Tag: monkeyball

Gamefinds: Return to Castle Monkey Ball

We love it when we find weird and unique indie games to tell you all about! Our alien friends to the left herald these occasions.

Some time back, I don’t remember how long, I made a Metafilter post about Nickireda’s weird and fun mixup game Return to Castle Monkey Ball, free on itch.io.

In a place like Metafilter, it’s not always obvious what will work and what won’t. Presentation matters for a whole lot, and there is also a random aspect to it. While no one said anything negative about it, I remember it being one of the least favorited-posts I’d ever made on the site. (Favorites are one measure I use to see if people liked a post or not. Sometimes comments just don’t tell the whole story.)

A point of similarity between Sgt. B.J. Blazkowicz and Donkey Kong: a fondness for bananas.

It’s a shame because the game is a perfect mixture. Not as punishing as either original game, its levels are procedural generated so a lot of rolling on your feet is required. You get a time bonus for defeating a guard. While you don’t have a weapon, you do just enough damage at full tilt to take one out in a single hit, and it feels great to do it.

Why is B.J. so much smaller than the guards now? I realize it’s a concession to melding the styles, but he’s so tiny!

There’s only eight levels (at least in the first “episode”) so it doesn’t take long to get through either. In the first version they kept Wolfenstein 3D’s graphics unchanged, meaning unfortunate reminders of Bad Person and his Stupid Symbol. Those have been removed since, which makes it less accurate to Wolf3D but also less saddening to play.

I was reminded of EFCMB by Vinesauce having recently streamed it. (13½ minutes) I don’t often return to a Gamefinds game, but given that I had made an attempt at telling people about it before I feel a slight bit of ownership here, and my previous attempts at spreading the word slightly predated Set Side B, so please go enjoy if you think you’d like it. It really is brilliant, and it runs in a web browser, even on my Raspberry Pi 5.

Escape From Castle Monkey Ball (by Nickireda on itch.io, $0)

Preserving Monkey Ball Flash Games

Adobe (formerly Shockwave) Flash had a good long reign on the web as the premier means of presenting snappy interactive content without requiring repeated trips to the server. For ages, Javascript wouldn’t cut it for many purposes. Being tied to a full authoring environment helped it gain in popularity. Whole careers were built off of creating Flash content for the web.

Flash was easy enough to work in that many companies would produce Flash applets, even games, merely as promotional content, intended to be cheap and quick to make and ultimately disposable. Many of these games were lost when the websites they were a part of were taken down.

The Flashpoint Archive project, headed (I think) by BlueMaxima, has as its mission the preservation of these ephemeral creations. A post on Flashpoint will be coming eventually, but in the meantime I’d like to point out a 2021 Youtube video by (adjusts glasses) “Goober13md,” although I suspect that he may not actually be a medical doctor.

Goober13md’s beat is all things Monkey Ball. He made a video about the search for, and ultimate rediscovery, of three Flash games commissioned by Sega to promote the first Super Monkey Ball titles, as well as one for Super Monkey Ball Adventure (which Goober13md is understandably reluctant to mention by name). It’s an informative story about the difficulty of content preservation in a time, which is still ongoing might I add, where companies don’t see their web presences as anything more than transitory. Look look, see see!

The Super Monkey Ball Flash Games That Were Lost For Over a Decade (Youtube, 29 minutes)