| Super Monkey Ball DX review |
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This isn’t an easy review to write for anyone who’s never played Super Monkey Ball. Anyone in that category who’s reading this: stop now, head to your game supplier of choice and buy this game. It’s that simple. Those of you who fell in love with it a few years ago and wonder what a remix can possibly be worth to you: read on.
Super Monkey Ball’s Greatest Hits. Honestly, has there ever been a better idea in the history of gaming?
Comprising (in the classic Challenge mode) 40 Beginner, 70 Advanced and 100 Expert stages, taken from the two original games with some new designs for good measure, it’s clear from the outset that Super Monkey Ball Deluxe is going to take some doing. Getting into the action, most Monkey Ball veterans will immediately choose Expert mode – and by the second stage, it becomes still more obvious what sort of a challenge is to be overcome. It’s not that the stages are different so early in the game. It’s not that there’s all of a sudden something new to think about in the Monkey universe. The only difference is the controller you’re using.
A lot of people moaned about the GameCube controller. It was, they said, a funny shape. The buttons were, they said, in funny places; places that didn’t lend themselves in the least to playing Street Fighter. Further, they didn’t like the rubbery camera stick, the peculiar feel of the Z button. But after they’d finished playing Monkey Ball, and gone back to the ungodly stretched-thumbs position of the Dual Shock, or the hand-crampingly huge Xbox controller, they all thought the same thing: “Funny buttons notwithstanding, I can’t imagine playing Monkey Ball on anything but that GameCube controller”.
By the second stage of Expert in Monkey Ball DX, a great many experienced Monkey Ballers will have lost all of their monkeys to the angled incline in the original game’s Expert 2 which was so challenging to begin with, but so simple after a few days’ practice. For fifteen minutes, it’s hard to imagine anything as irritating as not being able to do something so previously simple, particularly for those of us who served our Monkey apprenticeships three or four years ago. Of course, what you don’t appreciate at first is that back in the day, when you first plugged in your spanky new GameCube, you were really, really rubbish at Super Monkey Ball.
Can you remember the first time you completed Expert Floor 7? That overwhelming sense of relief at getting over the snaking bridge at the end, a sense of relief sadly obliterated as soon as you lost the rest of your lives on Expert Floor 9? Well, Floor 7 is still here (almost unbelievably moved even closer to the start of the game, and accordingly rechristened Expert Floor 6). And you know what? It’s fantastic that it feels impossible again for a while.
It’s hard to believe – it’s almost impossible to believe to begin with – but after a while that horrific Xbox controller with its clunky analogue stick feels just as natural as the GameCube one used to. Those minute angle adjustments, those moments of forward-backward grappling to keep your monkey on a microscopic moving tile: they’re all possible. You just have to go back to the Beginner and relearn what you think you should already be able to do.
Although there must have been some levels lost, nothing feels obviously missing from Monkey Ball DX and while the pad-smashingly irritating – but eminently do-able – horrors of Launchers and Arthropod have made it through from Monkey Ball 2, the stages are generally a fantastic cross section of the best the original games had to offer. The new designs are, however, of undeniably variable quality. Gimmicky moving-floor stages rub shoulders with rubbish mazes, both types of stage fresh from the mind of whoever designed some of Monkey Ball 2’s weaker and lazier floors.
Every once in a while, though, you get a brand new stage which makes you remember what you first loved about the original game. Floor 38 of Beginner is just such a stage; an absolute swine of a level which will have you swearing blind that you’ll never manage it in a million years. The feeling of just one such stage taking all your lives from you is worth ploughing through twenty dull mazes.
It feels much quicker, somehow, and the graphics are lightning fast with none of the slowdown which occasionally blighted the original games. The minigames are still there, and all unlocked from the start: all varieties of Monkey Bowling, plus all your other favourites from the original games. 'Story Mode' is still present and correct, sadly much easier than it used to be (you no longer have to complete all stages to clear a level) but still a useful way to get a look at the levels you can’t manage in Challenge mode. The Xbox hard disk provides limitless hours of replays of you ramming the stick forward as hard as you can, bouncing off a railing and rattling unconvincingly through the goal in an entirely unlikely manner.
So. Monkey Ball’s greatest hits. What could possibly be to moan about? You could, if pushed, argue that Xbox and PS2 gamers would have been better suited if this had arrived two years ago. So has this release missed the boat?
Not at all. Monkey Ball is as fantastic a game as it ever was. It’s one of those rare games which are so good they feel genuinely ageless; pure, uninhibited pick up and play genius with not one button to press. Anyone who never had a GameCube can now play the all best bits two of the most innovative and entertaining games of the last ten years. Anyone who’s already got the two original games can feel, for a few precious days, like they’ve never played them before. Either way, this is one of modern gaming’s few truly classic franchises, and it’s hard to pick fault with Super Monkey Ball DX as the definitive version.
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System: Microsoft Xbox
Genre: Action
Developer: Sega
Publisher: Sega
Players: 1-4
Version: United States
Reviewed: Jul 2005
Writer: Stephen Pringle
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Pros:
- It’s Monkey Ball
- It’s almost like you’ve never played it before
- Some of you have genuinely never played it before. Now you can
- Beginner Floor 38
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Cons:
- Non-GameCube controllers feel truly dire initially
- A lot of the new stages are rubbish
- Beginner Floor 38. You’ll see
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