Reviewed on:
Nintendo WiiAlso available for:
N/A
The Good:
The new tilt control method, after some adjustment, works superbly. A small proportion of party games are highly playable.The Bad:
The majority of the party games are gob-smackingly unplayable or pointless, and the single player level design has suffered from the emphasis on the multiplayer.The Verdict:
Super Monkey Ball: Banana Blitz has a fantastic control method, but little else to recommend it unless you're already in love with the series.
It's not often that I bother to sift through the manual of any of the games that I play; well, before I get hideously stuck while trying to work out the subtleties of the controls, anyway. With 50 party games for up to four players making up the bulk of the latest in the Super Monkey Ball series, I thought I'd better have a quick glance through the manual while waiting for the game to load up, and became utterly captivated by the completely bonkers descriptions of the Super Monkey Ball characters.
The manual explains character "Baby" (son of characters AiAi and MeeMee) "comes from the future" (which means that at some point in the future he'll be his own big brother) that YanYan knows "the strongest form of martial arts in the ape world." This theme of deranged nonsense is continued by the intro movie, in which the cast of monkeys are admiring a bunch of golden bananas before they're stolen by, wonderfully, an evil pirate monkey. The solution they settle upon?
Jumping into clear globes and being jostled around obstacle strewn courses suspended in the sky, of course!
Simian Single-Player
The core game of Super Monkey Ball remains the same as always, with the player controlling the tilt of the courses that the monkey ball rests upon, allowing the player to roll (much in the style of one of those simple ball bearing puzzles) the monkey into the goal. In this version, however, there is a crucial difference: the player controls the tilt by tilting the Wii remote, rather than using an analogue stick.
Though this sounds like the most natural thing in the world, initially the controls seem frustratingly imprecise compared to an analogue stick. However, after some time for adjustment it becomes clear that only the most subtle of movements are required to tilt the course (it helps to hold the Wii remote with two hands at points) and quickly you wonder how on earth you could have ever played the game any other way. There are still quirks to the control (it's hard to get the controller perfectly level, for example) but once you get used to it, it's superb.
The same, sadly, cannot be said for the level design, which seems sadly dumbed down, perhaps simply to ease the demands of the new control methods. Levels are far less intricate and less interesting in terms of construction than they were in previous titles, so perhaps to increase the excitement Sega have introduced a new jump ability (much appreciated) and boss battles (less so.)
Boss battles follow the design they've had practically since they were invented; avoid the boss for as long as possible until he takes a rest that conveniently exposes his weak spot, and then jump on it. Repeat.
Monkey Multi-Player
The single player game isn't a complete success (gamers who just can't get enough Monkey Ball action will enjoy it despite its flaws) but it succeeds far better than the 50 party games. In a real case of quantity over quality, Sega have stuffed the game with far too many games for any of them to really stand out. It's likely, in fact, that in any party situation people will be too overwhelmed to simply select one to stick with and play for any length of time; the urge to skip between them is too tempting, and would possibly be even more tempting if the menu interface wasn't so clunky and irritating, with the selection method absurdly relying entirely on rotation of the Wii remote (entering your name on the high score table repeatedly becomes insanely tedious, for one.)
That's not to say that all of the games are bad. Many of the games that have featured before in the series are excellent, such as Monkey Target (though Monkey Bowling and Monkey Golf aren't as good as their Wii Sports counterparts.) Some new games are particularly fun, with my favorite Monkey Squash, which feels almost like what Wii Sports Tennis should have been.
Sadly, though, most of the games range from the throwaway to the terrible, with many using the Wii remote and optional nunchuck in such specifically demanding (and poorly explained) ways as to be almost unplayable.
Chimpanzee Conclusion
Super Monkey Ball: Banana Blitz has a single player mode with an incredibly pleasing control method, and it's a real shame that Sega spent so long developing a massive range of party games that they forgot to make sure the single player levels were particularly interesting, or that any of the party games would stand out. If they'd limited themselves to perhaps 10 party games and really fleshed them out this could have been a superb package. As it is, it's for Monkey Ball fans only.
