Gaming Target - GameCube: Super Monkey Ball

Written by Chris Reiter on April 19, 2002

Full Review: Shouldn't there be restrictions on these kinds of game titles?

Remember that old 8-bit NES game from Milton Bradley, Marble Madness? Sega does. And Sega has duplicated the challenging depth, innovative structure, and addictive gameplay of the ball rolling puzzle game in a brand new work of art that's fun for the whole family. If Marble Madness was the highlight of your life once, Sega's GameCube launch title, Super Monkey Ball, will surely fill that void again.

Like Marble Madness, Super Monkey Ball takes a different approach to the general type of games players are used to. In Marble Madness however, you were given a marble to guide through various sections of twisted platforms that had littered across them blockades, gaps, and trap devices that would get in your way and try to stop you from reaching the level's goal. Super Monkey Ball takes the same premise and twists and turns it into a similar, but quite different experience. Instead of marbles, you use monkeys positioned inside a transparent ball that you must lead through puzzling courses to collect bananas (provided by the good people at Dole), score points, and ultimately beat the clock to the end of the level goal. Sega's tradition for peculiarity in video games to use monkey ball rolling is just the half of it.

To describe the game's control scheme, it's pointblank easy. As simple as anything, you decide where the cased monkey heads off to by moving around the actual ground the ball rolls on top of. To execute this, you wiggle the left analog stick which pitch and pivot the game platforms, in turn putting the ball in motion. However, each stepping stage is constructed differently in order to force the player to use his or her brain. With this, different physical attributes such as the process of slowing the ball when it flies recklessly down hills or when it comes in contact with shifting objects adds some challenge to the game, letting you not only excercise your mitts, but also your thinking cap.

Selectively, you can choose amongst a multitude of gameplay modes that allow access for up to 4 players in each one. As follows, the modes are Main, Party, and Minigame. Aside form a Practice (go through any level you've already completed over again to take your skills to the top) and Competition mode (a simultaneous split screen experience of monkey puzzle solving for multiple players), the Main option also has a primary mode called Normal, containing Beginner, Advanced, and Expert levels of play. In each of the three difficulty levels, you can decide to use up to four players of monkey mayhem by passing the controller around in a circle, or endure through the single player format to collect points as you'll follow level after level of banana gathering and face perplexing level designs in order to reach the end goal. If you're not able to reach the goal in time, or fall off the edge of the course, you lose a life. Also, as you guide the rolling ball through the progression of levels they become more disjointed, leaving it up to you to figure out how to beat the clock to the level's end. It should be known that Super Monkey Ball isn't as simple to just pick up and play, like you may be thinking. The gameplay levels are a simulation of abstract ingenuity, and you will find yourself starting from the beginning of the modes several times over because the game can become a strain on just about any player's mindset...even for the best ones in the world.

Further down the list, Super Monkey Ball has a bunch of less demanding multiplayer games in Party mode that center on three different types of gameplay. There's Monkey Racing; similar to Super Mario Kart, you'll race either the computer or up to four friends through such areas as glacier tunnels and extreme pathways to collect pickups like ice launchers for slowing the enemy down by turning them into a block of ice, or stars to speed up your characters, Monkey Fighting; choose from a list of battle arenas to collect power-ups for your ball and monkey that's equipped with a giant punching glove in front of it, for either enlarging your glove or generating your gloves to become more powerful and to ultimately be the one to knock up to three others off the arena's edge, and Monkey Target; test your launch pad skills by rolling your monkey down a hill and aiming the ball at a set target with accurate distant and speed probability.

Ready for more? Sega has outdone itself by even adding a collection of minigames. However, this mode can only be unlocked by scoring enough points from any of the other various modes. If you're patient and skilled enough to obtain these points, the mode, when opened, takes the game to the next level by letting you roll through real life, real small, such as on top of a giant pool table in Monkey Billiards. As with any pool simulation game, you can become the crack shot by pinpointing your monkey ball towards the others right into the pocket. There is a large golf course in Monkey Golf where you can be like Tiger Woods and play a round of the Master sport. There is even Monkey Bowling. Certainly, anyone with a GameCube and four controllers will get a real kick out of the hours of game playing to be had with Super Monkey Ball's vast multiplayer features.

From the visual point of view, Super Monkey Ball is like many of Sega's games, very colorful. Using the GameCube hardware capabilities in full swing, Sega is able to define their vision of quirky little monkey characters rolling around in transparent balls quite accurately. The game's four individual monkey characters (Aiai, Baby, Meemee, and GonGon) all have their own motion pattern and post-level animation. In the midst of gameplay, you can clearly catch a glimpse of how a glossy reflection veers off of the ball. Little nuances, like the sparks that fly when the ball goes from slow to faster speeds, make the seemingly unbelievable become believable.

Despite the imaginative aspect of it, Super Monkey Ball isn't what you'd call the best of what's to come. For starters, the game's look is just a little plain, and doesn't push the envelope enough. The game's backgrounds, which are made up of either mountainous landscapes or something like endless space with a fast-food burger joint placed in the middle of it, is limited scenery that is used too often. It's enough to say that the game becomes repetitious and when you're forced to replay a reprising sequence so often, it'd help to have more and differences in each level rather than reliving the same old thing again and again.

Noticeably, another feature that again you'll find yourself becoming familiar with quickly is Super Monkey Ball's redundant music soundtrack. Used for the game's background score is a constant techno beat that hardly ever changes, and if it does actually change, there is a very limited selection of songs from which to tune into. However, the songs aren't that bad and have a fast beat that will push you to stay on your toes. While the music isn't all that terrible, it's just bothersome that you can memorize it all within less than an hour of gameplay.