Super Monkey Ball 1 and 2 on the Nintendo Gamecube hold a very special place in my heart. The single-player mode’s always decent, sure (not to mention fiendishly difficult!) but for me it’s the multi-player modes that I’ll remember especially fondly. Be it just me and my brother, or more likely me, my brother and my cousin, or me and one or more school friends, we’d have an absolute whale of a time with simian-rolling mayhem on those tiny little discs for ol’ Ninty’s unsuccessful purple (and later various other colours, of course) box of a console, with a handle. The only console ever to have a handle, by the way. Now I’m not being completely stupid here and asking where the Super Monkey Ball series has gone, as though it’s been discontinued; because I know it’s still going. What has stopped though, and is now long since dead, is the spark. We spent hours of our time mucking about, getting too competitive and simply laughing our arses off with the 2 Monkey Ball games. I’ve given the more recent entrants to Sega’s series a chance, and I can’t say I’ve ever been more than slightly impressed. The usual feeling is of disappointment – that the game I’m playing just isn’t like the ones I loved. I initially thought I’d grown out of it, which would make sense, but I came back to Super Monkey Ball 1 and 2 and found that even on my own I’d have a great time.
Super Monkey Ball was original as hell when first released, and critics and the gaming public took to it rather well. It was charmingly colourful, had inventive level design and crucially was easy to get into but notoriously hard to get out of. It’s one of those games that can be defined as 'pick up and play’ but yet it’s so God damn hard to drop - a surprise hit in the Gamecube launch line up. The main game saw the player navigating one of four both charmingly loveable but intensely irritating monkeys in plastic balls (so many questions, I know) through levels and mazes of ever-increasing difficulty. I’m still unsure as to whether AiAi, MeeMee, GonGon and Baby handled at all differently from each other, but it doesn’t matter. The package was well rounded off with 6 mini-games – 3 ready to play from the get-go, and 3 further games unlockable after acquiring enough points. Funnily enough, arguably the mini-games where the most fun to be had lay were the 3 available to the player upon playing the game for the first time. These were Monkey Race, Monkey Target and Monkey Fight. Bloody hell they were good. The other 3, Monkey Billiards, Monkey Golf and Monkey Bowling weren’t quite as good – but they were all of a sufficient quality to be deemed deserving of a place in the sequel. They all do pretty much exactly what they say on the tin – so yes, Monkey Billiards is painstakingly dull at the best of times. A really great game overall though, if a little bare-bones and rough around the edges. But most of my childhood enjoyment was to be found in its successor…
The sequel then built on the roster of mini-games by doubling the tally to a tidy 12. On top of the original six you could find Monkey Boat Race, Monkey Dogfight, Monkey Baseball, Monkey Tennis, Monkey Soccer and Monkey Shot. The quality of these games varied wildly. Monkey Tennis, and Soccer were excellent, Dogfight was good, Baseball was decent, Shot was dull, and Boat Race was abysmal. For the sake of relative brevity, I won’t bother explaining the ridiculous inside jokes that came from some of these mini-games – besides, after being explained to you, I’m sure I’d soon realise that what was once funny to a child is now ever so slightly VERY NOT FUNNY to a 17 year old chap. What I can tell you though is that the two funniest moments I can remember from the game stem from the comically bad voice-acting announcer. For example, he was consistently very American in his accent until you get someone caught out in Monkey Baseball. ‘OOOT’ sharply exclaims the announcer, like the heartiest Scottish nationalist in the whole of Scotland. Good times, I promise. It’s not only the multi-player aspect of the game that was the recipient of improvements upon its predecessor though. The single-player mode was cleaned up. “How so?”, you ask. Well…they only went and gave it a motherfucking storyline (oooooh, spellchecker accepts ‘motherfucking’!) as part of the single player mode line-up. The cut-scenes were admittedly quite pretty, but the plot itself was utterly dreadful; cringe worthy, deranged and a little bit scary. Seriously. It all starts off in rather predictable fashion, with the game’s villain Dr Bad-Boon using a giant vacuum to suck up and steal all of the bananas from the poor monkeys’ island. This of course enrages AiAi, MeeMee, Gongon and Baby, who then set out to gain their prized yellow possessions back before Dr Bad-Boon can get up to more evil antics. Before they set off, the 4 monkeys take part in a tribal song and dance that can only have been brought on through their drug-induced stupor. “Magical spell is Ei-Ei-Poo!”. So far so Sega. What I can’t get my head around is the physics of these balls they’re inside. While playing the game, they’re weighty, difficult to control, and are very much limited in what they can do. Yet in the cutscenes, they can fly off into the air, swim, and hover inside the spheres – demonstrating that they can in fact move on several planes. I of course shouldn’t be ripping into this game for being flawed, because let’s face it; you know that a game about cartoon monkeys with magical powers inside plastic balls, flying, swimming and rolling their way through various obstacles to reclaim their horde of bananas from an evil baboon scientist is going to be ever so slightly unrealistic. What is already some pretty messed up shit only gets worse from here on in though. Dr Bad-Boon offers a compromise – MeeMee’s hand in marriage, for the return of the banana stash. We quickly learn that this villain is quite messed up in the head. He obsessively craves her love and attention, to no avail. Poor guy animal.
As a Gamecube exclusive, Super Monkey Ball felt like a first party Nintendo game. When the exclusivity was abandoned, the charm, the critical reception, the fun seemed to ooze out of the series with each and every passing instalment. A couple of changes in visual style, in my opinion, really didn’t work for the series. Sure, the following instalments weren’t bad per sé, but they also weren’t exactly good. The way I see it, Super Monkey Ball 1 and 2 hold the true identity of the series, whereas the rest cloud it. Anyway, instead of writing about the games I didn’t like (Adventure, Banana Blitz, Touch And Roll… etc) I’d rather boot up the ol’ ‘Cube and play some classics! Chow for now!
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