Super Monkey Ball hands-on impressions

[09.15.01] » "Hey, can you girls come over to my place and play Super Monkey Ball with me? I want to get some hands-on impressions. Hey, where are you going?"

   Ever since the success of Mario Party for the Nintendo 64, the "party game" genre has grown in sales and importance. Most modern game systems have a party game available at or soon after launch. But while another console is giving gamers a "non-stop party game with an edge," Nintendo's friendly GameCube has a party game with no edges--just spherical monkey balls and unbounded arenas.   Super Monkey Ball's gameplay is similar to the old arcade classic, Marble Madness. Gamers use the control stick to roll a large, transparent, monkey-holding ball around a large arena. Avoid obstacles and hazards, don't fall off the edge off the stage, pick up as many as bananas as you can, and reach the goal before time runs out. If it sounds straightforward, that's because it is: the main gameplay of Super Monkey Ball uses only the left control stick, completely ignoring the GameCube controller's buttons. Fortunately, the interesting and varied level design and multiple gameplay modes give the game an enjoyable level of depth.

   The Main Game involves navigating your monkey through three gauntlets of stages: Normal (10 stages), Advanced (30 stages), and Expert (50 stages). All stages must be completed within 5 continues, or a total of 18 monkey "lives." Picking up 100 bananas without continuing, however, bestows an extra life. Fortunately, any stage reached in the Main Game can be tried repeatedly in the Practice Mode, so gamers can master the difficult stage that did them in last time before jumping back into the fray. The Main Game can be played in single-player mode, or competitively with up to four players.

   Especially designed for multiplayer are the Party Game modes: Monkey Race, Monkey Fight, and Monkey Target. Monkey Race lets gamers outrun each other on six different courses of varying difficulty. Single Race and Grand Prix modes are available. Monkey Fight gives each player a giant boxing glove and drops them in a free-for-all arena. Monkey Target lets you shoot your monkey into the air via a ramp, then split the ball open to form hemispherical wings. Avoiding hazards and successfully landing on island targets earns points. All party games support from 2-4 players. Single players can also play the party games against computer opponents.

   Finally, Super Monkey Ball offers three extremely varied and creative Mini Games: Monkey Billiards, Monkey Bowling, and Monkey Golf. These are effectively competent pool, bowling, and golf games with the added bonus of little monkeys running around inside of the balls. Monkey Billiards is a standard nine-ball billiards game that lets you change the camera angle, shot direction, and shot strength. An overhead camera angle helps gamers line up difficult shots. Monkey Bowling lets you change the ball's starting position, target angle, strength, and even spin, via the left and right analog triggers. Monkey Golf is a well-done minigolf variant with a full 18-hole course. The camera angle, shot direction, and shot strength can all be carefully adjusted; players can even overlay a grid on top of the course in order to sink those impossible shots. All minigames support from 1-4 players; bowling even offers a single-player only "challenge" mode of difficult frames.

   The graphics appear deceptively simple when compared with Luigi's Mansion or Wave Race; there's only so much you can do with checkered levels and rotating bananas. Even so, the game's graphics are high-resolution, extremely colorful, a constant 60 frames per second, and feature an absolutely mindboggling draw-in distance--the horizon seems impossibly far away, and pop-in is absolutely non-existent. Music is the inimitable boppy Sega arcade fare. As the first third-party title for Nintendo GameCube, Super Monkey Ball may seem like an unusual choice. But its simple and enjoyable gameplay, combined with a large variety of in-depth multiplayer modes, make it a solid choice for the GameCube-owning gamer. Just be sure to pick up a few extra controllers, too.