Reviews// Super Monkey Ball: Banana Blitz (Wii)

Two new characters are added to the mix: a teenage girl monkey named Yanyan, and a little old man Monkey called Doctor. Aside from more character choices, the pair bring slight weight variations to the roster.

Of course, when rolling a ball around a table, weight is important: the heavier the ball, the more momentum it picks up, and the more difficult it is to change direction. In SMBBB, Gongon remains the heaviest, followed by Aiai, Doctor, Mimi, Yanyan and Baby. Gongon has some special abilities such as being able to break the pinball-inspired bouncers. The rest offer standard simian rolling.

Banana Blitz comprises a whopping 50 mini-games, along with the main game - a disappointment, as only around 100 levels are available across the eight standard and two unlockable worlds. I had hoped for a lot more from this game. Hoped it would be expansive and maintain that endless feeling the original captured so perfectly. Indeed, Super Monkey Ball was a game that felt almost impossible to fully master.

Complete Control?
So let's address what you want to know. Does the Wii Remote work? Yes, it works very well indeed. Does it feel weird to play with the Wii Remote after spending so much time with the original games? Yes, it feels painful at first, though the early levels of the game are so easy, they could be controlled by, well...a monkey, so you're eased in nicely. There were moments I yearned for the familiar feel of a GameCube pad in my hands, though they were matched by the times, when playing the original, I yearned for the Wii controller, some six years before it became a retail reality.

So, the mini-games: 50 of them... what could possibly go wrong? Well, to start with, most of them have the option of three environment variants at best; roughly half are unpalatably dull, the other half represents missed opportunities.

For example, the mini-game I was most looking forward to, without question, was Monkey Target, the iconic, Pilot Wings-esue beautiful gliding gamelet that graced the original. SMBBB's version has no wind to factor, making it a castrated and dumbed-down nonsense. Then - and get this - there's only a single level. There were three in the original, all epically scalable with the use of wind and the mythical 500-point landing dots. All of this is stripped out. Frustration with the mini-games stems largely from the wasted potential of so many of them.

I understand that Monkey Ball isn't an FPS (though it does feature a nice little FPS mini-game in Monkey Wars) nor is it a gliding game. However, given the main game is smaller than expected, why not offer the player as much as possible in the mini-game section rather than showing what might have been, then pointlessly under-delivering?

An honourable mention goes to the addition of the ‘Jump’ (performed by hitting the [A] button) in the game. It varies from character to character slightly, with the lighter monkeys bouncing more than the heavier ones.

Monkey Ball players have been proven to exploit every flaw in every level, then proving their feats with videos that sparked heated debate on whether they're even real. I assume that Jump is intended to encourage that same kind of debate for SMBBB on Wii. However, because the game is too short and its levels too easy, the motivation to do something special is greatly reduced.