Cave Appreciation Post

 

If you were to ask someone who their favorite game development studios are you might get a couple of standard answers.  Square Enix, Capcom, Rockstar, Nintendo maybe Naughty Dog if the person you are talking to is a braindead twat and Activision Blizzard if the person you are talking to is into findom.  However if you talk to someone who's interested in the extremely specific niche of bullet hell shooters the one name that might come out of their mouth is Cave.

Established in 1995 Cave are probably the single most recognizable name in the genre of bullet hell.  Kicking things off with Donpachi back in 1995 Cave's shmups have a unique style and feel to them where you can recognize them right away.  Some of their biggest titles include Donpachi and all its sequels, Mushihime-sama, ESP. RA. DE and Deathsmiles.  For a couple of their lesser appreciated games I would suggest checking out Guwange and Progear as well.   

While shmups are Cave's bread and butter it isn't the only kind of game they have ever put out.  Semi-well liked snowboarding game Steep Slope Sliders was developed by them as well a number of driving games including one Japan only title which I think is about delivering soba noodles to an office?  Its called Delisoba Deluxe and I watched a longplay and couldn't quite work out what the fuck was happening but that seems to be the premise.  They even have what I think is a Tokimeki Memorial clone under their belt called Princess Debut which seems very off brand for them but when I looked up a video to see what it was all about the comments were like "OMG SUCH A GOOD GAME!" and "SO NOSTALGIC" so I guess it resonated pretty well with a few youngin's at launch.  

The one thing that actually blew my goddamn mind was that, apparently, they worked on fucking Shin Megami Tensei Imagine Online of all goddamn things.  If you aren't aware SMT Imagine was a free to play MMO that, was maybe a little barebones but I'm enough of a sucker for MegaTen to have sunk a fair few hours into it.  It shut down and was then kept on life support by some fans running a private server but because the business-men over at ATLUS are fun-hating turbo cunts they shut that down too.  I guess Cave are too busy making more DoDonpachi games to give a shit but I wish someone would bring it back or even just make a new one.

Now that you have read this post you are required to go and play a game made by Cave.  I suggest ESP.RA.DE if you like top down and Progear if you like side scrolling.  Doesn't really matter what you pick in the end anyway because its basically guaranteed to be a good time