Back II: Back With a Vengeance

I'm pleased to say I'm finally back to posting updates on this blog, after having had a terribly busy May and June with exams and translation work. Blogging, a word whose mere mention evokes images of Cheeto dust being smeared over a Macbook bought on unemployment benefits, is actually pretty hard work, especially when you're a non-native English speaker like me and you have to spend time thinking of trite jokes to spice up your entries.

As always, I welcome any suggestions and requests for material to post here: the best part of blogging is when you find out that there are actually people out there who want to read your stuff, and the encouraging comments from the people who read this blog are what makes me continue doing it. Thank you so much, I'll work hard to provide interesting content to read over the course of this summer.

Game Review: Cave Story (洞窟物語)

Level: Advanced Beginner/Intermediate
Characters: Simplified/Traditional
Pros:

• Wonderfully entertaining game with a simple and compelling storyline.
• Perfect for when you don't want to read mountains of text and just want a game to relax with while learning some Chinese in-between.

Cons:

• None I can think of.

Where to find it:
Simplified
Traditional

Cave Story, an internet favorite and possibly one of the best (if not the best) freeware games available for the PC, is testament to how far one man's dedication can take him, and should serve as a model project for any wannabe game designer out there. Everything you see and hear in the game was made by Japanese software engineer Daisuke Amaya working on his own over a period of five years, an amazing feat considering the length and polish of the game.

The game is a platformer with exploration elements, illustrated in a cutesy pixel art style reminiscent of 16-bit SNES and Genesis games. You play a young amnesiac robot thrust into a conflict between the peaceful Mimigas and an evil doctor who kidnaps them to perform experiments, without revealing too much I can say that this simple plot outline develops in interesting directions and continually finds new ways to make the gameplay fun and challenging (without getting frustrating).

Enemies drop power-ups when they die, which upgrade the weapon you are holding when you pick them up, up to a maximum of three levels. If you take damage, however, the weapon's level will decrease and you will have to get new power-ups to get it back up again.

Two translations for Chinese are available, for this review I played the Traditional Chinese translation by chowleft, but there is also a Simplified translation available by Hydrowing. I would love to hear some comments about the simplified version, if any of you out there have played it, by all means feel free to leave a comment.