One man, one cave, one seriously awesome story.

While shuffling through the gaming blogs, I came across several posts announcing the release of Studio Pixel’s Cave Story via Nintendo’s handheld content delivery service, DSiWare. While I now understand that Cave Story was initially released in its native Japan in 2004, I had actually never happened upon the game.

The title debuted for the PC as a free executable. Free. And since I didn’t even have a DSi, I figured that I’d just track down a copy to play on my computer.

NONE WILL BE LEFT TO MOURN YOU BUT GHOSTS

There was a time when I was working way too much. Between putting in upwards of 55 hours a week at my desk job and chipping away at my art projects, I had little to no time to play any games.

One dragging lunch break, however, a co-worker of mine pointed me to Loren Schmidt’s Star Guard, an independently developed Flash game that took Schmidt a long 16 months to complete. What resulted was a convincingly epic yet simplistic interactive space opera that gorged itself on several well-spent hours of my time.