Monkey Ball (without the Super iirc) was an arcade game initially. With a banana-shaped joystick and everything. Then SMB added some extra modes and came out as a release title for the Nintendo GameCube. It was probably intended as kind of a low-budget thing, but ended up being recognized as one of the best games for the system, especially early on.
For some reason the opening settings page made me think this would be someone who just told claude to make a monkey ball style game.. maybe from seeing too much of that on HN. forgive me for that, this is awesome.
As far as i can tell it's not even an emulator or a decompilation running in emscripten or anything like that, they remade the game in TypeScript. love stuff like this https://github.com/sndrec/WebMonkeyBall
I keep saying JS JIT + WebGL/WebGPU is fast enough for these kind of games, no need for the WebAssembly toolchains that are still a pain to use years later.
See PlayCanvas.
The whole GX code reminds me of the Gamecube API from the same name.
The GTA Vice City in browser was also really impressive, but it seems it has been taken down. How much of an advantage has AI got on decompilation projects? Complex assembly seems to be still done to some degree by hand these days (see - ffmpeg), and I wonder how big of a training set you could provide. I have wondered if it was possible to take the re3/reVC code and the assembly and use it for training data to get GTA San Andreas on macOS.
GTA Vice City and San Andreas were released on iOS more than a decade ago. I tried installing the mobile version on my Mac with Apple Silicon. It launches fine (if I remember right), it just needs an update for the controls to work, since it was made for touch. I haven’t tried hooking a gamepad to the Mac, maybe that would solve it.
It seems like Rockstar could make a relatively minor update to officially support macOS and sell a lot of additional copies. At this point, they could simply not support Intel Macs and I don’t think anyone would mind.
In 2006 the iPhone was announced without an App Store and Apple’s party line was to just build/use web apps.
Fast forward to 2008 and the App Store is launched along with Super Monkey Ball – a day one app – the perfect game to demonstrate the power of a true native app that could _never_ be achieved on the web.
I was in the market looking for some fun iOS games, things that I could play casually, pick up in a moment, load quickly, and not be burdened by the ridiculousness of modern gameplay and incentive mechanics. To my surprise, it was very hard. I couldn’t find anything. This is exactly what I’m looking for.
Well this was a fun way to see that Firefox on Linux finally fixed the shader cache being broken (at least for NixOS). This is great.
Though I gotta say, I am a little disappointed that there are no monkeys inside the balls. It's just a big ball, at least for me on Firefox and Chrome on NixOS.
I tried to put on a movie while I was home for the holidays and my brother instantly complained that the drone shot made him motion sick. Was weird to me to hear that a stationary screen could upend someone's vestibular senses.
Embarrassingly, I only ever knew this game as Neverball because there was a period when I would only play open source games and this, Xmoto, and tux racer.
47 comments
[ 4.7 ms ] story [ 60.7 ms ] threadI miss the "woop woop woop woop" noise you get when you move though, and it feels a little fast somehow?
As far as i can tell it's not even an emulator or a decompilation running in emscripten or anything like that, they remade the game in TypeScript. love stuff like this https://github.com/sndrec/WebMonkeyBall
See PlayCanvas.
The whole GX code reminds me of the Gamecube API from the same name.
It seems like Rockstar could make a relatively minor update to officially support macOS and sell a lot of additional copies. At this point, they could simply not support Intel Macs and I don’t think anyone would mind.
Looks fun but keyboard doesn't seem great for this, it feels like it needs an analog stick. Note I've never played the original.
Perf wise it seems bang on.
Fast forward to 2008 and the App Store is launched along with Super Monkey Ball – a day one app – the perfect game to demonstrate the power of a true native app that could _never_ be achieved on the web.
Though I gotta say, I am a little disappointed that there are no monkeys inside the balls. It's just a big ball, at least for me on Firefox and Chrome on NixOS.
Seeing this, I understand.