Software Classic-Games - Cave Story

Description:

Cave Story is a freeware sidescrolling action/adventure/platformertitle with leanings towards Wonderboy and recent sidescrollingCastlevania titles.
You control a little amnesiac who runs aroundhelping out these rabbit-ish creatures called Mimigas while tryingto find your way out of the giant cave inside the floating islandwhich makes up the game's setting.You can expand your health meter by collecting Life Capsules insimilar fashion to Metroid games, while you can get stronger bycollecting energy to boost your firearms' output.
Each weapon canbe built up to the maximum level (3) fairly quickly, but takingdamage will drain energy from its experience meter, sometimescausing it to level down.
Given how quickly they power up thisonly tends to be an issue during boss fights, and even then there'susually plenty of opportunities for collecting more weapon energy.The game has loads of secrets, too.
Shih Tzu and I haven't foundeverything, and we've each played it through a couple of times(not to mention having read the script.) It's pretty awesome thatway.For a freeware Japanese platformer, it's fairly lengthy and hasquite a large amount of text.
I'd guesstimate that each playthrough,provided you knew what you were doing, would take about 4-6 hours.Tack on an extra couple of hours if you don't know what you'redoing, possibly for extreme problems with nasty bosses (which thisgame has plenty of, especially towards the end.) We're also talkingthree very different endings, plenty of plot, and quite a cast ofcharming characters.
It really is a superb little gem :)