hanging hazards. I honestly thought my controller was starting to malfunction, but the same thing happens with keyboard as well. This is a perfect example of why I stopped buying games and why I’ll probably never spend real money on a game again: even if it looks like it does everything right, you never know what sneaky cheap crap the devs might’ve snuck in.

Oh, but even if you can look past the base control issues, the game still has problems. After the first boss, the game introduces lasers, and there are a bunch of levels where the lasers shoot up and you need to ride them up to progress. Problem is, these lasers work off a physics engine: when you jump into one, you’ll still be falling and you’ll need to rely on the laser to slow your fall (meaning even if you jump in near the top, you can still fall to the bottom and hit the hazardous floor and die). Plus, many of these lasers shoot you up above where you can see, but due to the physics engine, they can move you so fast that you won’t have any time to react to when your new path shows up or to the hazard ceiling that’s placed above many of the upward lasers. It gets even worse when the lasers are combined with the game’s faster-than-you homing shots, because now you somehow have to avoid them while also having little control over your character.

Despite all that, the part that made me give up was in level 95. See, when you touch a colored tile with your like-colored side, it not only turns into a block, but fades into a solid color; when you get off, it fades back into transparency. At first, this is just a neat visual effect, but when lasers are introduced, you’ll slowly start being required to use the colored tiles to block the lasers. Thing is, level 94 introduces a sinister trap: you need to turn the wall solid, then jump OVER where the laser is before the wall goes back to being transparent, while also remembering to hit the jump button again so you can jump up the other side of the colored wall. Not only does this require more precision than the game’s controls really allow, but you’ll also notice that touching colored tiles won’t put them at their max brightness by default. This means if you wall-jump too early, the wall fades too quick and the laser will kill you before you can jump over it, but if you wait too long, you’ll slide too far down (because you always slide down when hugging a wall in this game). Still, at least with level 94, it was just one laser, but level 95 makes you do it with two lasers in a row and changes the color of the wall mid-way AND it’s a timed level, meaning if you succeed too slowly, the platform you need goes out of reach and you have to kill yourself anyway.

Absolutely.

Not.

Recommended.