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Comment by monksy | Hacker News Reader

I miss the game Super Monkey Ball. That was one of those games that was supper approachable, and easily competitive with friends in the same room.

They have released something for the ps4 but I haven't opened the box yet.

Also, this makes me want to get out the https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~cr4bd/3330/F2018/bomblab.html lab and try the disassembler he's using.

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There was MTP Target, a clone with penguin which had a pretty active community circa 2008[1][2]

I loved this game. It had an IRC server included so you could chat while in game, a forumboard, and a pretty diverse community. The gameplay was simple to learn but difficult to master, with a lot of fun for everyones.

Sadly, it was open-source but not so much. The sole developer never opened up the source of the server, and even the client's were not keep up to date, so it was impossible to play elsewhere than the official server.

The sole developer had a little revenue stream by selling premium account (which enabled the possibility to use custom skins and access to a private server) and never accepted to let the community fix bugs or host other servers. There was quiet a bit of friction and drama between him and some members of the community, and in the end he prefered letting the game die than giving it to the community.

[1] http://web.archive.org/web/20111028123349/http://www.mtp-tar... [2] http://web.archive.org/web/20110310131659/https://www.mtp-ta... [3] https://fr.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mtp_Target

An indie developer announced today that their Super Monkey Ball-inspired game will be going into early access on Steam later this month: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YN_XnekG6Ac

It looks to be incredibly close to those original games.

Is the bomb lab the same one as in CS61A? I did that one and it was extremely interesting. Sadly I'm not really sure how to go from there to start a reverse engineering life but at least I'm taking some univ courses.

It really was a highly enjoyable game, both 1p and with a party. I'm pretty sure it was the only thing we needed 4 controllers for :)

The speed runs for that game are mind melting, if you're into watching those.

I've seen bomblab, etc, at a couple of universities. Does anyone know the history of these exercises? I saw them at CMU as well. Really cool that these are used across several great programs.

I believe they are a part of Computer Systems: A Programmer's Perspective by Bryant and O'Hallaron. You can see a list of the labs at http://csapp.cs.cmu.edu/3e/labs.html.

Ah! Perfect, I remember this. Great textbook.

Thank you wdevanny

I think it originated at CMU. At Elon we had an automatic grader that gave limited amount of tries tied to your grade.

My grad school had the same auto grading and a scoreboard where you could see anonymously each others attempts and explosions. We did it as part of our Systems I class which was essentially an introduction to C and Assembly. I felt the point loss from blowing up was poorly thought out for at least an into type class. It makes it so that if you didn't do it perfectly the first few attempts there's actually a point where you can come out ahead by not finishing the assignment which just really bothered me as that seems exactly against any intended learning outcome from the lab.

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