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BONK!
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Pictured: the only good Nazi.
Nickireda
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Each level starts with a Monkey Ball-style 3D pan around the map to get you.
Nickireda
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It is surprisingly difficult to cover incoming fire while in a monkey ball.
Nickireda
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What is you look at, Nazi foam?
Nickireda
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Victory!
Nickireda
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This game was 91% bananas.
Nickireda
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Something about the banana in this image cracks me up every time.
Nickireda
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Two bananas, two fists. Just seems natural.
Nickireda
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Are you a bad guy to beat my high scores?
Nickireda
In 1992, id Software proved that it can be a lot of fun to shoot virtual Nazis on your computer Wolfenstein 3D. In 2001, Amusement Vision proved that it can be a lot of fun to roll around in a sphere and collect bananas Super Monkey Ball.
This week, Itch.io game maker Nickireda proved that both of these concepts somehow fit in perfectly Return to Castle Monkey Ball, a free fangame that you can play in an HTML5 compatible web browser.
Yes, the famed one-man army BJ Blazkowicz somehow trapped himself in a translucent sphere and without his usual arsenal of weapons. So you need to help BJ by tilt the whole world to lead his ball through Nazi-infested corridors, and pick up bananas and looted treasures for a high score.
Certainly, Return to Castle Monkey Ball lose something through the analog controls of the Monkey Ball series for digital keyboard directions. And yes, the procedure-generated levels of the game can be a bit unbalanced and / or simplistic, depending on the random seed you fall for.
After all, there is something incredibly satisfying about seeing a Nazi guard at the end of a corridor, building up a good steam and just bumping him to death with a colorful ball at full speed (and making an excited voice hear shouting “Time Bonus!” as a reward). Honestly, this is the kind of light distraction that is more welcome these days than ever before.
As with any fangame that uses original art and sounds of copyrighted titles, this one exists in a state of legal presidency. Nickireda makes it clear on the Itch.io page of the game that it ‘exists as a free trailer project’, that they consider the game to be ‘fair use under an educational license’, and that they ‘no donation or compensation’ of any kind will not accept ‘for the game.
Hopefully this will help prevent the usual legal threats that these types of games pose. Sega has shown a surprising openness to fangames in the past, and id Software has released the source code to the public Wolfenstein 3D, suggesting that a notice of strike here might be a little less likely.
Anyway, it’s probably best not to procrastinate now and go to Itch.io to get the pleasure of the Nazi platter. My high score is just over 1.9 million on the “Death Incarnate” issue, and I just want to see someone try to beat it. (I want to take this seriously. I need a challenge to assess my skills).
List image by Nickireda