Super Monkey Ball Deluxe PS2 Review Cambridge MA

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Ever since Donkey Kong took a bit of a shine to Daisy and decided to abscond with her up some construction scaffolding, simians have had a seminal role in video games, and never more so than in one of the Gamecube's best launch titles, Super Monkey Ball. Super Monkey Ball quickly begat Super Monkey Ball 2, but up until now you'd have to have invested in one of Nintendo's purple or black mini-boxes to get a fix of controlling a monkey in a plastic sphere. Super Monkey Ball DX collects the best levels from Super Monkey Ball 1 and 2, throws in a few other challenges along the way, and offers it all up on a plate (or should that be in a sphere?) to Playstation 2 and Xbox owners.

If you're not familiar with the series, Super Monkey Ball gives you control of a monkey, in a ball. Presumably the fact that they're able to breathe in there at all, not to mention independently move around and eat bananas, is what makes them Super. In single player, each level of Super Monkey Ball charges you with the task of rolling your monkey from a predetermined start point to a goal as quickly as possible. Bananas can be picked up along the way by rolling over them, and in classic gaming fashion, 100 bananas will afford you an extra life, as well as a whole lot of points. The hook with Super Monkey Ball is that you don't in fact control the movement of your monkey at all. Instead, what you have control over is the tilt of the landscape, up and down, left and right. So to roll your spherical simian to the left, you tap to the left on the analog stick, with differing degrees of tilt giving you more or less momentum. Invariably, you'll hit a level that'll see you tumbling to a screaming simian demise over and over again, and it's worth noting that while the game starts off relatively easily, it quickly becomes a test both of skill and gamer patience.

That's the basic premise in a nutshell, but what makes Monkey Ball unique is that the level designers took a rather different approach to level design than most developers. It'd be unfair to state for the record that Super Monkey Ball levels are the product of an unholy marriage between the paintings of MC Escher and a whole lot of psychotropic substances - but it's also the most apt description that comes to mind. Super Monkey Ball's levels start quite simple, but quickly contort into unworldly shapes, slopes, bump ramps and some exceptionally stiff challenges. All of the levels feature bright psychedelic designs on them - this game is practically the poster child for having an epileptic fit, in fact. It's a heady mix of on-the-spot reflexes and some fairly nimble mental agility combined that'll see you through all of the levels in Super Monkey Ball DX, which includes 300 stages. 114 of these are culled from the original Super Monkey Ball, 140 from Super Monkey Ball 2, and 46 of the levels are all-new affairs.

Super Monkey Ball DX picks up the story mode from Super Monkey Ball 2, which involves your four simian heroes (AiAi, MeeMee, Baby, and GonGon) recovering all the bananas stolen by the evil Dr Bad-Boon. It's the kind of plot that sounds like it was ripped straight from an 8-bit game cartridge to be honest, and not a very good one at that. Thankfully, it doesn't matter a whit what the plot does or doesn't mean, as it's simple enough to bypass straight into the monkey rolling madness.