Super Monkey Ball ported to a website

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

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.

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.

Seeing the translation from the decomp to ts is pretty interesting. Makes me wonder how one would actually write it these days

Looks and feels great, but is missing the monkey in the ball? :(

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.

I feel like it’s more sensitive than the original but this is a solid job.

Man, this really takes me back. I loved that game!

Really blown away at how well this works on mobile. Awesome stuff

Thanks, got to stage 10 without messing with any of the settings on iPhone!

WHERE THE MONKE IN THE BALL?!

how does something like this work so well but scroll-based animations on mobile still choppy?

Is there any info how this was done?

forgot how much fun this game is. really takes me back

so good!

Absolute cinema!

It almost works on my phone but glitches out. Pixel 7, Chrome browser

Hahahah no wayyy

I miss the "woop woop woop woop" noise you get when you move though, and it feels a little fast somehow?

dude you like Super Monkey Ball for the HTTP2? Bro, HN, I knew I liked you dude.

Other notes:

Is there supposed to be a monkey inside the ball? That might be lost in portation

The bananas appear to be 'Dole' branded, interesting early example of Product Placement in games.

I like the category of products that are quite simple to make (read cheap) but can be very successful. I know of course that nowadays making something like this would be much easier, but I can imagine at the time it was still very simple for a nintendo console title. It feels like games this simple might have existed for the N64 when 3D was a novelty so building literally anything was bleeding-edge high-tech million dollar projects (PilotWings 64), but in the NGC era games were much more polished and deep than this. I think its every hacker's dream to publish something they coded in a month and have it be an overnight success.

NEVERMIND MOST OF THIS, I JUST REALIZED THIS IS NOT A PORT, BUT A SIMPLER REMAKE

Amazing!

We're only 2 years away from "Claude, Make GTA VI!" /s

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.