This post was last modified: Nov 23, 2017 at 3:42 AM by Aidan.

today instead of a dumb gimmick i’m just gonna do two games: hack9 and hacker9
they’re part of the same series, and you can find both games as well as this dude’s other work at this link. (warning: loli)


the title screen is pretty bland tbh. i’m glad the guy who makes this just calls himself blackbastard. now i know exactly what to scream if his game pisses me off.
if you’ve played cave story the menu might look kinda familiar. i believe these games are mods for cave story? but they come with their own .exe and there’s coding changes. it’s not just cave story with different maps and shit so i think it’s fair to consider this its own game.
i know i’ve played other indie games that had more in common with cave story than this.


the game starts us off in this weird room. the pause menu helpfully tells us we’re playing as Snort, the purple haired chick at the bottom left. i equipped the kukri here because the game starts you off without a weapon equipped. there’s absolutely no good reason for this, the first thing you should do is equip the weapon and leave it on forever.
you’ll also notice we start with 50 Japan bux. this may come up later.
the blonde dude tells you some shit in moonspeak, as do the computers at the top left. the big machine in the middle is actually a teleporter, but we don’t currently have a destination set. time to explore!


aw yeah we’re on a cool train
near the back of the train there’s a door to a laboratory. i didn’t bother including a screenshot because it’s just dumb nerds doing dumb nerd things.
the tonberry near the engine sells you shit. he has a dagger for sale, but it’s 60 anime coins so we’ll have to come back for it. the door right behind Snort...


leads to the save room! the bed, as it helpfully advertises, restores your HP and MP. the usb stick saves.
when i first saw the save icon i thought it was a scientific beaker or something. but when you use it, you hear the sound a keyboard furiously typing. i guess the implication is that she’s writing a record of her progress and saving it to the USB, so someone can check it if she dies. cool sh*t
anyway i wandered around and kept talking to everyone until finally the teleporter started working. i hopped in and it brought me to


the beginning of cave story?
most of the train assets were original but this is almost all copy pasted. main difference is the enemies, little soldier dudes in brown.
this game is supposed to be a little more stealth focused than cave story’s run and gun style, and this is where you first get a taste of that. this dude patrols his little section of land, and will keep walking back and forth unless he makes eye contact with you. if he does see you, he’ll take some pot shots with his pistol and then chase you down.
that would be a perfect little system to encourage the player to avoid enemies, but the only way through is to stand directly on that platform with him. later on you’ll start seeing this enemy type in narrow corridors so that there’s absolutely no way to circumvent them.
so your choices here are to jump over him and run away, risking getting shot in the back, or try to kill him.
if you do get shot, it takes half your health right there.
here’s the problem with fighting: in the time it takes to take down his 4 HP with our 1 damage weapon, he will probably just turn around and shoot us unless we time it absolutely perfectly.
fuck you brown solider guy your uniform is as shitty as you are


eventually you can make it past that asshole and come to this room. there was a fucking tank so i turned and ran. there’s also another type of brown soldier guy, this time with a sword. i’m pretty sure they have identical sprites except for the attack, so there’s no way to tell which enemy type you’re facing until they’re after you.
you can get a little bit farther than this but it’s not worth it. i tried for like half an hour to see what was up but you have four HP and the only save point i found was on the train.
i decided that the game wanted to force money grinding on me, so i just ran through that first room repeatedly and then backtracked to go buy the dagger. it does double damage, so you actually have something of a fighting chance against the soldiers.
the first fucking combat room in the game is a forced grinding spot. lol.


this room is a piece of shit. those floating boxes are enemies, and they move back and forth until they hit a wall.
how the fuck are you supposed to fall through this shaft without taking damage? there literally isn’t enough room for both you and a box to fit on the same horizontal plane. i ended up letting the first one hit me and just used the invincibility to run past the rest.


this part was actually pretty dope. there’s a security camera here that sets off a siren if it detects you. the siren makes enemies turn around more frequently so you can’t sneak by.
i ended up setting off the security camera, and then blowing it up with my knife. not the sneakiest approach but it got the job done


there’s a bunch of rooms you can access but most of them are dead ends with like, an item or something. this is the most interesting one i found because it’s got a waterfall and a fish.
tbh i never made it out of these caves after like 45 minutes of trying. there’s no save points or healing and there’s unavoidable damage. maybe the next level is really cool but i was not interested in redoing this one until i somehow got the perfect run-through.


so that brings us to the next game, hacker9. first thing you’ll notice is the text isn’t foreign scribblies anymore. there’s actually an English version, endorsed by the creator and available on itch.io
since i could read the fucking text this time i got a bit more of the story. the game opens with a back of lore about the world, and it’s actually pretty cool so i’m going to include it. the ideas are very cyberpunk. it wouldn’t surprise me if ghost in the shell was a bit inspiration for these games

Spoiler: Show

Nine professionals gathered and trained with funding by Nichinan Heavy Industries. They were also test subjects had who had their brains duplicated by the virtual brain processor “ENIGMA”.
Japanese Army, Poison Gas Unit: Officers “Scott”, “Douglas” and “Oliver”
Psychicers : “Tsukihime and “Kazehime”
Founder of the Cyber Religion Kyuushinkai: “BABA”
Japanese Army, The 13 Commanders (AKA The 13): Kanou
Nichinan Heavy Industries: “B. Weapon”, “Chan Yecheng”
Their duplicated brains were incorporated into a “definitive decision system” known as the “Nine System”. After the establishment of the Nine System, the minds of the 9 Old School members kept repeatedly forming consensus at the speed of light inside ENIGMA, and output instructions for Nichinan’s management as “the will of Nine”. Due to the fast and precise instructions, Nichinan’s upper management stopped holding meetings in times of trouble, and instead kept turning to the Nine System for help. Ever since Nichinan’s sudden growth, the existence of the “Old School” had been fading into obscurity...

Nichinan Heavy Industries was expected to be forever prosperous...

...until the “IDC Occupation Incident” occured on 2010/12/23...

tl;dr: there’s a digital consciousness called the Nine System that makes the big decisions, and living humans are getting pissed at their loss of power


game starts us off in this cool Japanese castle, and that blonde boi gives us our first mission: THE_HEAVY_STORAGE

the gist of it is that terrorists called Old School have taken over the servers of Nichinan Heavy Industries, and they’re demanding a ransom to gtfo. they’ve holed up inside the building, but there’s a nearby inn that connects to the server farm through an underground tunnel. Nichinan is paying us big bux to get in and pull out their servers

one thing that i didn’t really bring up earlier is that these games both implement a physics engine. blackbastard somehow hacked the Box2D physics engine into cave story and makes use of it on various little items throughout the world. you don’t notice it much in the first game, except for when a random coin falls into a pit, but it’s in full force here. you can knock into bells to ring them, kick around bottles and hear them clang against the floor, and just run through piles of garbage to knock them all over the place. this leads to some weird shit where you’ll walk into a room and just hear a bunch of items rolling around all over the place creating a cacophony of bullshit. still though, it’s cool to see.

i wandered around the castle for like 10 minutes until i figured out how to leave. you’d think the game would be less cryptic in English but nope lol


despite the boss’ orders, you can just run right to the server building. the terrorists somehow acquired several tanks though so it’s not a good idea by any means.

i’m a fucking pro by this point so i managed to get to the front door.


buuuut they’ve taken hostages and you get a game over if you walk in. i think that’s what the SPY icon on the HUD is supposed to denote? if you get detected you lose.


we decide to be good and follow our orders. the inn is actually pretty sweet looking. the geisha chick at the front desk offers you a room, but it’s expensive af so we decline.

tonberry is back, but this time his prices are much more reasonable. kinda.
the upgraded knife, which is now just knife+1 fsr, is actually affordable this time. he also has an ice knife on sale for a thousand gold dubloons.

the door next to him is a save point room, with the USB and a vending machine. the usb works the same way as the last game, but the vending machine charges you for healing. no point in using it right now though, we’re all topped up.

the other door in the basement takes us into the cave so we can actually start on our mission


and it’s a fucking copy-paste from the previous game.
actually, there’s one difference: it’s even fucking harder. hack9 had one enemy here, while this game has two. they also have 6HP now instead of 4, making it literally impossible to stealth kill them with the default knife.

the knife+1 shit is 100% necessary here. on the one hand, it’s nice that you don’t have to grind for it, but there’s no reason to make these already difficult enemies even stronger just to compensate. hack9 was barely playable as is with the upgraded knife.


this room is mostly new, parts of it were in the previous but it’s been expanded upon a bit.

the main difference is that lower area with all the colorful bullshit. most of those are scrap items i think? to show off the physics engine, this game is full of pointless shit that you can pick up. some of it can be sold, but there’s a lot that have zero value and are just there to take up space. that little room is like a treasure chest full of high value doodads.

unfortunately, the little computer thing in front of it blocks us off. not only can we not get it, we get teleported out of the room if we even come near the computer. the game tells us “The anti-intrusion system (JP1) repelled Snort. You need to restore 99 servers to deactivate this JP1.”

it’s really fuckin annoying to get teleported out of a room, especially when the room has enemies in it. really not sure what the intention was there but i don’t like it.


this room was in hack9 but it’s a little different now. i guess all the guys that were patrolling here before died on the spot and are now skeleton men. Snort can pick up their bones but i don’t think there’s any actual use to it. maybe she’s a travelling bone collector or something? a bonist?

there’s a fuck you trap in here too. somewhere around the middle is a landmine that insta-killed me the first time i stepped on it. thanks blackbastard

anyway i redid pretty much the same couple rooms as in the first game. i wanted to at least get to the waterfall


lol fuck that.

i genuinely don’t think there’s any way to not get hit. what the fuck are you expected to do here?

it’s kind of baffling how insanely difficult these games are for no reason. i’d be fine if it was a straight up stealth game, where if you ever break stealth you’re fucked. but there’s plenty of areas where you literally can’t avoid being seen. like on this screen, how could you even hope to avoid the enemies in this tiny ass corridor? you can stab some of them to death, but that requires perfect timing and precision based on sight cones you can’t see in-game.

i feel like these games are probably cool once they get started, but i’m in no rush to keep playing after dying in level one so many times.


these games get two :uniporn: youmus out of five

This post was last modified: Nov 23, 2017 at 4:54 AM by Elyk.

This game actually is not a Cave Story, hack it's an original game. I'm actually the one that extracted the text and handed it off to someone to translate. We couldn't get it reinserted on our own because the map name code is stupid and makes no sense. The original creator happened to find a thread about it on /jp/ and was nice enough to take the translation and insert it himself as well as fix a bunch of bugs and do some QoL changes.

These games are really unforgiving at first. Basically the first thing you want to do is immediately sell the kukuri and buy the dagger because it does double damage. The next thing you want to do is get your hands on the P90, either obtaining it from an enemy as a rare drop or Buyer (Tonberry). You are able to use guns to shoot the boxes which is how you can get through those rooms without having to take damage.

As you get more money you should be investing in the HP UP items to increase your max health. Once you get around 20 HP the game starts getting way easier. You basically just want to keep exploring the caves while making trips back to Buyer to power yourself up. You'll eventually start to find metroidvania style items which will help you explore more such as double/triple jumps, cloaking devices, gas masks, and explosives (to bust down doors). There are checkpoints after the boss fights and you'll be able to warp back to them from the hub.

i'm fucking stupid i guess. i never saw even a mention of a P90 after playing both games an hour each
i thought i read somewhere that this guy does cave story hacks but now i can't actually find where i heard that lol

it probably does become a lot more fun once you actually get some HP. the difficulty was really oppressive at the start when you have no upgrades. i actually did find a few HP UP drinks in my playthrough but they don't heal you and i would always die right after picking one up

I've been meaning to play these since they seem pretty fun

This post was last modified: Nov 23, 2017 at 1:53 PM by Elyk.

i'm fucking stupid i guess. i never saw even a mention of a P90 after playing both games an hour each
i thought i read somewhere that this guy does cave story hacks but now i can't actually find where i heard that lol

it probably does become a lot more fun once you actually get some HP. the difficulty was really oppressive at the start when you have no upgrades. i actually did find a few HP UP drinks in my playthrough but they don't heal you and i would always die right after picking one up

You might not have noticed because the game obscures some item names until you show it to Buyer. The P90 is called "Iron Lump" or something to begin with.

You want to use the HP UP items when you're back at the base next to the save point because the developer is an asshole and made it so it's random 1-4 HP bonus. So sometimes you'll only get 1 HP and then have to reset and try again.

Also another useful tip for starting out is that the first room has fish and bats in it and they drop healing items. It only takes a minute or so to grind a full inventory of bat wings and fish fillets.