here at stop skeletons from fighting, we like it weird. good games are great, we like those too, but video game oddities are more fascinating. these irresistible oddballs are often the product of wild, perhaps reckless ambition, making them perfect for a show we call punching weight,
3d dragon illusion print out, a celebration of the weird, ambitious, or unnecessary. similar to our very first episode, we'll be taking a look at three games you wouldn't think were even possible on a game boy advance. good or bad, you can't knock the hustle. this is punching weight, episode 7 - i can't believe it's game boy advance 3d.
super monkey ball is a great series, at least those first few. simple, cute, silly, has the most appropriate product placement ever, and thanks to maddeningly difficult and super creative levels, it's one of my personal favourite games to watch the pros play. please note, this is footage of me playing, and i definitely ain't no monkey ball pro. but what i am a fan of is the game boy advance port: super monkey ball jr. released between the two gamecube games, jr. is surprisingly competent. the game's sprawling levels are rendered in full 3d and look great,
even if most courses have been shrunken down a bit. the frame rate ain't too bad either, and i don't recall seeing any slowdown. but monkey ball demands precision, and you'd think this game would be impossible without an analogue stick, but to replicate that precision, the a and b buttons radically or gently tilt the tables, respectively. it's not perfect but it works fairly well, though the game still proves quite difficult and long sessions have left my thumb a little raw. i don't wanna shock you people, but this may not be a perfect conversion of the gamecube game. but like the gamecube original, jr. has a ton of content. as you grind through its 65 single-player levels, you'll earn points to unlock minigames and multiplayer modes.
yeah, just in case you and your buddies need a palate cleanser after a few epic matches of warlocked. "warlocked!" i would say honestly, the best part of this game - that is, the part that works best on a gba - is the golfing minigame. it doesn't take long to get the 2500 points to unlock it, and well, because it's golf, you don't have to wrestle with the controls. and with two 9-hole courses to unlock, it will give you quite the challenge. at any rate, it's no substitute for the original and has some clear shortcomings, still, i cannot imagine it's possible for super monkey ball on the gba being any better than this.
a fascinating oddity, and not half bad. but it wasn't all good for sega. while monkey ball had an impressive showing on the gba, their port of the massively successful crazy taxi arcade game, crazy taxi: catch a ride, was not. but you see, that's how insanely popular the gba was. if it was even remotely possible to port an ip to it, they did it, even if it wasn't really a good idea. the fact that this game shipped at all is truly an achievement, though unfortunately, crazy taxi: catch a ride is just terrible.
according to an interview with creative director richard whittall, catch a ride uses a full 3d polygon engine capable of rendering 20 cars on screen at once. he boasted that it was "about the most technically challenging game you could do on a handheld machine" and he's probably not wrong. crazy taxi is nothing if not fast and chaotic. while monkey ball can still work if you slow things down a bit, catch a ride tries its best to capture that signature breakneck pace of the arcade original. grinding your gears, of course sends your taxi into turbo mode, and you can get moving pretty fast, even soaring through the air if you hit an incline just right.
but it doesn't change the fact that this game is just a glorious, awful mess. the hit detection is super loose, and while there's a decent attempt to replicate the original's finely-tuned squirrely handling, the controls here are just terrible. true, the game has an impressive amount of traffic to maneuver around, but it's so hard to avoid cars and obstacles. i guess i did eventually get the hang of it: on my third try i was able to claim the top spot and scoop up an s rank licence, but i honestly couldn't play this game for more than an hour before my eyes started to hurt.
the lack of chiptune renditions of offspring songs is a bummer, but the original songs included here give off the same rockin' vibe. there's also voicework that's unfortunately used very, very frequently. the game features two whole cities and a slew of minigames in the crazy box mode, so you can't say they skimped on the value. against all odds, they really swung for the fences with catch a ride, but the result is nothing more than a super interesting footnote. in a strange twist of fate, the knockoff simpsons: road rage took a completely different approach with its gba port,
and fared far better as a delightful mode 7 fever dream. though ambition does not go unnoticed here, and we tip our hat to you, crazy taxi: catch a ride team. when we started punching weight, we came to the table with a bunch of ideas, but we knew full well our viewers would suggest games we'd never heard of. enter asterix and obelix xxl. not the ps2 or gamecube game, but the stunning third-person platformer for the gba. this has got to be one of the most technically impressive games ever made. we had no idea this game existed until receiving numerous requests a few months ago, but in all fairness, that's because it was never released in north america,
like most asterix games, it turns out. based on the famous french comic, as an american i only vaguely recognise the short, feathered-helmet guy, with the well-rounded dude in the striped pants. beard bros! this game looks and controls remarkably well. if i didn't know this was a gba game, i'd swear i was looking at some late era ps1 footage. it's not hard to imagine a crash bandicoot port looking this good on the gba. while the characters are not full 3d models, the spritework gets the job done, and the world is rendered in 3d with minimal issues. well, minimal issues that i'm willing to forgive.
standing near a wall sort of breaks the illusion. to compensate the lack of nuance, hit detection is very generous, which helps make the occasional sprite perspective breaks more humorous than annoying. there's a fair share of platforming, but this is a pretty simple button masher for the most part, tasking you to clobber enemies until a counter ticks down and a door unlocks. unlike the other two games, there's not much beyond the graphical wonders here, though i imagine collecting all the items in each level would take some time. the team responsible is velez and dubail, an internal dev team at atari. they are actually responsible for a number of incredible technical marvels, including the gba port of driver 3,
and what was supposed to be another driver game: c.o.p the recruit. researching this team has given us plenty of fodder for future episodes of punching weight. and speaking of which, if there are any weird, unnecessary, or ambitious games you'd like us to cover on punching weight, let us know in the comments below. we've got a growing list of games and we add to it with every episode. we recently played all the games featured in this episode on our livestream channel - that's the video in the middle. in the inaugural episode of punching weight, we discussed ambitious game boy color games - that's on the left. or perhaps you're like us, wondering "what the hell ever happened to pokã©mon snap?" - that's the video on the right.
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