Happy Belated Birthday Cave Story!

On December 20th, Cave Story was released in japan, after 4 years of development by 1 man.

Share your fondest memories of the game in this thread.

Mine was beating hell for the first time.

 

My best memory of Cave Story was probably printing out a guide on how to get the Best Ending, bringing it to my Dad's house with no internet, and nervously and meticulously trying step-by-step to fulfill all of the requirements. Good times! Getting under four minutes on Hell with the DSi port was also a very good moment for me.

 

Playing the DSi port of the game back in 2011, sitting on my bed, just completely immersed into the game, I played for hours on that thing. Best moment?
Beating what I thought was the game, (aka The Undead Core), which, at the time, felt immensely satisfying considering I hated him at the time. (For killing Toroko, who was one of my favorite characters). That is, until I realized I had gotten the normal ending. I didn't beat the DSi version until sometime late last year, considering it took me so long just to get through Hell...

 

I still find it funny that Cave Story launched the day before I turned 10. Now I'm 19.

 

One day I did a Bubbler-only run of CS. Every boss fight felt 10 times more challenging and I had to come up with some rather interesting strategies to dispatch each boss (my favourite being Balrog 4 since you have to run up and jump over him when he's in the middle with just the right timing so that he jumps where you were, not where you are, and then use the room to physically jump through the gap in his missiles because you lack the firepower to consistently shoot them down), but the ultimate moment for me was at the end of the run when I beat Hell and Ballos for the first time in my entire life and completed the entire run.

 

My fondest memory of cave story? ... I was playing the demo on the wii, and after 3 days of ragequitting, I finally beat the demo.
Or maybe it was finding the forums... I dont know...
Nope. It was finding out they were making a 3DS port of the game (not cs3d) and I couldnt wait until it came out so I could download it and go on and on about the game to my friends and they had no idea what I was talking about...I think it was... October 4th?..

 

I have two.

It was already special when I got to journey off with a few people to a slightly far-off area of my country and stay in a nice hotel for a few days. But I had brought a borrowed laptop too. And on my first day there, as I was nestled comfortably on the nice couch standard to the room, I finally defeated Misery, the Doctor and the Core for the first time. It was such a nice moment, and I guess I can't explain well why.

That was more than a year ago. How time passes...

The other was when I found these forums, of course. I won't elaborate much. But it's obviously had some amazing consequences.

 

It certainly has, Polaris. I can certainly say the best experience I had with it was coming back from my second banning, determined not to let it happen again. And look where I am now!

 

My fondest moment of Cave Story... What can I say. The time I defeated Balfrog after several failures? Barely surviving Monster X after getting savagely curb-stomped by those treads? Beating the Core in one go...and then seeing Curly dead right after? As if she was how I would've ended up if I hadn't been so meticulous with dodging. Listening to the awesome Waterway and MoonSong themes? Hearing the Main Theme and then going on to beat the Doctor once and for all?

Spoiler

Then finding out afterward I was playing as Curly the whole time and that it was CSWii, whose soundtrack I prefer over the original and 3D?

It's hard to choose, really. At the least I've moved on and matured, joining the forums, playing WTFStory, getting to know the folks here a bit, the Skype group, Jenn's Journey...there's still a lot to do.

 

My best memories were the fist time I played cave story, when i went to the balcony, i couldn't defeat the core after 50 tries, and when i did,well

Spoiler

I could enter prefab house with booster v0.8!!
I Arrived to a weird place, called sacred grounds, I died their,i made researches,and found the best ending.My copy of CS was probably buggy.

 

This day marks just over a year of playing Cave Story for me. It's funny how much one game can change your life, in the course of a year.

Downloading the deluxe package, I really had no idea what I was getting myself into. I didn't even look at what the game was about. Maybe I saw about five seconds of a fan made trailer, and I knew some of the music via YouTube. One day, I was bored of doing schoolwork, and was like, "I wonder what Cave Story is like."

Starting out the game was a bit of a bumpy ride for me; I died at every boss or took significant amounts of damage. I didn't face any issues until the Sand Zone, where Toroko kept killing me and I became really interested to know what happened to her.

I suppose it was a shame that I decided to spoil the entire plot of Cave Story for myself by watching LPs, but I realized it motivated me to want to complete the game and experience it full screen for myself. Even after seeing videos of people playing, I somehow forgot that I shouldn't have spoken to Booster in the Labyrinth and ended up killing Curly on my first try. Even after watching speedruns of the Sacred Grounds, I still died multiple times before finally completing it, let alone getting Curly on my titlescreen. I'll never forget the frustration I had navigating through room B2, the room no walkthrough could ever point a clear path to complete.

Cave Story Deluxe had a link to a Tribute site in its program files, but the link was dead. I began to think a Cave Story fanbase was no longer existent. I tried out ORG Maker v1 for the first time, fooling around with ideas I improvised on the piano and wanted to find out how to convert them into mp3 (I know - not possible), so I put this into a Google search. That was how I found the forums. And in turn, that was how I discovered Cave Story Wiki.

...

Gosh, I sure ramble a lot for a forum that doesn't really like long posts. Oh well. To be a little more optimistic, I'm glad to reminisce in a thread that asks for it.

 

My most memorable moment was when I saw Curly drown in the core room and I could do absolutely nothing to save her.

I was actually in total shock when it happened. (I had only played mario and sonic games up to that point so that was really epic to me as a first on top of a great plot and story)



That or getting under 3 minutes at hell.

 

I think one of the most memorable moments for me is when (shocker) I did the bad ending and I had no idea what to do. King and Toroko were dead, Curly was dead, and I escaped the island with Kazuma. The next week, I played again and I said "NO" to Kazuma and I realised that I could still keep on playing and later on, I beat the Undead Core and Misery and escaped with Sue and I finally beat the game (Normal Ending). It took me two weeks to finally get the Good Ending and I still complete it at around 7 minutes.

 

On Dec 20th, I went into school wearing my Quote costume to celibate Cave Story's 9th birthday.

 

celibate

I don't think that's the word you're looking for.

 

If he goes to school dressed like cave story there's no reason to believe he won't be

 

I enjoyed the whole game really, and well this may sound like a cop-out, I really think my favorite part about it was just how it got me into the indy genre of games. I was happy the whole time playing Cave story, because I've always been into retro games, especially metroidvania's. Before even picking up Cave Story I had played several hours of Castlevania: Aria of sorrow, and Harmony of Dissonance, metroid, super metroid, and the like. I first saw it while watching top 10's and lets plays. However, when I first looked it up, I happened upon the wiiware page. Thinking it would cost money, I decided not to get it. Couple years later, my friend downloads the demo on wii and starts talking about it. I decide to try it, since he hadn't been able to finish the demo yet, so we kept trading off whenever we died. I was quite a bit better then my friend, mostly because I've played many similar games. I beat the demo, and tell him he should get the game. I go home, look it up, find original version, and go through the game getting the good ending in 3 days. It opened up a world of single developer no publisher games for me.

 

Beating ballos for the first time was cool.
I was so happy, then went on to play and ragequit on the nemesis challenge...