Need a fun way to while away a few hours this weekend?  Cave Story is a retro-styled, lovingly crafted, homebrew (as in free!), Japanese platformer ported to Mac, complete with full third-party English translation (patch)—good thing, too, because it’s even got a nice story to it!

Directions on getting the game itself and applying the English translation patch (easy) can be found here (it’s elsewhere on the web, too): 

http://www.wctc.net/~luvmimac/cavestory/ (about a 6MB download, total)

The Mac version has an amusingly low version number, but it runs fine so far on my pokey 2G iMac/800.  If you’ve seen the screens, don’t be fooled.  Sure, the graphics are 8-bit-inspired and the game plays in a small window (you can go full-screen, I believe with the Esc key), but if the smooth scrolling and high framerate don’t convince you, once you find your way to a certain boss in the middle of the game, you’ll know this isn’t some game from the 8-bit era.

Doesn’t take more than two hours to get a feel for the controls, but here’s a quick guide to make things a little easier:

Arrow keys—move, look up/down (press down to interact/talk/investigate)

Z - jump (also acts as a start/confirm button)
X - fire weapon (you can also fire weapons up and down)
Q - weapon/item screen (press Z over selected items for description, possible further action)
W - map, if you can find the map device that is…
A, S - quick-switch weapons (once you have more than one)