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

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'm really at a loss to explain why there aren't more web games of this quality. It's totally feasible to make these, and yet they are so rare. I've ported a couple of games myself (https://thelongestyard.link/q3a-demo/, https://thelongestyard.link/cave-story/), but there ought to be hundreds like this.

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.

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

The gyro permission request doesn't work on iOS since it's not tied to user input. If you're feeling brave, you can paste this into your phone's javascript console to add a button that requests permission.

var b=document.createElement('button'); b.textContent='Gyro'; b.style='position:fixed;z-index:999'; b.onclick=()=>{DeviceOrientationEvent.requestPermission();b.remove()}; document.body.appendChild(b);

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.

Neverball is a similar game that's been open source for ages. It has a web based version too: https://play.neverball.org/

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

I don't want to spam comments, but I was absolutely hooked on SMB 1 and 2 for Gamecube and Wii.

This is incredible. Well done.

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

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.

Seeing this, I understand.

Is there any info how this was done?

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

So. this code was most likely generated with AI trained on community decompilation efforts, possibly without their knowledge. I know that the community has not yet reverse engineered custom model skinning for the game, so it does not appear here because it wasn't in the training data. Why would somebody who has supposedly already implemented billboard object support, or as the code calls it "flipbook objects", couldn't just stick a similar animated billboard texture inside the ball? probably because they have no clue how the code actually works or is structured.

It's genuinely impressive that generative AI has advanced to the point where this was possible, but it also feels like this was built backwards, extremely niche mechanics in the game are rendered nearly perfectly, where the base elements of the game had this been built from the ground up are implented wrongly or completely absent.

Are gyro controls broken?

This would be prefect for iPhone gyro controls, but I’m not getting it to work.

Edit: never mind, the permissions are broken:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46791545

Cool. There's this from 13 years ago

https://experiments.withgoogle.com/world-wide-maze

(only a video is still up)

Oh man, this nerd sniped me. This brings me back to my childhood :)

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

I completed stage 10 and it shot me into space but the timer kept going and then counted it as a failure and restarted the map.

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

This is awesome. Monkey Target was my favorite part - I hope that makes it in one day.

Is there a chance Super Monkey Ball will finally see a Dreamcast version?

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

Welp, there goes my productivity for the next week

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

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.

WHERE THE MONKE IN THE BALL?!

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?

Absolute cinema!

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

so good!

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.

Amazing!