Super Monkey Ball - Review - 29th of December 2002 System: Nintendo GameCube Television System: PAL Publisher: SEGA Developer: Amusement Vision (AV) Origin: Japan Players: 1-4 Genre: Puzzle/Platform Memory Card: 3 blocks Released Japan: 14th of September 2001 USA: 18th of November 2001 Europe: 3rd of May 2002 Ironic times. A Sega owned company converts an old arcade title, Monkey Ball, in only six month and makes it the best release game for the GameCube according to me and many others. Anyway, Super Monkey Ball is about controlling a monkey trapped in a ball through various courses by using the control stick to tilt the courses. Besides this, AV made some exclusive mini-games for the GCN version which are really amusing. Graphics 8/10 No story so we move on to the graphics. Nothing too special but I love it. It's clean, fast and lots of colours. The graphics reminds me of the Kirby games. The monkeys are well designed but pretty simple. Their way of moving are great and the courses have lots of variation. A nice detail is the way the finish line always move so realistic. Impressive because this game isn't very advanced on the graphical department. Sound 6/10 First out the music. Typical arcade game music, typical Sega music. It sounds pretty much the same all the time and pretty soon gets on your nerves. But, it suits the game, I guess. Then we have sound effects. The only thing you can notice is the monkeys' screaming. They do it in very shrill voices as soon as you get close to an edge. And believe me, this game is all about riding on edges. They get annoying, fast. Controls/Gameplay 9/10 Brilliant! It's so simple but so amusing. In the main game you only use the control stick and the A-button. The control stick for moving the monkey and the A-button to zoom the course map in and out. There are three different difficulty settings, Beginner, Advanced and Expert. When choosing one of these you get to play a series of courses or 'floors' as it's called here. When arriving on a floor you shall tilt the floor with the control stick so that the monkey you have in the ball rolls towards a finish line. When the finish line is broken you can move on to the next floor. It's much more fun than it sounds like and very addictive. But besides the main game, described above, there are no less than six mini-games, Monkey Race, Monkey Fight, Monkey Target, Monkey Bowling, Monkey Golf and Monkey Billiard. All of them are pretty simple and all of them are both single and multy- player games. What they're about is pretty obvious when it comes to the first and three last besides that the monkey is always in the ball of use. In Monkey Target you shall fly your monkey, using the ball as wings and land on different targets. This is hard and takes lots of patience and practise. Many people love this but I haven't really gotten stuck on it. In Monkey fight you shall together with three others, either human or CPU controlled, monkeys roam around a platform with a huge boxing glove attached to your ball knock down the others from the platform. Hysterical and fun but you soon get tired. A nice touch with mini-games. But I do have to complain some. There's a really annoying glitch in the PAL version which makes the ones who play 50 Hz mode only get around 80% of the points the ones who play 60 Hz mode get. (Forgot to mention the points system). This glitch is annoying and the fact that in 60 Hz mode the game always slow down extremely on a certain expert floor which unable us to play properly. Lasting appeal 9/10 Lots of floors with lots of variation and six mini-games. So there's something for everyone to have fun with. The floors, especially the expert ones take lots of time to master so if you like this game you'll be stuck for a long time. It's a pretty good balance between the difficulties. Beginner are for beginners, Advanced are for the advanced players and Expert are for the Experts. There's also a practise mode which enables you to play all of the floors you've once played to completely master them. It's nice to know that you can be four players in just about game mode in this game. Total 9/10 A simple but brilliant game which actually beats all of the other release games for the GameCube. Spoilers Beginner, Advanced and Expert contain 10, 30 and 50 floors and 10 extra floors for every difficulty after completing Beginner and Advanced without losing a life and Expert without losing all of your lives. If you beat Expert + it's extra levels without losing all of your lives you open up the really tough master mode. Stuff worth to know so you know what you're up against. © 2002 Christian "Twink" Wall