Review: Super Monkey Ball
Score:
61%
Version Reviewed: 1.00
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Super Monkey Ball was a milestone for old school gamers like myself because it was a Sega game on a Nintendo system, but for modern gamers who don't remember when gaming in the early nineties was a battle between the two titans it was something else entirely. This deceptively easy looking game sucked gamers in by the boatload with an "easy to play, hard to master" design that would have made Atari proud and Alexi Pojitnov jealous. Its multiplayer play was on par with the Mario Party series for party game fun and the replay value was amazing.
Now enter Nokia looking for gaming content for their new N-Gage. By this point in time, a sequel, Super Monkey Ball 2, had already been released for the GC and the series has made ground in the portable market with the release of Super Monkey Ball Jr on the GBA. Nokia smartly courted Sega Mobile in an attempt at this series and scored a hit. What they delivered however is a mild disappointment.
For anyone familiar with the series it is very 3D and really doesn't feel quite right any other way (read that as "on the GBA"). Realizing this, developers Amusement Vision, LTD. rightly chose to make the N-Gage version in 3D. These 3D graphics, while simple, are clean and crisp with no serious polygon dropout, no unacceptable slowdown, and unlike many of the N-Gage's 3D games, almost no load time (they don't even have a loading screen). In fact, the only complaint I could even come up with about the graphics would actually be about the camera which you have been given absolutely no control over. Sometimes this is forgotten, but when the weird camera positioning eventually drops you over the edge (it will happen) you will be irritated by it and curse the name of Amusement Vision. In reality I think they could have fairly easily integrated a camera control system into the game, but they didn't and this is one of the things that keeps a good game from achieving its potent!ial.
What are the other things you might ask. Simply this: 1 player. One of the great party games of recent years has been reduced to a one player game. Such reduction, while possibly necessary to the get the game to market in 2003, can not be looked upon as acceptable by series fans. Yes, they have included the mini-games (Monkey Race, Monkey Fight and Monkey Target) and have a nice system of unlocking them through game play, but the fact that they didn't allow for Bluetooth multiplayer is a major strike against this game. With that, this would have possibly been a killer app (like Worms World Party, expected this year), but without it the game just feels flat. It seems ludicrous to take a game made famous by its multiplayer gameplay and port it to a system touting its multiplayer ability and then not make it multiplayer. This single decision cuts the game down a good 15 or 20 points in my book.
That rant aside, the single player game is perfectly acceptable for the series fan or puzzle gamer with three difficulty levels and 20 different levels to master. It also has a nice practice mode that lets you play through any level you have reached in normal mode until you are satisfied in your proficiency with it (without this mode I may never have gotten past some of the mid-teen levels on hard and I am grateful for this simple addition) and is fun as the type of game you can pick up and play for 2 minutes or two hours at your discretion.
All in all, Super Monkey Ball is an acceptable one player puzzle game that will entertain the casual gamer and let down the hardcore series fan. Should you buy it? Maybe. Should you try it? Definitely. Should you hope that Sega gets their act together for a multiplayer sequel in 2005? Absolutely, positively, unequivocally YES. She's a fine 61 percent and I hope she makes you happy. Ciao.
Reviewed by Chris Rydberg at