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
If you haven't seen Smiling Friends, you're in for a treat. Zach Hadel is a genius.
The mix of 2D animation, 3D animation, claymation, stop motion, live action rotoscoping, and comping in guest animators like Joel Haver and David Post amazing. You know they appreciate the art form.
You've probably already seen the gif of this scene: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5zxL77g1em4
I imagine how it would be with software, you have a whole ass huge website, but out of the blue you download a .jar for Nokia and you have to run it in a nokia or a very niche VM,(Or just in a JVM). Maybe to get a 6 digit verification code so you can log in to an account.
I 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
I don't see much of a reason to keep a copy of node_modules on the git repository considering they can be reinstalled for deployments and it is generally bad form.
sndrec (the author):
Thank you for this - I'm newbie at webdev so I wasn't sure what was and wasn't needed. I'll merge this soon.
Haha, almost certainly Claude
iPhone 12 mini works TOO well.
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.
tyleo•1h ago
drivers99•1h ago
For me, it's not really the same without the monkey yelling when you fall off the level. (example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rIs7bCOCQj0 )
adzm•55m ago