Today I'm here to talk about a simple Super Monkey Ball clone.
Looks really simple, ugly and maybe a little bad? Or at least just ok?
Why does this game matter?
Well, the title says it all. This was the first game I ever bought originally and not as a pirated DVD or downloaded from the internet.
This was in 2008 and cost my mom R$10 (about $2 USD). For 7 year old me this was way better than most of the flash games I played, so it was definitely a worthwhile purchase.
For years on end I've looked for content on this game on the internet but could find nothing about it, so I decided to post it to archive.org where you can go ahead and download it for yourself! It should run on any version of Windows alongside Wine on Linux (which is how I'm running it).
What makes it even more special is that after posting that on archive.org, the game developer who made this game actually left a comment!
I updated the post after that to credit him.
Now, how did I get the game if it was gone from the internet?
Luckily a couple of years back I had a DVD/CD capable laptop on my hands and decided to install it and zip it up, then in December of 2021 I uploaded it to archive.org.
But this doesn't mean I lost my physical copy, no no no! And in fact, it's in great condition.
The front of the case actually looks really appealing in a sort of old-school way.
The back of the box has very accurate screenshots and some points about the game, even though I think they're a little... exaggerated hahaha.
Check out the specs needed to run this! I may be on a severely worse rig now but this is still cute to read. This game was released in 2005! It's surprising how low-end friendly it is.
And this is the disc itself. Likely still working although I have no way of testing that right now. It looks great, and so does the back of the disc.
It's a nice reminder of where I started, good to look back at the games I used to play even if they were simple and silly. Nostalgia hits me like a truck when playing this, even if I was a way better player at 7 years old than now, the physics feel a little odd and I've been playing tons of Monkey Ball on the 3DS so it's hard to get my bearings lol.
Anyway, that was a quick glance into the past, of the first game I ever legally owned. Something that was quite rare here in Brazil back then, where stuff was expensive and most of us had to resort to illegal methods of acquiring games - I'm sure my LATAM brothers can relate to this feeling.
Even if this was a simple, silly game it's still a prelude to what would happen a couple of years later in 2012, when I made my Steam account and started buying games. Now with a huge library of digital games and physical games being a relic of the past on PC, it's still cool to look at this.
Maybe if I one day get an external DVD drive I might start collecting retro PC titles, something I wish I could do on console but unfortunately my Xbox doesn't have a disc drive :P
Thanks for reading!