What kind of fricking wizardry did Realism/SEGA perform to cram a fully fledged Monkey Ball game on the GBA? It's not like it or the SNES were exactly known for their 3D prowess. It's actually really impressive considering what other 3D GBA games look like and its even more impressive how well this game works with just the D-pad as well.
It is impressive, but only worth playing for the novelty of it.
I wouldn't go that far, but it is a really damn good Monkey Ball and I'd prefer it over other portable MB games.
The ds one was okay at least
It's just Super Monkey Ball for the NGC backported to the GBA. It's just for novelty, nothing else.
If you like that, check out Crazy Taxi: Catch A Ride. Maybe the OpenLara demo as well if you can manage to emulate it. The Need for Speed games also use 3D models unlike Mario Kart's boring Mode 7-esque pseudo 3D.
Driv3r is also very impressive to look at, albeit not nearly as fun to actually play as those.
Speaking of the SNES, I haven't played it myself yet, but check out Stunt Race FX. Some very interesting things going on in that game long before Mario Kart 64
Brainlet question here: how do homebrew devs pull off what was basically thought to be impossible type games/ports/demos etc on these platforms. I know having a ton of time that normal dev teams don’t have is one aspect, but something I’ve heard on occasion is that modern compilers enable a lot more juice to be squeezed out of the hardware than was previously an option, is the compiler thing true?
modern compilers, the fact that the hardware is far more well understood now that it's been around for so long, and homebrew devs not being pressed for deadlines like devs back in the day, all together means they can squeeze as much performance out of the console while being able to iron out bugs too
Thanks, is it that modern compilers have more options for those optimization flags? Or they just convert to assembly or machine code more efficiently than they used to? I think about this stuff in conjunction with early grave consoles like the 32x, 3DO, Dreamcast, etc where I wonder what a game that really and truly pushed it to the limit would look like, I don’t think they around long enough like those late gen ps1 games that were close to early gen PS2 games.
>Thanks, is it that modern compilers have more options for those optimization flags? Or they just convert to assembly or machine code more efficiently than they used to?
both; better and more optimizations (the former question) naturally leads to the latter. The rise of debugging emulators (hell, emulators in general, though GBA specifically had them practically on release) is pretty instrumental as well, I think.
Compilers are a big thing, but it's also just about better understanding of the hardware. You can look at most consoles and see a very noticable upgrade between launch titles and titles that came out towards the ends of their lifespans (just compare Yakuza 3 to Yakuza 0, or SM64 to Majoras Mask, etc). The longer people tinker with hardware, the more you can figure out about how to use it, and these homebrew devs are basically just continuing the trends that the official devs were already working towards
Monkey Bowling was bullshit
that's nothing, dude.
Somehow Fernando Velez and Guillaume Dubail got a fully fledged 3D platformer working on the GBA.
Check out Open Lara running on the thing, too, GBA homebrew over the past decade has really pushed the tech to ludicrous degrees
Thats awesome
i instinctively was going to dismiss this with "heh can't be anything more than a tech demo" then realized there's a good 4+ hours of this game. wild.
>or the SNES
What does the SNES have to do with this?
The GBA is effectively a SNES in a handheld form, like the Gameboy and Famicom/NES before it.
Wtf? The GBA has like a 5x faster CPU, way more memory and can put transparencies and transformations on anything
So tell me then why were so many gba games just snes ports or built on snes era tech like mode 7
>how is a more powerful system capable of playing 10 year old games
You got me, the Switch is actually a SNES in handheld form since it has SNES games on Nintendo Switch Online
Alright moron put mario 64 on a game boy advance and get back to me
No one was arguing that the GBA matches Nintendo 64 spec (never mind that Mario 64 was not even a 10 year old game by the time the GBA was replaced). The GBA is roughly a halfway point between SNES and Saturn.
Look at
Not Super Mario 64 but still pretty impressive and nothing that you could find on SNES
Not SM64 but
Because they wanted to sell those games again, both to people who grew up with them and people who had never played them before and wanted to play them on the go. Just like SMB Deluxe or Mega Man Xtreme on GBC.
He's right though that despite its lower resolution and other limitations the GBA is technically a more powerful machine. It's full-on 32-bit and capable of real 3D as seen in the OP and other games mentioned here, which unlike the SNES that used special chips to achieve this, had the tech built in. Take a look at Driv3r and Crazy Taxi:
lolno. The GBA has a stronger CPU and worse sound. It can pull off 3D shit without need for any expansion chips. People even got goddamn Tomb Raider running on it.
Gba running tomb raider in 2022
Ngage running tomb raider 2004
Well no shit, of course the Ngage is more powerful. My point is that the GBA was more powerful than the SNES.