Cave Story Ported to 3DS

NIS America announced today that they will publishing a “fully reconstructed in 3D” port of Cave Story, a Metroidvania style 2D sidescroller. It was originally developed as a freeware game on the PC and Mac by Studio Pixel and ported over to the Wii Shop and DSiWare by Nicalis.

Originally made entirely out of sprites, Cave Story 3D will be polygonal and some areas of the game will have some curvature to them thanks to the 3DS’ tech. According to the game’s preliminary fact sheet “This curvature can be accomplished by defining a 3D spline that directly and uniquely maps to the 2D grid that the game is actually aware of.” This means that things will move like they are in a 3D environment, but it will still all be 2D.

Aside from the new curve, nothing else about the game is going to be changed. I have just gotten my hands on the original game so I will have to play that before I know whether this is a good or bad thing. No release date has been given, but plain old Cave Story is still available on PC, Wii and DSi (go for the PC version, it’s free!).

– DeadMan