Allright I just watched a Youtube video of Curly's underwear.
That is kinda funny.

Here's what throws me.

If you play the game on the Wii in Curly mode, Curly is the main character and Quote is living in the Sand Zone hut protecting the mimigas.

...but the panties are still there. In the same place.

And when you pick them up, it says: "You found your panties."

So I'm left with two possibilities. Either I assume this is just another one of the Wii version's little bugs. Or I am forced to begin coming up with incredibly elaborate decade-spanning scenarios explaining how on earth Curly's panties got behind that wall.

Also, secret stars in Braid!? I finished it but don't remember any stars - going to have to fire it up and take a look...

You will never find them

I'm not sure about the new background image

Everything2 wiki entry, "Brian Eno":

Brian Eno has, quite justly, a reputation for being an intellectual. But complementing his endless curiosity and experimentation is his rather bizarre sense of humour. This is very apparent in his diary, "A Year With Swollen Appendices". One of the incidents he relates in the book is almost beyond belief, although I have to say that I personally am inclined to take his word for it.

The story revolves around Marcel Duchamp's "Fountain", which is basically a porcelain urinal which Ducamp chose at random and subsequently exhibited. In 1995, Eno saw it on display in the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, being treated as if it was a holy relic rather than a randomly chosen object. He was appalled that Duchamp's message, which Eno characterizes as, "I can call any old urinal — or anything else for that matter — a piece of art", had been so badly misunderstood. But Eno had far more pressing things on his mind. The following is quoted from his diary.

"I've always wanted to urinate on that piece of art, to leave my small mark on art history. I thought this might be my last chance — for each time it was shown it was more heavily defended. At MoMA it was being shown behind glass, in a large display case. There was, however, a narrow slit between the two front sheets of glass. It was about three-sixteenths of an inch wide.

I went to the plumber's on the corner and obtained a couple of feet of clear plastic tubing of that thickness, along with a similar length of galvanized wire. Back in my hotel room, I inserted the wire down the tubing to stiffen it. Then I urinated into the sink and, using the tube as a pipette, managed to fill it with urine. I then inserted the whole apparatus down my trouser-leg and returned to the museum, keeping my thumb over the top end so as to ensure that the urine stayed in the tube.

At the museum, I positioned myself before the display case, concentrating intensely on its contents. There was a guard standing behind me and about 12 feet away. I opened my fly and slipped out the tube, feeding it carefully through the slot in the glass. It was a perfect fit, and slid in quite easily until its end was poised above the famous john. I released my thumb, and a small but distinct trickle of my urine splashed on to the work of art."

Cafes not really but I get an alarming amount of work done on the train.

It turns out my productivity shoots up when you take internet access away from me...

After I beat Cave Story I actually did keep plugging at it because were enough little unexplained details, and also some suspicious things in the credits:

...camera idling carefully on Curly at the end, and also the "lol you didn't fight this did you?" message IN the credits with the red demon

...to make me certain there was game content I hadn't found yet. I actually hate playing with an FAQ so what I actually did was play through the game over and over, and I had a friend who'd beaten the game (with the FAQ) dribbling me little bits of hints every time I concluded I was really, truly stuck. And I was really meticulous about this, I actually played through the game and made a save file backup at regular intervals so I could return to any point in the game at will and keep trying different things.

I have to give a lot of respect to Cave Story for how ridiculously, insanely out-there its hidden content is. I feel like there is an expectation in video games these days, that everyone will be able to beat the game eventually if they just keep plugging at it. This was not at all an assumption in video games in the NES era and it is not an assumption with Cave Story. This is a game designed with the idea that not everyone is going to see the whole thing.

And if you ask me the cave story secrets are not as outright cheap as the hidden secrets in Braid :D For that one I in the end just used the level editor to look at the hidden parts of all the maps. Frustratingly, the star puzzles are actually really cool if you can get past the basic problem of not knowing which of the game's levels the stars are actually in!

I looked up the secret ending and I'm not ashamed. It is one of my few complaints about Cave Story. It is not only unintuitive, but one of the requisites goes against common sense. Don't talk to Dr. Booster when he is fallen? Why!? Why would he survive only if I didn't talk to him!? Not letting Curly drown is also hard to know beforehand... or even after, since the tow rope is so easily missable.

I thought about this for a long time and here's what I decided:

From a GAMEPLAY perspective the secrets in Cave Story make a lot of sense. You are rewarded for passing up opportunities to make the game easier when they present themselves. If you pass up the machine gun, you get the spur. If you pass up the Booster, you get the real ending. Of course, there is no way that's a legitimate puzzle or that anyone would be able to figure things out based on that logic.

But here's the thing I realized later, and I was angry at myself I didn't make this connection on my own. (The friend dribbling me hints specifically gave me a hint along the lines that getting the secret ending requires avoiding meeting a major character after I couldn't figure it out.) There is a detail that would allow you to figure out what you're supposed to do with Booster on your own. Booster falls immediately next to a teleporter. The description for the teleporter says something like "it's broken, a skilled engineer would probably be able to fix it". There is no justification for this being right at the site where Booster landed unless it's specifically for Booster to use! Of course, what's less fair is that there's no in-game justification for the idea that the Tow Rope is only there if Booster survives...

I have never encountered anyone who did figure it out on their own, though. Logically though someone must have or the FAQs wouldn't have been written in the first place! I sometimes imagine somewhere there's a forum where the first people to figure Cave Story out were posting at the time, that would be fascinating to read if it's still archived somewhere...

Reality was not designed with the goal of producing entertaining 2d gameplay 

Did you get this resolved?

And can you possibly post a bit more of the code? What's BetLabel for example?

I think your commenter on stack overflow has the right idea. I would not expect this code to work in the init method. The normal place to do this kind of initialization is awakeFromNib or viewWillAppear:(BOOL)animated. Did you try that?

One more interesting glitch in Cave Story Wii I haven't seen reported elsewhere...

- Start Curly Mode
- Die
- When it says, "Try Again?", say no. You will return to the menu.
- Start Curly Mode again

If you do this, you'll be in Curly Mode, but have the "Mr. Traveler" sprite. If you encounter Curly she will be using the normal Curly sprites as opposed to being swapped with "Mr. Traveler". However all the dialog will be the dialog from Curly Mode, everyone will call "Mr. Traveler" Curly.

I have a "gravis gamepad pro". It is an absolutely ancient USB gamepad that is basically identical to a pre-dual-shock PS1 controller. I use it absolutely whenever possible. A lot of games don't support it or have problems with it. On the mac I have some add-on I use that lets me map controller presses to keyboard keys but I haven't ever gotten around to figuring out out how to do the same thing on Windows.

cocos2d is written in python, but cocos2d for the iphone is written in objective-c

Hm, OK. For some reason I had gotten the impression that cocos2d iphone had a python wrapper for manipulating the underlying objc.

Well the new music is pretty much the same as the original, but less 16bit-ish so to say.

Well... the new music is missing a lot of stuff. Like entire instruments. For example in the title screen music there are no drums. Someone was explaining earlier in this thread that there is some sort of a bug in the sound code.

To me the new music takes a lot out of the game, not necessarily because I miss the chip-tune-y-ness but just because (due to the bug?) the songs seem much simpler and less intense and epic.

Wow, I played Cave Story a long time ago and thought it was awesome...until the Final Cave. It was so impossible for me and I couldn't go back. I eventually started over, and eventually quit. However, I was playing with my old monitor which would for some reason turn red into black. I didn't learn until recently that the spikes were actually red at the tips (as I did have trouble avoiding them in the final cave) and so I'm thinking of trying it again, possibly on the Wii (if I find the money (I know its not that much but I'm cheap ))

Sorry to quote myself, but I need to know. Is it a worthwhile buy or should I get back to the freeware version instead?

Definitely buy the wii ware version (but switch from the buggy new music to the original). It's just a much more enjoyable experience.

I dunno about that one, but when I'm running low on creative juices for a KotM I'm going to make this game:

...

Wait, someone sorta already made that one!

Oh! Eternal Darkness. Eternal Darkness had a magic system used both inside and outside combat, based on runes invoking an Old One. So you'd have  a rune of the name of the god of Strength, and a rune meaning "protect", and a rune meaning "self". And you'd combine them to form a sentence, something like "Strength, protect self". Casting this would give you a temporary shield protecting from physical attacks. Over the course of the game you constantly found both new runes and new "recipes" for spells; you could learn new spells either by following the recipes or just by experimenting. Things were made more complicated in that every enemy was aligned with a particular god, and so that enemy might be strong or weak to certain kinds of magic depending on which god the spell was cast in the name of.

Does it have to be *video* games? Cuz I was gonna say Mage: The Ascension.

The Golden Sun games for GBA used magic outside of battle in interesting ways. I only played the first one though and it was too easy, so much so as to be boring, and the plot was super generic. The second one was supposed to be harder and sounded more interesting?

"Avalon Code" for the DS (I did not play this) had a REALLY interesting mechanic where you had a book that contained the world, and you did magic by "rewriting" reality. So like you could alter an enemy's stats by changing the "code" that defined them.

"My world, my way" (DS and maybe PSP in Japan?) had a similar reality-altering mechanic where you literally whine until the game gives you your way. Although maybe at some point this isn't a "magic" system anymore.

Gtk (glib specifically) has a function called g_get_language_names() that returns the locales in order of preference.  Right now I'm using this and loading the glade file that corresponds to the preferred language, and it seems to be working well.  I haven't done the research for Mac/Windows yet, but I'm sure that something exists.

Ooh, very neat. Do you know if this works correctly on machines which use KDE rather than GNOME as their primary desktop environment?

What I'd be most interested in is one routine or set of routines that would allow me to figure out what the default language is for whatever machine I currently happen to be on. There's probably a lot of options once you know which language to use, but figuring out what language the OS thinks I should be using seems like the hard step. Does Pango or Transfix offer that?

And I kinda suspect I could figure out how to do this myself on Mac and Windows, but I have no idea how Linux decides what the current language is. Does Linux even have a standard concept of "current localization", the way Mac and Windows do?

So what if someone took citizen kane and removed all the parts about "rosebud" from the movie and replaced them with product placement for Mountain Dew. huh?

That sounds... incredibly awesome

Somebody get on that immediately

Just beat the game on Normal! I haven't yet gone to Hell. It is a really neat port other than the problems with the music. I think I still prefer the PC translation but I don't feel like the translation changes ever altered the story.

Could someone explain the alternate/difficulty modes to me? Like, is Curly Mode equivalent to Normal Mode in terms of difficulty? There's no difficulty selection when you choose Curly Mode...

(Apologies if this has already been addressed in the thread.)

Uhhhhhh...so, why does anyone care whether Balrog says huzzah? Is this just sort of like the Cave Story equivalent of "you spoony bard," in that even though it's a stupid line, people are attached to it because of how strange it is?

Well...

So I don't care one way or the other about the original quote

But I have to say

He yells "OH YEAH" and blasts through a wall?

He's the kool-aid man!