Super Monkey Ball

Game Detail

Amazon.com

In Super Monkey Ball, you’re in control of a cute little monkey trapped inside a transparent ball. The objective of the game is deceptively simple: tilt the floor with your analog stick so that your monkey ball rolls towards the goal. Your success is all in the thumb: the more you tilt, the faster the ball rolls. Just be sure not to fall off the edges! You can play with up to four others to see who can master the tilt and get their monkeys to the finish line ahead of the pack.

Product Description

Labyrinth/Marble Madness hybrid with a unique platform twist, based on the Sega arcade game of the same name. Players control not a character, but tilt the entire environment to guide their “monkey ball” to the goal. Super Monkey Ball’s “Main Mode” is constructed of more than 110 different levels of various difficulty, most of them taken from the arcade game. Players begin their monkey adventure going through these different levels on various settings of difficulty.

Review

Super Monkey Ball is exactly what it says on the box: it features a monkey, in a ball, and it’s absolutely super. This rather odd game is similar to the classic Marble Madness, except that instead of controlling a marble through a mazelike course, you control the course and must tilt and rotate it to get the cheeky little simian to the exit.
Ironically, this title–the GameCube’s best launch game–is also its least impressive graphically. It’s not ugly by any means, but the graphics are mostly functional and are subservient to the gameplay. It may sound simple and repetitive, but Super Monkey Ball is pretty much the dictionary definition of addictive, as it perfectly balances the intense frustration at failing to complete a course with the absolute desire to have “just one more try.” To make matters worse, the later courses are so fiendishly difficult, one may wonder if the game was designed by sadists.
The single-player mode is maddeningly addictive, but it’s the four-player larks–either on the standard puzzle courses or through a bunch of wacky minigames, including monkey bowling and monkey fight–that mark Super Monkey Ball as a true gaming classic. Its lack of showy graphics may unfairly limit the game to cult status, so make sure you’re part of the cult. –David Jenkins — Amazon.co.uk