Torn between your love of the original Cave Story's beautifully pixel-drawn sprites and your excitement for Cave Story 3D's complete reinvention of the game's hovering island-world? You can now have your cave and eat it too: NIS America recently announced the game's 2D sprite mode, which takes the original, flat characters and enemies and places them in remodeled 3D environments, Paper Mario-style.

Destructoid managed to get its hands on a pair of images of this double-dimensioned mode, one of which is posted above. Personally, we think it looks pretty gosh darn neat, though now we're going to have to worry about poor little Quote slipping through crevices in the cave floor. Guess it still beats getting squished by the wizard-king of Hell, but ... um, not by much.

http://www.joystiq.com/2011/05/21/ca...d-sprite-mode/