You have died.

[prog]

Cave Story has a lot of great stuff in it but I just don't know what this Pixel person was thinking with the end. It's almost a parody of how a lot of platformers have an endboss that's twice as hard as anything that's come before.

A four-stage endboss with a three-bosses-at-once-plus-summoning last stage, without any opportunities for saves or even healing, is a bit much. It's also a real let-down after hours of delightful exploration paced by only somewhat narsty boss fights. This isn't worth getting angry over. baleeted

(I might play it some more if you can skip past the cinematics. Hard boss fights with unskippable cinematics in is bad design. Yugh.)

Comments

[karlvonl.livejournal.com]

Damn you JMac! I'm addicted to Cave Story now. New Super Mario Brothers and Tomb Raider Legend have been put on hold. :-)

Oh, and as for the boss thing; I never finished Mega Man X4 for the Sega Saturn many years ago, for the same reason. You have to fight like 4 bosses in a row. And if you've played any Mega Man games you know that beating one boss is hard enough, and even if you only have one point of health left at the end, you feel like you've accomplished something, and you're glad it's over.

[prog.livejournal.com]

I'll feel like returning to this fight someday. I think it's a little easier than it looks, with patterns that you can pick up and react to on later iterations.

The real problem, as I said, is the fact that you can't skip past the lengthy cinematics woven into each stage of the fight, and they get very old fast. I argue that Pixel could have added a control to skip cinematics without sacrificing old-school feel.